Once addicted to a social-networking service, 27-year-old Lim Moon Hyang suddenly got tired of responding to instantaneous feedback from her online friends and realized with terror just how deep her SNS obsession ran.
"There was a time I was logging on to Mixi every five minutes," Lim, a student in Tokyo, told The Japan Times, referring to an SNS popular with young Japanese. "But I didn't really socialize with people in my real life."
And so began Lim's quest for an authentic human relationship. Just as she gradually outgrew her infatuation with cyberspace, she came across an NHK documentary featuring a young couple in Osaka who listened to passersby complain about their lives.