hightext

Chinese mobile search

Research from mInfo, China's leading mobile search provider, on what Chinese search for. It does not differ greatly from other countries, except perhaps that searching for jokes and riddles is more popular in China than I have seen elsewhere.

A thousand flowers blooming?

Bringing back memories of the doorstopper reports of 1999, Mary Meeker presses two hype buttons in her Morgan Stanley report 'China Internet', China and mobile content.

The report argues that the internet has brought a cultural evolution (wittily missing R) to China - free floating information, interactivity and entertainment. It also notes that Chinese people are not a level of comfort where they can buy goods unseen over the internet however. Also, local content still rules, in that all of the top 10 computer games in China in 2004 were of Asian origin (including South Korea and Japan). Content providers should transform themselves to fit the local culture, not the other way round, the report concludes.

Chinese parents and computers

Anthroplogists are helping companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Xerox to question their culturally specific approaches to various markets, according to an article in the Financial Times recently (subscription only).

For example , Chinese parents do not see computers as having the desired educational benefit of helping their children to learn Mandarin, and instead see PCs as a distraction because of uncontrollable access to the internet. This contrasts with American parents who think that buying a computer for your child early on is helpful to their education.

As a result of this research Intel launched a PC aimed at the Chinese home education market which has a touch sensitive screen that allows users to write in Mandarin, and even checks the stroke order that the character is being written in. Also, thanks to the anthropologist's analysis, Intel included a physical locking mechanism on the PC, visible from elsewhere in the room, as locks and keys have symbolism in China as manifestations of authority. The physical locking mechanism has more meaning than a software-based key.

China update

A couple of nuggets from an article by David Kirkpatrick for Fortune magazine re China:

China has 350 million cellphone users, according to Information Industry Minister Wang Xudong, which is more than any other country in the world.

100 million Chinese are already online. It recently passed Japan, to become the second largest population online behind the U.S.

The most popular song in China recently has been a silly romantic ditty entitled, "Mice Love Rice." It originated on a blog. The once-anonymous singer-songwriter is now a national celebrity, and the song has been released commercially in both Mandarin and Cantonese. Four million Chinese now maintain blogs.

And I hope what Kirkpatrick says is true rather than wishful thinking:

"Attitudes in China about openness - an inevitable accompaniment to Internet growth - are changing."

one of those 'fun' foods that parents torture themselves and their children with in an attempt to get them to eat something other than cheesy wotsits.

Net balls

Ah sport and the interweb, bringing nations together in happy harmony...

A quote from an article in the New York Times on China's angry reaction to being defeated by Japan in the Asian Cup football tournament:

China's fast-growing Internet is the main forum for this anger. Lu Yunfei, 29, runs Patriots Alliance Web, a nationalist Web site that boasts 76,000 registered members and 100,000 daily visitors. Last year, Mr. Lu's group rallied online opposition that helped kill a deal for a Japanese group to build a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. The group has also turned a territorial dispute between China and Japan over the tiny Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea into a rallying cry of Chinese patriotism.

I read elsewhere that Japanese fans in China had adopted the Millwall slogan of 'nobody likes us and we don't care"...

Children playing football outside the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City.

Chinese vague censorship

Via BuzzMachine via Many to Many, an article on Chinese censorship,
both on the internet and offline, by Perry Link, of Princeton University.

What I find particularly interesting is his discussion of how Chinese governments have used vagueness, rather than giving specific details, when censoring people:

"Although repression under Jiang Zemin has applied to a narrower range of expression than it did under Deng, its essential methods have changed little from the Deng era. These methods have 'Chinese characteristics'; they have always differed, for example, from those of the Soviet Union. The Soviets published periodic handbooks that listed which specific phrases were out of bounds, and employed a large bureaucracy to enforce the rules. China has never had such a bureaucracy or published any such handbooks. The Chinese Communist Party rejected these more mechanical methods in favor of an essentially psychological control system that relies primarily on self-censorship. Questions of risk - how far to go, how explicit to be, with whom to ally and so on - are moved inside the cerebrums of every individual writer and editor. There are, of course, physical punishments that anchor a person's calculations. If you calculate incorrectly you can lose your job, be imprisoned or, in the worst case, get a bullet in the back of the head."

High context, non-verbal cultures which go 'wrong', (there's probably a more academic, systems analysis way of phrasing this), can lead to these kind of situations where all the burden is placed on the listener, to be 'clever' enough to get the hidden messages, and the listener becomes (rightly) paranoid and stressed.

China - mobile phones and religion

Dr Genevieve Bell seems to have one of those jobs I didn't realise people could get paid to do other than in academia - travelling round the world watching people using technology with an Intel salary. She's quoted in a BBC News online article about Chinese people using their mobile phones to access the lunar almanac - something I'm sure Japanese mobile content providers can supply too. She says that Asian cultures are 're-imaging' the role of the mobile phone - which rather assumes that the role of the mobile phone has been defined by Western cultures first.

I would look at it more by starting with the role of religion in daily life, particularly the kind of religious practices that are based on lunar almanacs or finding the right direction for Mecca. Mobile phones are part of everyday life both in the West and in Asia, but in Asian cultures, religion is not something separate from daily life, to be practiced in a church on Sundays only - even without being 'religious' as such, a Chinese or Japanese person would want to know whether a day was auspicious or not, before starting a new venture, and would consult their mobile phone if such a service was available, rather as anyone might use their mobile to find out the weather forecast.

18th century Japanese almanac

Chinese bloggers, cyber dissidents or internet essayists?

Much rejoicing at the release of Stainless Steel Mouse, Liu Di, 23, a psychology student at Beijing Normal University, who was detained for a year for what she wrote and posted on the internet.
Bloggers have been quick to claim her as a blogger. Other news articles suggest her activities were: writing a satire of the Communist Party, posting essays critical of the Communist Party on her website and posting comments to internet chat sites calling for the release of dissidents. Washington Post calls her an internet essayist, blogger Peking Duck calls her a cyber dissident.

Ditching the pedantry for a moment, let us note there are still 35 or so Chinese people in prison for what they posted to the internet, and Reporters Without Borders estimates that China employs 30,000 people to watch what its people are doing online.

Anglosphere Blogosphere

With my interest in the cross cultural uses of IT I would love to be able to understand and analyse blogs and other information on the internet from countries whose languages I don't speak. But, uh, duh, I can't because I can't read them. Not only that, it's really hard to find them in the first place. For example, if you put "Chinese blogs" into Google, you get a nice list of blogs based in China, but written in English, usually by Westerners living in China. Searching for "mandarin blogs" or "pinyin blogs" doesn't get you much further. So I tried what I do when looking for Japanese stuff on the web, go to Google in the native language version, but I can't type in Chinese like I can for Japanese (both linguistic and keyboard/software constraints) so I tried typing 'blog' in English, and - finally - I see something promising. One of the links is to this blog - XuPing's Space. It looks really interesting - he (or she) is obviously interested in the same things as me - blogs and how they relate to Knowledge Management, e-learning etc. With my 1 year of Mandarin studies I can see some of his diagrams relate to 'people' and 'words' and the different ways they connect. But that's it - I don't know their gender or where they are (could be China, could be Taiwan) let alone what they're trying to say.

We get excited about how global we the blogosphere or the internet have become when Iranians start blogging, but again, it's when they're blogging in English that they get our attention. There is a list of Iranian blogs written in Persian who won prizes recently btw - but, well, it's all Greek to me.

The language used matters because English as a language has various characteristics that force you to express yourself in certain ways - because of the 'subject verb object' construction, it is less easy to be as vague as you can be in other languages. It is therefore much more 'low context' (although British English native speakers can be pretty good at writing in a 'read between the lines' high context way ;-)).

These frustrations with the Anglosphere's own blindness to its non-globality, conscious or unconscious, are expressed in a post on the Chicagoboyz blog as well as some good statistics from Melvyn Bragg (!) on the commercial reasons why we only care about the English language speaking countries.

Don't shoot the messenger

When I was asked to speak in July this year at a Voxpolitics meeting in London about politics and blogs, with the brief that I talk about moblogs and anything relevant from Japan, I soon hit a brick wall. There wasn't any connection between mobile phone-based blogging in Japan and politics. In fact I couldn't even find any general Japanese web blogs that had a political focus. Unsurprisingly, explaining this to the audience of keen-as-mustard geek bloggers and warbloggers did not go down particularly well. Lesson learnt - if asked to speak, make sure that the brief you are given really will lead to something substantial and relevant to the audience.

I've now seen this on Japan Media Review, a site I've looked at many times and printed off lots from in the past. I unaccountably failed to spot this article in time for the July talk about how Japanese anti-war activists are using their mobile phones and the internet to organise themselves. But, rather as my friends in Hong Kong explained when I asked them about mobile phones, blogs and the democracy protests in July (in desperation for something to say to those fierce Voxpolitics bloggers!), it turns out that mobile phones were mostly used to organise and coordinate protests rather than to create moblogs.

There does seem to be some kind of cultural barrier (and not just because of government censorship) to being overtly political on weblogs in (certain? all?) Asian countries. An indicator of this is the ban in Japan on using the internet for electioneering, for fear of libel.

One of the Japanese anti-war organisations' websites does have a weblog (and even calls it a weblog) though. But it has no comments, just links to relevant news stories, which is something that I have seen with other Japanese blogs - comments, if they exist at all, are often one liners.

At least it is still being kept up-to-date - another thing I noticed with Japanese blogs in general was that many of even the most popular ones had been shut down by their owners, who were finding it too much work for no money after a couple of years of fun. (I had to duck the flak again when I made this point at Voxpolitics ;-) ).