I've been traveling in Asia, and was in Korea this last week when Gangnam style really took off, at least on my Facebook feed.<p>I asked one of my tour guides about this, not knowing anything about the relevance of the video, and she basically echoed a lot of the comments about how it was poking fun at Korean materialism and superficialism. She said that Korean culture has really shifted in the last few decades. Her grandparents' and her parents' generation, she said, were very hard-working, and transformed their country from a post-war, 3rd world country into one of the powerhouse economies in the world. But her generation (she said she was 27) wasn't nearly as hardworking, and is enjoying the fruits of her parents labor without putting as much in.<p>She said that the Korean culture had turned very materialistic and superficial as well. Korean males have started to use a lot of the same makeup that females traditionally wear, like foundation, etc. Many girls will have cosmetic surgery done right after high school so that their college graduation pictures will look good, which she said was very important to females. She said her sister practices smiling in the mirror for 15 mins every day, in order to get a certain crease in her mouth, which apparently is the sign of wealth and good luck. She said "double-eyelid surgery" (I guess a type of surgery to add a crease in the eyelids which many Koreans do not have) is so common, that girls don't even consider it surgery anymore. Most eyelid surgeries come with a 2-for-1 deal where they throw in a nosejob as well, and new techniques are constantly being developed, like a form of injection that will lift the nose up temporarily, like a nose job.<p>I found this absolutely incredible, and I said to the tour guide that it must be very hard growing up as a female, with all this pressure. She said that it was only 30% of the female population that engaged in all this materialism/superficialism, and that left 70% of the females that didn't care about it. It was a good attitude, but still 30% seemed awful high to me.<p>My guess is that this is just a phase that developed (or developing) nations go through, and social commentary like this Gangnam style are the first steps in seeing a "reversion to the mean", where things become a lot less extreme.