I know what you did last summer. Want to get coffee?

I have posted before about my propensity to make inadvertently inappropriate rental choices. I still get teased about Atanarjuat. The first time I spent the evening with my high school boyfriend's uber-Catholic family, I, under the impression it was a generic courtroom drama, brought over a copy of Primal Fear. And the last time I stayed at my grandparents' house, I freaked them and myself out by renting Oldboy, which I thought was a standard action flick but which turned out to contain extended episodes of incestuous sex, complete with heavy moaning, and numerous scenes of graphic maiming.

Despite that last bit sounding like not much of an endorsement, Oldboy is an excellent if disturbing movie, and the New York Times Magazine's profile of its director, Park Chanwook, is great. (It does contains some plot spoilers for his films, though, which annoyed me greatly.) At the end of the piece, Park throws out this little anecdote about the internet and human relationships. I thought it was very perceptive, but that might just be because I like Googling people. Your thoughts?

Park told me a story that showed how much tradition can matter, even in cyberspace: "A young woman, working in our office, fell in love with a man through the Internet. The young man was so taken with her that he not only scrutinized her blog but followed all the links in her blog as well. He traced her family relationships, but also her entire private history, including her boyfriends going back to high-school days. Not only their names, but even their digital pictures came up through the links. In the end, he knew everything about her, without having to hire a detective."

Park continued: "You might find this invasion of privacy a bit scary, but young Koreans like it. It is, in a way, a revival of village life, a revival of community, where everyone knows everything about everyone else." But it is a peculiar community, where human intimacy takes place without physical contact.