[News Culture] People form attachments to animals they have never met, pour money into digital tokens built around internet jokes and walk familiar streets without noticing much beyond a phone screen. Three new episodes of EBS1’s “Knowledge Channel e” take those everyday behaviors seriously, asking what they reveal about attention, connection and value in contemporary life.
Airing Nov. 9 through 11, the episodes move from the emotional pull of animal videos to the volatile economics of meme coins and, finally, to the simple act of walking without looking at a smartphone.
Why we grow attached to animals that do not know us
Fubao has online “aunts” who follow her daily life from afar. Moo Deng can turn a few seconds of video into a global hit. In Busan, a shark nicknamed Bukangi became enough of a local celebrity to inspire websites tracking sightings and even games built around its unexpected stay in the North Port waterfront.
The Nov. 9 episode, “You Don’t Know Me, But,” asks why people can feel such strong affection for animals that have no idea who they are.
The episode approaches the phenomenon through the idea of a parasocial relationship, a one-sided sense of intimacy more commonly associated with celebrities and media personalities. Social media has extended that dynamic to animals, whose routines, expressions and personalities can be followed day after day through screens.
Research examining comments and surveys around panda videos found that the bond was associated more strongly with a sense of comfort than with cuteness alone. Another experiment comparing animal videos with comedy found similar levels of enjoyment, but differences in how the two kinds of content affected viewers emotionally.
Those feelings do not always remain between viewer and animal. People send clips to friends and family, turning a private moment of comfort into conversation with someone else. The episode looks at how animal content can become both a source of emotional relief and a small piece of social glue.
When an internet joke becomes an asset
The Nov. 10 episode, “The Price of a Joke,” moves from emotional attention to financial attention.
Meme coins begin with a familiar piece of internet culture — a joke, an image, a character or a passing online obsession — and attach a tradable token to it. Unlike assets built around a clear business model or technical use case, their value can depend heavily on whether people continue talking about them.
Dogecoin, launched as a joke in 2013, helped establish the template. Since then, celebrity comments, online communities and viral moments have repeatedly sent meme-coin prices sharply higher, sometimes only for that value to disappear just as quickly when attention moves elsewhere.
The episode points to the short life span of many such tokens. Among meme coins created on one launch platform since 2024, more than half recorded their final trade on the same day they were launched, while only 4.55% remained active for more than 90 days.
That churn makes the market a particularly stark example of the attention economy. Visibility itself can create financial value, but it does not necessarily create lasting value. “Knowledge Channel e” examines the gap between popularity and underlying worth, as well as the risks of speculation in markets where a joke can attract money almost as quickly as it attracts clicks.
What changes when the phone stays in your pocket
The final episode, “I Need a Walk,” airs Nov. 11 and begins with something far more ordinary: walking down the street while looking at a phone.
Messages, videos and notifications can keep attention fixed on a small screen even while the body continues moving through a much larger environment. Familiar streets become routes to get through rather than places to notice.
The episode asks what happens when the phone stays in a pocket instead. Sounds that normally fade into the background become easier to hear, details along a familiar route become visible again, and walking becomes less about reaching a destination as quickly as possible.
There is no equipment to buy and no elaborate routine to learn. The point is simply to recover some of the attention that normally goes elsewhere and allow sight, sound and other senses to take part in the walk again.
Taken together, the three episodes examine different claims on the same finite resource. An animal can hold attention long enough to become emotionally significant; an online joke can hold it long enough to acquire a market price; a smartphone can hold it so consistently that the physical world around us begins to recede.
“Knowledge Channel e” airs Nov. 9–11 at 12:40 a.m. KST on EBS1.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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