Archive for the ‘2007 Global Plaza’ Category
From São Paulo and London with Love: Sex in the Blogosphere in Brazil and England
Raquel Pacheco, aka Bruna Surfistinha
China has Mu Mu and Muzi. England has Belle. Brazil has Bruna.
Similar to Mu Mu and Muzi, who I discuss in this post, Belle de Jour and Bruna Surfistinha are respectively a British and A Brazilian woman who blog about sex, thus presenting an opportunity for a three way comparison of cultural attitudes towards sex – both in general, and in the blogosphere specifically. The biggest difference to point out between them is that, whereas the Chinese bloggers were just Chinese citizens who posted sexual content to their blogs, Belle and Bruna are ex-prostitutes who were actively blogging during their tenures as a sex workers. But even taking that fact into consideration, both Belle and Bruna would write about themselves, their personal lives, and their boyfriends on their blogs, thus ensuring their blogs do not have a fundamentally different format from the Chinese blogs.
Belle
Subtitled The diary of a London call girl, Belle provides no real introduction to her blog, which suggests that it emerged somewhat spontaneously as a by-product of her profession. But on this blog, Belle chronicles different aspects of her life – primarily the sexual aspects, although she will occasionally include writings on other topics as well. In the (more complete) introduction to the U.S. release of a book version of her blog entries she published in 2005, she describes her move to London as a recent college graduate and the discovery of how hard it is in contemporary Western societies to bridge the divide between college degree and entry-level job. From there it’s a fairly typical road she follows – limited job prospects and the expense of living in London drew her first by accident and then by specific intention to the world of prostitution. The most interesting part of her entry into this world comes as the last sentence of her introduction in her book:
And it wasn’t too long after deciding to do it [become a prostitute] that I started keeping a diary
This diary of course turned into her blog.
Belle’s life seems to have changed since the days she was blogging about prostitution. On May 23 (Mai 23, as she writes it in French), she posted about getting a job and has since jokingly referred to herself as “Belle de Office.” She has also continued turning her blog into a commercial publishing venture. In addition to her first book, she has published this 2007 follow up. But she still writes about sex and different social attitudes towards sex on her blog, as well as providing different vignettes on her life, her friends, and her activities.
The main reason I bring Belle into my comparison is to provide a Western European perspective on sex blogging – what kind of content goes into it, what cultural factors affect or don’t affect it, and how readers respond to it. That said, culturally I find England to be the most similar to the United States of any European country. Having seen different parts of England with a British friend on one hand, and also having lived in both France and Greece and traveled to other cities in Europe on the other, I find it quite obvious which nation American revolted against in order to gain independence. I am not at all suggesting that British and American culture are the same, only that I find them closer to each other than I find comparisons between the cultures of America and other European countries. And as always, I invite discussion of this idea, either agreeing or disagreeing with me.
With this in mind, I find Belle’s blog the most culturally similar to a blog one would find in America. Her writings aren’t affected by the constant threat of government censorship the way Mu Mu’s are (and to which Muzi’s writings fell victim). (And no I’m not suggesting that censorship doesn’t exist in England – only that it doesn’t exist to the same degree that it does in China). Nor do Belle’s writings reflect any one pervasive element of British culture, the way Catholicism acts as a pervasive cultural element in Brazil, affecting Internet content and use, and occasionally make its way onto Bruna’s blog.
Belle also doesn’t explicitly discuss the use of technology or social media as a vehicle to make her online diary available to the world. I’m sure this absence is a result of multiple factors, ranging from what topics she feels are worth or not worth discussing, to the comparatively ubiquitous level of Internet connectivity in England as opposed to Brazil or China. (Drawing from data from the International Telecommunications Union and other sources, Internet World Stats reports 62.3% Internet penetration in the United Kingdom, as opposed to 22.8% in Brazil and 12.3% in China). My thought is that the relative ubiquity of Internet connectivity in England makes it more just an everyday feature of life – not the kind of cultural force it is in Brazil, where average netizens seem to dedicate much more explicit thought to the connection between their social interactions and the Internet. While it isn’t the focus of her blog, Bruna does talk a lot more about the explicit connection between the Internet and her diary chronicling her work in prostitution, as I discuss below.
Bruna
Like Mu Mu, Bruna made her major debut to American audiences through the New York Times. Larry Rother introduces her thus:
She goes by the name Bruna, the Little Surfer Girl, and gives new meaning to the phrase “kiss and tell.” First in a blog that quickly became the country’s most popular and now in a best-selling memoir, she has titillated Brazilians and become a national celebrity with her graphic, day-by-day accounts of life as a call girl here.
Bruna, whose real name is Raquel Pacheco, says in the article that her blog emerged as kind of an accident that just kept growing ad growing. “In the beginning,” she says, “I just wanted to vent my feelings… I wanted to show what goes on in the head of a program girl [the Brazilian term for a high class prostitute], and I couldn’t find anything on the Net like that. I thought that if I was curious about it, others would be too.” Since this beginning, her blog has become one of the most widely read blogs in Brazil and she has adapted some of her blog entries into a book titled The Scorpion’s Sweet Venom, which was first published in 2005 and has been released in two English editions, as well as a Spanish edition. A second book, titled What I learned from Bruna Surfistinha, is on the way. Like Belle, Bruna has turned her blog into a full blown commercial publish venture. Also like Belle, she no longer chronicles her sexual activities online, although she will still devote parts of her discussions to the general topic of sex.
But in addition to introducing Bruna, Rother’s article also points to the ongoing debate over social morality to which the presence of a person like Bruna has led. While it considers questions of what thoughts should or should not be allowed, who is and/or should be empowered to make such a decision, and what to do with conflicting views on the topic, this debate over social morality is different from the censorship debate in China. In China, Party officials are considering from an official point of view what the government should or should not allow in Chinese Internet content. In Brazil the debate does not spring from an official government stance on what should or should not be allowed in the Brazilian Internet space, but rather from different segments of Brazilian society debating with each other. A national government can be involved in a debate of this nature – see for example this report by Nicholas Kulish in the International Herald Tribune about the Bulgarian government cracking down on prostitution by punishing individuals willing to pay for sex from a prostitute rather than punishing the prostitute himself or herself, as well as this report by Henry Porter in The Guardian opposing government intervention of this nature in England. But in each of these cases, the government in question is responding to a social morality debate in which its citizens are engaged, not (as is much more the case in China) setting their own policy irrespective of what their citizens think.
So the social morality debate in Brazil of which Bruna’s fame is a product springs not from the Brazilian government, but rather from different social attitudes of Brazilian citizens. And these attitudes frequently revolve around sexual liberalization, traditional feminine roles in Brazilian culture, and the presence of the Catholic Church. As Rother says,
Carnival and the general sensuality that seems to permeate the atmosphere can give the impression that Brazil is unusually permissive and liberated, especially compared with other predominantly Roman Catholic nations. But experts say the real situation is far more complicated, which explains both Bruna’s emergence and the strong reactions she has provoked.
As a result, some Brazilians have applauded Bruna’s frankness and say it is healthy to get certain taboos out in the open… But others decry her celebrity as one more noxious manifestation of free-market economics and globalization.
Rother further quotes a host of voices on the different sides of the debate. He frames the debate by quoting Richard Parker, an anthropologist at Columbia University and author of Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil:
Brazil is a country of contradictions, as much in relation to sexuality as anything else… There is a certain spirit of transgression in daily life, but there is also a lot of moralism.
Rother then presents two voices, the first – Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, a journalist and theologian at Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro – decring the presence of a person like Bruna in Brazilian society, and the second – Gabriela Silva Leite, a sociologist, former prostitute, and director of a prostitutes’ advocacy group – arguing that moral concerns such as those Bingemer espouses are exaggerated. Bingemer says that
This is the fruit of a type of society in which people will do anything to get money, including selling their bodies to be able to buy cellular phones… We’ve always had prostitution, but it was a hidden, prohibited thing. Now it’s a professional option like anything else, and that’s the truly shocking thing.
Leite replies that
It’s not a book like this that is going to stimulate prostitution, but [comment instead on] the lack of education and opportunities for women… I don’t think Bruna glamorizes things at all. On the contrary, you can regard the book as a kind of warning, because she talks of the unpleasant atmosphere and all the difficulties she faced.
Last but not least, Rother quotes Bruna herself on the debate over social morality:
Brazilian women have this sexy image, of being at ease and uninhibited in bed. But anyone who lives here knows that’s not true.
Carla de Meis, a medical psychiatrist at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro who has researched the mental health of Brazilian prostitutes, considers this debate in her own research. She points out in her article Subjectivity, Social Suffering, Liminality, and Suicide Among Prostitutes in Brazil that this debate is not just external, that a person can struggle with this question with respect to her own values and worldview. While the contrast is admittedly somewhat artificial, de Meis sets up a contrast between social roles in which a woman conforms to a societal definition of a dutiful wife and mother who honors her family, and in which she rejects family life to make a living through prostitution instead. de Meis notes that many of the prostitutes she interviewed for her research described making a wrenching decision when the elected to bypass the wife and mother role in favor of the prostitution role. She further notes that many prostitutes wanted to get out of their lives as prostitutes as quickly as possible and do their best to rid themselves of the stigma of having been a prostitute and live a life that more closely conforms to their society’s definition of a “good woman” (de Meis’ words).
Though this definition of a “good woman” – dutiful wife, honorable mother, moral woman, etc. – springs from multiple roots, de Meis and Parker both point to the presence of the Catholic Church as being a major factor reinforcing this role in Brazilian society. de Meis notes in particular Clara, a lady who wished to conform to her society’s definition of a moral woman and wanted to work her way out of prostitution to achieve that goal. As such, Clara differentiated herself from “real prostitutes” – women who willingly chose prostitution as a profession. According to de Meis:
Clara maintains that the real prostitutes are the women who begin early in life, explaining that those who begin later, as in her case, cannot adapt to it. She tells us that God curses prostitutes. However when I asked her if the curse of God would affect her she answered “No,” explaining that she pray every day and only works as a prostitute through extreme necessity. This would redeem her from the curse.
Regardless of whether one accepts Clara’s logic or not, her words demonstrate how deeply engrained Catholicism is in the Brazilian consciousness and social culture – even with the acknowledgement that many Brazilians are not personally religious.
As I noted in my discussion of social media in Brazil here, Catholicism is pervading the Brazilian sphere of social media as well. In this October 5 post Bruna offers two passages that touch upon religious themes. Writing about an interview she gave through an Internet chat service during a recent trip to the city of Salvador, she describes fielding a question from an “evangélico” – a person with an evangelical bend:
“As perguntas foram ótimas, mas cheguei na conclusão que eu posso estar onde quiser, em qualquer parte do mundo, que sempre terá algum evangélico com suas teorias macabras para cima de mim… Ele me perguntou se eu não tenho medo da morte… Afff. Sangue de Jesus tem poder ( é assim a frase?)!!! Amém.”
(I will e-mail some colleagues in Brazil to correct me, but in rough translation):
The questions had been excellent, but, as is the case anywhere in the world, there will always be some evangélico with macabre theories. I say this because the only question that left the focus [of the chat session] came from an evangélico… He asked me if I do not fear death… Afff. Sangue de Jesus tem poder (is this the phrase?)!!! Amen.
I do not know of an English equivalent of her last full phrase, “sangue de Jesus tem poder,” but if I read it correctly she is speaking in irony – in effect saying “oh dear God, what a ridiculous question” in response to the inquiry. (If any Brazilian or Portuguese readers can provide a translation, I would appreciate hearing from you). The translation aside, this exchange demonstrates not only the presence of Christianity in Brazilian society, but also the willingness to use the Internet as a forum to discuss it. And while Bruna seems to take an irreverent attitude towards its presence here, a little earlier in her post she describes her surroundings in Salvador as “the kind of life for which one would ask from God,” thus displaying a not-so-irreverent attitude towards religion in her post as well.
Diligent readers will point out the obvious problems with talking about the views and concerns of whole segments of the world’s cultures based upon just a few blogs from those cultures. This is an excellent point, and I do not seek to make any broad assumptions about a culture based solely upon the views of a few bloggers. With that in mind, I invite any commentary you have on the British, Brazilian, or Chinese segments of the blogosphere. I would love to read any discussion you would like to provide, as well as any examples of blogs or other Internet sources you know that support or refute my analyses. Thanks!
(The NY times requires a login to read their articles online. Creating a login and password for the NY Times is free and may be done here).
Work cited:
de Meis, C. (1999). Subjectivity, Social Suffering, Liminality and Suicide Among Prostitutes in Brazil. Urban Anthropology. V. 28:1. pp 65-101.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
What’s in a name?: Questions of privacy in a Chinese social network
Besides being accompanied by the above photo, which I find perfectly encapsulates the tension between recognition and anonymity among social networkers, Robert Ness’ post to Danwei.org this morning offers some of the best commentary I’ve heard on the right (or lack thereof) to be anonymous on the Internet in China. At issue is the real name system (实名制), or identity verification system. This is a system that requires someone wishing to join an online community to provide his or her real name and photo in order to join. Some like this system because (as they put it) it guarantees the authenticity of someone’s view points – members of an online community will know who said what. The systems proponents further argue that people will think twice before posting any potentially incendiary social or political commentary, as they will not be anonymous. By contrast, critics argue that this system represents Big Brother in action. Many of these critics further feel that the ability to post anonymously leads to discussion of taboo topics that would not be discussed if discussants could be personally identified.
Ness frames this debate in the context of the Chinese social network Zhanzuo.com — in Ness’s words, “one of several sites contending for the role of ‘China’s Facebook.’” The English version of the podcast interview with some of Zhanzuo’s regular networkers does a great job covering the different perspectives on this openness vs. privacy issue.
I confess I was interested in Zhanzuo for another reason as well. In order to reach out to social networkers, particularly on non-U.S. networks, I created profiles for myself on different networks active in different parts of the world (see my MySpace and Facebook, as well as my Orkut and Bebo). So naturally Zhanzuo was something I wanted to check out. I tried using Google translator to get around the language barrier, and to my surprise it wasn’t a total failure. I did get this far:
But when I created the profile I wasn’t able to type in the Roman alphabet, so I couldn’t give my real name. I threw in few random words in Chinese I copied and pasted from part of the page on the faint hope that I would be able to edit that bit of text into my real name once I was inside. Not surprisingly I was not able to do this – while I found the “edit my personal info” button, I was still unable to get the site to recognize my Romanized name. So my Zhanzuo profile is doomed.
But before the name verification authorities deleted my profile, I did try to add a little blurb about myself and the SIG-III blog, partly on the off chance that someone would see it before my profile disappeared, and partly just to see if I could do it. What happened was interesting. My attempts to post to the “about me” section were blocked, with (in Google translation) a rather Orwellian message:
your current state is: not yet audited by administrators, unable to use this function.
Block of the network to promote the real-name system, in order to pass audit, you must:
1. Upload your photos as a true portrait
2. Complete the true information (including name, department, etc)
Within 24 hours administrators will examine your images and information vetted through you can freely enjoy the fun of the block!
If Facebook, typically considered the standard bearer for authentic profile information in the U.S., ever tried anything like this, Facebook users would leave immediately. This amount of verification would never fly with a U.S. audience, thus marking a very significant difference between American social networkers and a certain percentage of Chinese social networkers. And while I wouldn’t presume to draw conclusions about broader social phenomena such as privacy in general and how attitudes towards privacy change by culture based solely upon an experiment like this, I did think my experience with Zhanzuo offered an interesting if incomplete window into attitudes towards privacy among Chinese netizens.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
Sex, Blogs, and the Great Firewall Part II – Sexuality and Subversion in China
Chinese blogger Mu Mu, from a May 2006 post to her blog
Decisions about when and what to censor can rest on multiple different criteria such as the reputation of the author and the relative visibility of the offending thought – an op ed piece in a major newspaper will be read by more people than if it were in a fringe publication, and as such may be subject to more stringent regulation. But the primary criteria in deciding when and what to censor is (obviously) the overall content of the idea. And as is exemplified by official censorship in China, some topics stand a greater chance of being censored than others.
DeWoskin, who I cited in part one of this article, notes that political commentary will raise the ire of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censors immediately, whereas personal, social or sexual content is much more of a gray area. She writes (p. 31) that
It was as if an unspoken compact had been reached between the government and its citizens: we do politics the old way; you do your lifestyles anyway you want.
A Chinese friend of mine in Seattle echoed this thought regarding internet content specifically: an Internet search for “democracy,” “Tiannamen Square,” or “Dali Lama” will return censored results, but a blogger like Mu Mu, about whom we were talking, could get away with posting sexual content about herself.
Mu Mu first appeared on the radar screens of Western media outlets in late 2005, when Howard W. French wrote his article A Party Girl Leads China’s Online Revolution. French introduces Mu Mu as a fascinating mixture of sexuality and political commentary:
On her fourth day of keeping a Web log, she introduced herself to the world with these striking words: “I am a dance girl, and I am a party member.”
“I don’t know if I can be counted as a successful Web cam dance girl,” that early post continued. “But I’m sure that looking around the world, if I am not the one with the highest diploma, I am definitely the dance babe who reads the most and thinks the deepest, and I’m most likely the only party member among them.”
Thus was born, early in July, what many regard as China’s most popular blog.
Sometimes timing is everything, and such was the case with the anonymous blogger, a self-described Communist Party member from Shanghai who goes by the pseudonym Mu Mu.
A 25-year-old, Mu Mu appears online… most evenings around midnight, shielding her face while striking poses that are provocative, but never sexually explicit.
She parries questions from some of her tens of thousands of avid followers with witticisms and cool charm.
Mu Mu has changed a bit since French introduced her. After French wrote his article her blog attracted a large amount of media attention from the West, causing her to shut the original version of it down. If you follow the link French provides, you receive the following error message, saying (in Chinese) that the page no longer exists. Mu Mu started blogging again after the media attention subsided a bit, and her blog has since been through two other incarnations: this one here, and the current version, which exists on two different sites here and here. She has also refrained from posting any semi-nude photos of herself recently, although she is still willing to post provocative photos, such as the depictions of Japanese soldiers in the following post, which I presume deals with perpetually strained Sino-Japanese relations. (If any SIG-III Blog readers speak Chinese and would be willing to confirm or correct this presumption, I would appreciate hearing your interpretation).
Mu Mu also said she “finds it hard to comprehend why her blog is so enticing to westerners,” according to Dave Lucas. Lucas has published an English translation of Mu Mu’s reaction to French’s article. In this reaction Mu Mu uses the Google translator to engage French in a discussion, in which (if I read the Googleified translation right) she says she is glad she is living at a time when China is increasingly socially liberal, points to the challenges of separating one’s personal life from one’s public life (which is why she chose to mix the two in her blog), and reaffirms her belief in the CCP.
Mu Mu is an example of a huge challenge for Chinese censors. Politically she claims to be on their side, but then she writes about being a party girl and partaking in a Westernized liberal lifestyle (and as I discuss below, the contention that Chinese censors only go after political discussion and generally leave social and sexual topics alone does not always prove accurate). From researching her, my impression is that she is very adept at being edgy bout not too edgy as to be shut down by Party censors. Her popularity in the Chinese blogosphere adds to the challenge. With a large following, her sudden absence at the hands of Party Censors would cause a considerable stir around the Chinese blogosphere. But the attention she received from Western media in late 2005 and 2006 threatened to create a politicized crisis between official censors and Western media outlets over freedom of speech issues. I believe this potential political situation is what cause Mu Mu to shut her original blog down as an act of self-censorship and only later begin blogging again when the attention from the West had subsided.
Do Party censors really overlook all this sexuality in China’s Internet sphere?
The short answer is no, although it remains true that the severity of any reaction by official censors varies widely. Simply put, these censors are far less equipped to comprehend and deal with censoring social topics such as sex than they are political topics such as democracy.
But there is evidence of CCP attempts to regulate online sexuality in China. Perhaps the most visible example is the CCP blocking the Japanese portal of Baidu.com, noted in these two reports. (Baidu, whose name is taken from a poem from the Song Dynasty, is not a well known company outside of China, but inside China it is fighting a gargantuan three-way battle with Google and Yahoo. And Baidu is winning – see reports here and here).
Chinese blogger Mu Zimei, reproduced in a report by Jeremy Goldkorn on a Sohu.com story about Mu
In the Chinese blogosphere, Mu Mu isn’t the only blogger blogging about sexuality in China. At the end of 2003 another young woman named Muzi Mei (Or Mu Zimei, Mu Zi Mei, or木子美) received a lot of media attention around the world for blogging the stories of her sexual encounters.
Hannah Beech of Time Magazine writes that
Li Li… isn’t averse to kissing and telling. For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog–written under the pen name Muzi Mei–that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man… “I express my freedom through sex,” says Li, unapologetically. “It’s my life, and I can do what I want.”
Her blog has been translated into French and German (and she reports an English translation of some of her work, although I was unable to find her on Amazon in English).
She has had less success dealing with official censors than Mu Mu. While her blog was popular enough to give censors a daunting challenge in trying to counter the viral spread of her posts around the Internet, it now seems to be defunct. In the Time article linked above, Beech writes that
Despite government attempts to censor it, the sex diary is so popular that Li’s pen name is intermittently the most searched keyword on China’s top search engine.
An article by Hamish McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald went even further, saying the rise of blogs exchanging views on Chinese politics is a direct descendant of blogs that deal with social issues in China. At one point McDonald essentially says that Mu Mu, with her mix of sexuality and politics, could never have existed without Muzi Mei having blogged about sexuality alone.
Muzi Mei was certainly aware of the censorship threat she faced, and took precautions to prevent her blog from being shut down. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Peter Goff says
For now, Muzimei is among those managing to sidestep [CCP censorship]. “I cannot go too far,” she said. “If my work was stopped that would be bad for me, bad for the development of the internet and free expression, and bad for China.”
Nonetheless she ran afoul of official censors. As Jeremy Goldkorn reports on Danwei.org,
Her online diary stirred up an online fuss which got the attention of the print media, but she was thrown off the gossip pages of the tabloids when [official censors] caught on to the action and issued some of ban on media coverage of her. She has been absent from the media since the first few months of this year [2004].
Goldkorn goes on to quote a 2004 story posted to Sohu.com that painted a very unflattering picture of her:
Muzi Mei, Li Li … she dresses gaudily, but even more gaudy is her thinking and her behavior. She frequently changes sexual partners and even brazenly describes the details of her encounters on the Internet, revealing or hinting at the real identity of the men she has known. All of this caused a great fuss in Chinese society in 2003.
The censoring of her blog may be permanent now. Whether it was a voluntary choice on her part or the result of official censorship, Muzi Mei’s blog seems to have disappeared. The last version of her blog cached on the Internet Archive was in January of 2007.
Mu Mu and Muzi Mei are just two prominent examples of a small but well known (to Chinese audiences at least) bloggers who have used the blogosphere to explore the nexus between sex, storytelling/information sharing, and Internet technology, all at the risk of being censored. Other examples come from a Cai Shangyao article in the Shanghai Star that covers Muzi Mei and Zhuying Qingtong, and Sister Lotus (also translated as Sister Hibiscus — now defunct blog here, reports here, here, here, and here). There is also the slightly different but related episode of a blogger named Hedgehog MuMu (no relation to the Mu Mu discussed above, according to Lonnie Hodge) participating in a blogger beauty contest only to be disqualified for posting nude photos of herself online. (Additional reports here and here).
That every one of these bloggers should face censorship for posting sexual content online demonstrates that Chinese censors can and will censor social as well as political content. Some astute readers may further assert that the political, social, and sexual spheres cannot be discretely separated from each other, and that posting sexual content online can be a form of political commentary. This is certainly true, and I do not at all seek to imply otherwise. This issue is, however, complex enough that it merits a full discussion that I will leave for another time. Beyond that I have additional thoughts that I will put into part III of this essay, which I will add soon. And as always, I appreciate and look forward to reading your reactions to my thoughts.
Work cited:
DeWoskin, R. (2005). Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
Sex, Blogs, and the Great Firewall Part I – Censorship
China has 162 million Internet subscribers – 12.3% of the total population of China, but over 50% of the total population of the U.S. And as Internet connectivity and use in China is growing, so too is China’s influence over the Internet. The Associated Press reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is working on incorporating characters from non-romanized alphabets into web addresses, albeit while facing big challenges over how to do this. Concerning the prospect of Chinese in these addresses, John Yunker’s article Slouching Toward Multilingual .com originally ran under the title “Slouching Toward .公司 (.com),” using the Mandarin Chinese characters for .com. And concerning the overall influence of different languages on the Internet, Daniel Altman of the International Herald Tribune raises the prospect that Mandarin Chinese might someday overtake English as the language most widely spoken on the Internet. While Altman is dubious about this prospect, the prospect he raises of Chinese dominance over the Internet is a prospect generating a lot of discussion around the world.
All this is occurring with the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, heavily involved with an Internet Censorship campaign. This censorship campaign has taken on multiple different forms and been applied with varying degrees of consistency and varying degrees of effectiveness by the Chinese government. I will get to a discussion of censorship in China in a moment, but first I should say a word about what censorship is and is not.
So what does the slippery concept of censorship entail?
One of the best thoughts I have encountered regarding censorship emerged during last year’s Global Plaza. Responding to a First Monday article that I posted to the Blog, a student wrote that the article
…clearly shows that a society cannot exist without some sort of censorship. The government tries to enforce censorship of actions or content that majority finds harmful or offensive. Basically, we expect government to do something about child pornography or terrorist training sites and don’t usually view it unfair censorship.
This thought points to a continuum of different levels of acceptability of censoring people’s thought or expression depending upon what that thought or expression is. While many people (not all, but many) in liberal Western societies find it socially desirable to censor child porn or terrorist training sites, they will have a different standard of acceptability for censoring the free exchange of ideas. And there are many levels of acceptability of censorship in between these two situations, along with ongoing debate about what should or should not be censored at these different levels. Furthermore there are the questions of who is and who should be able to make such a decision – be it the group of “many people” I list above, or official government censors. Last but not least questions of culture come into play. What is socially or culturally taboo in one region may be acceptable in another region. While citizens of liberal Western societies may find it socially desirable to censor one type of idea, citizens of another form of society may object to the censorship of the same idea. And given the borderless nature of the Internet, different cultures will come in contact online, in some cases prompting national governments to try to erect an artificial national cyber barrier to ideas or websites they find subversive.
In addition to this continuum, there are different forms of censorship. Many voices discussing censorship in China are (correctly) discussing CCP censorship. These discussions concern (for example) jailed bloggers such as Wang Xiaoning, and the heavy handed “challenge the Party and you will be punished” approach to censorship. Less attention is paid to the closely related and comparatively lighter handed concept of propaganda. Instead of using threats or force to ensure conformity, government censors will use Internet portals such as Sina or Sohu to post pro-Party reactions to ideas they consider subversive in an attempt to sway public opinion to favor the official view over the subversive view.
In her book Foreign Babes in Beijing, Rachel DeWoskin writes that xuanchan, the Chinese word for propaganda, does not carry with it the negative stigma of its English equivalent. It is merely the word for “official” information or views of events. Reactions to such an official view expressed through propaganda can range from agreement to disagreement, whereas people in the U.S. and other western countries typically display aversion to the whole concept of propaganda.
In an article with the somewhat Orwellian title As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching, Howard W. French describes Hu Yingying, an undergraduate who follows the life of a typical Chinese undergraduate – except that for several hours per week unbeknownst to her classmates she acts as a censor of her university’s Internet forums. As French says,
Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator — and all without the knowledge of her fellow students — Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech.
But Ms. Hu, one of 500 students at her university’s newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the CCP is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.
Instead of relying on the force of authority alone, Hu tries if possible to steer conversations on these forums to a more pro-Party viewpoint, and only alert the school’s webmaster for the worst departures from an official view. French writes that Hu,
says she and her fellow moderators try to steer what they consider negative conversations in a positive direction with well-placed comments of their own. Anything they deem offensive, she says, they report to the school’s Web master for deletion.
French does not mention any disciplinary action taken against a student who posts something that is later deleted, only that the post is deleted.
(Two side notes: First, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention self-censorship – the practice of voluntarily censoring one’s thoughts on a topic in order to avoid repercussion or to conform to a societal standard. And certainly this happens in China. But while some will censor themselves, others will not, thus furthering, rightly or wrongly, a role for CCP censors. Second, I am not suggesting that surveillance occurs only in China. A similar situation occurred at my undergraduate school in Ohio in the mid-1970s – before the Internet, and more specifically, before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which stipulates that the U.S. Government must obtain a warrant in order to monitor a person’s phone conversations. At the end of the Vietnam War, before FISA was enacted, residence halls at my school were not equipped with a telephone in each room. Rather they had one phone per floor in the hall. A CIA wiretap was found in the phone that one floor of one of the residence halls shared. No school administrator ever learned who installed this wiretap, but there is some speculation that one of the students was doubling as a CIA operative).
There is a kind of middle ground between censorship and propaganda that the CCP uses too – “friendly” reminders not to engage in subversive behavior online. Such reminders are best exemplified by two cartoon cybercops (one of which is below) that have recently begun appearing on Chinese websites.
Quoting the China Daily news service, the BBC reports that
The animated figures, a man and a woman, will appear on users’ screens every 30 minutes “to remind them of internet security”, China Daily said…
They would “be on watch for websites that incite secession, promote superstition, gambling and fraud”, the China Daily said, citing Beijing’s Municipal Public Security Bureau.
How effective they are or are not remains to be seen, as do people’s reactions to them. And as with the cybercops, the effectiveness of the Chinese government’s Internet censorship program as a whole, as well as the reactions of Chinese citizens to it merit discussion.
Is the CCP effective in censoring the Internet? And what do people in China think about official censorship?
I first wrote about Internet censorship in China here. In this article I noted that, even into the early 2000s, the Chinese Communist Party had met with solid success in censoring the Internet. I pointed to Tamara Renee Shie’s 2004 article in the Journal of Contemporary China called “The Tangled Web” and Tom Zeller Jr’s observation that the Communist Party “created a multilayered regime of filtering and surveillance, vague legal regulations and stringent enforcement that, taken together, effectively neutralized the Internet in China” as evidence of the Party’s success in controlling online information. But then I added that
Change is happening despite the CCP’s efforts at control, and it is proving a powerful force in terms of everyday life in Chinese society and in terms of online commentary specifically… things will only get harder for the CCP as the Internet and the blogosphere continue to expand. Ultimately the CCP must adapt to the current realities of Internet use in China (which may prove to be too much of a challenge for them) or see their control over information wane, perhaps to the point that they will no longer be able to govern China.
Howard W. French offered a similar observation here. And although I was writing in early 2006, the tension between Party control and freedom on online information is still the same fundamental tension.
The CCP is aware of the increasingly complex challenges of maintaining control over online information. In addition to their efforts at technological control, they have reached into their own Confucian and Maoist cultural heritage to promote an ideology of following Party rule. I wrote about efforts at ideological control in the comments to a post from last year’s Plaza:
This New York Times article by Jim Yardley describes an effort by the Chinese Communist Party earlier this year to reinstill a Confucian respect for order and official authority, under the premise that doing so will allow the party to remain a modern and vital element of life in China. Revolving around many hours spent reviewing the works of Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping, Yardley quotes Wenran Jiang of the China Institute at the University of Alberta as saying that the Party’s effort “is an effort to cope with the declining reputation of the party and the distrust of the people toward party officials.” That Professor Jiang saw fit to bring the issue of trust into this push for order underscores the position in which the Communist Party currently finds itself, and its desire to reinstill a sense of trust for its authority among the Chinese people.
However a push towards conformity like this represents a huge challenge for the CCP – some Chinese citizens will treat a push like this with disdain. It is in the blog comment above that I wrote about the question of the reactions of ordinary Chinese citizens to censorship. Professing disagreement with the reasoning of CCP censors in this BBC article, I “began to wonder if Chinese Internet users would react the same way, or if my reaction was borne of my own Western view of a free Internet.” I found both Chinese voices dissenting against censorship and expressing support for it. Concerning the dissenters, I wrote
Hundreds if not thousands of Western media outlets have chronicled official censorship in China, and many Chinese bloggers take the same view, as this BBC article suggests. Not trusting the official media to report a broad range of news events, nor to report them fairly or accurately when they do, the journalists, editors, and ordinary citizens noted in this article support freedom of expression in the Chinese media.
Concerning Chinese voices in support or partial support of censorship, I wrote
But there are Chinese voices that explicitly place their trust in the official media to present trustworthy information. I think in particular of a Chinese classmate who, when asked what she thought of Party censorship, responded that she saw solid arguments both for and against state control of media.
Concluding that “Some favor independent media sources competing and collaborating with each other, similar to Western media sources and blogs [and] others prefer to place their trust in official party pronouncements,” I now find my thoughts similar to DeWoskin’s observation about propaganda above. As with propaganda, there exist among Chinese netizens both a view that CCP censorship is something to be quashed as quickly as possible, and a view that CCP efforts at censorship are merely efforts to promote their official version of events. And the tension between these two viewpoints continues to be discussed in different segments of the blogosphere in China (unless it gets censored) and around the world. This tension frequently centers on a sensitive topic, and can be heightened even further when there exist different ideas about what subjects are illicit, should be illicit, and should be discussed even when others consider them illicit. If a new idea (particularly a more liberal idea of what should or should not be restricted) is imported into a culture from another society or country, the tension over censorship can become explosive. And the topic of my next post – Sex, Blogs, and the Great Firewall Part II: Sexuality and Subversion in China – is a tension that has become explosive and will only continue to challenge CCP censors in the years to come.
(The NY times requires a login to read their articles online. Creating a login and password for the NY Times is free and may be done here).
Works cited:
DeWoskin, R. (2005). Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Shie, T.R. (2004, August). The Tangled Web: does the Internet offer promise or peril for the Chinese Communist Party? Journal of Contemporary China, v. 13: 40.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
Social media and the Internet in Brazil
Brazilians are passionate about the Internet, and all the social media applications the Internet has made possible. Internet use and social media are pervading a wide range of aspects of life in Brazil, such that even those who do not have Internet access or choose not to participate in social media are frequently aware that the Internet and all its related applications are being inextricably integrated into Brazil’s social fabric. The Wikipedia even lists a technical term for Brazilian appropriation of foreign Internet applications – the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon. And they are matching Americans with regard to time spent online. Telegeography, a telecom consulting firm, reported in 2004 that Brazilian Internet users had overtaken American Internet users in terms of hours online. I actually find their statistic of 12 million Internet users in 2004 inaccurate. Euromonitor International lists 22 million users in 2004 (Euromonitor International, 2006), and Internet World Stats and Caio Bonhila of the International Telecommunications Union list 39,140,000 and 40,800,000 respectively in late 2006/early 2007.
Likewise, many in Brazil are making extensive use of different Web 2.0/social media/social networking applications. My favorite bit of pop culture to come from the Brazilian Internet recently is this music video by Claudia Leitte:
It highlights the extent to which both YouTube and Second Life are becoming a part of daily existence for Brazilian Internet users. The success of YouTube has even prompted Universo Online, A Brazilian version of America Online, to produce a native Brazilian video sharing service, the Videolog. And earlier this year Linden Labs, the company that maintains Second Life launched the Mainland Brasil arm of Second Life, its first non-English language platform (Brasil is the Portuguese spelling of Brazil). Drawing from many Brazilian blogs, Jose Murilo Junior provides this excellent account of the opening of Mainland Brasil. He quotes Brazilian bloggers’ thoughts on the opening itself, on the marketing campaigns that accompanied the opening, on the presence of the Catholic Church in Mainland Brasil, and on the (inevitable) backlash that came with the hype surrounding the event. Two bloggers in particular are worth noting. Drawing from the March 2007 Second Life population data, a blogger named Aenea pointed out that Brazilians are the sixth largest group of active Second Life users, claiming 4.73% of active users around the world. She provides the following comparison of these numbers to other Sough American countries. And writing at the Mundo Linden (Linden World) blog, Debora Perenti writes that
The Catholic community and communications network “Canção Nova” will launch the second biggest Brazilian enterprise in Second Life. It is the first Christian world large scale initiative in Linden Lab’s virtual universe. The “Canção Nova Island” forms an archipelago of 25 islands which will turn into the biggest Brazilian (and Global) Christian center, and offers a communal space for relationships, events and business in Second Life, is already in an advanced stage of development and building. The project was already being discreetly executed about 3 months ago. A team of 15 people take care of the diverse aspects in the island, such as terraforming, infrastructure, code programming, multimedia development, along side of the space’s commercial and managerial demands. (Translation by Jose Murilo Junior)
The presence of the Catholic Church in Mainland Brasil is a huge example of the confluence between Web 2.0 applications and a longstanding institution that forms part of the social and cultural fabrics of the Brazilian people.
In addition to the Brazilian presence in Second Life, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians use the Orkut social network. Developed by Google, Orkut is an example of the Brazilian Internet phenomenon listed above – an American network, but more Brazilians than Americans using it. Jose Murilo Junior writes about Orkut as well – as he says,
In order to understand Google’s significance in South America’s biggest country it must be realized that today of the 20 million Brazilians with access to the Internet , approximately 17 million are in Orkut.
And immediately after he makes this statement he pulls together literature from around the Brazilian blogosphere outlining a tension between Brazilian authorities seeking Orkut patron information on people suspected of being involved in foul play and Google’s unwillingness to turn over information it believed should remain confidential. In addition to discussions of censorship and comparisons of Brazil’s government to the governments of China and Iran (both of whom have asked Google for information on Internet users), some of the discussion focused on an extremely frightening prospect for many Brazilians – that Google might elect to close Orkut to Brazilian social networkers rather than turn over data to the Brazilian government. Luckily for Brazilian Orkut users this course of action never became reality, and Orkut is still freely accessible in Brazil. This amalgamation of blogosphere chatter culminates in Murillo Junior’s thought that
All sides should keep in mind that the case can be an opportunity bringing important insights about how to deal with identity in the web environment. Brazilians are ready (eager?) to explore these possibilities. It would be important also that Google Brazil’s team should be prepared to think and move with respect for local cultural sensibilities while dealing with the implications created by such a huge experiment in social networking. It is obvious that ‘adsense’ sales people are not prepared to understand the deep issues that will keep emerging from the incredible digital laboratory spontaneously generated by social networking. Google’s one-size-fits-all approach may just not fit everywhere, every time.
I’d be interested to know any or your thoughts on the extent to which a social network or other Web 2.0 application can be imported from one “local cultural sensibility” into another one, contrasted to the extent of localization that must occur to make a social networking service palatable to a culture different from the one that produced it.
Citizen journalism blog reactions to violence in Brazilian cities
As is evident from Murillo Junior’s sources, the Brazilian blogosphere in general is vast and covers many different topics, from people’s daily lives, to blogs discussing specific topics. (In fact in terms of breadth and topics, the Brazilian blogosphere isn’t too different from the blogosphere in America, although the content posted to Brazilian blogs will have its own distinct cultural characteristics). Though they are by far not the only blogs to discuss these topics, I have run across two blogs in particular that highlight issues within Brazilian politics and rising violence in Rio de Janeiro. Written in both Portuguese and English, the political blog, Brazil Political Comment, is managed by a consultant in São Paulo named John Fitzpatrick, and (in its own words) offers “opinion and analysis of the Brazilian political and business scene.”
A starker example of a social justice blog, Rio Body Count chronicles the numbers of dead and wounded in Rio between February and September of 2007. For the past year to year and a half, Brazil’s major cities – Rio and São Paulo in particular, but other cities as well – have been hit by a severe spike in violence and gang-related activity. There are multiple causes of this spike, but in particular ethnic tensions and a wide gap between wealthy and poorer people (combined with a perception that this gap is widening even further) have fueled this rise of violence. An October 6, 2006 article by Ralph Hoppe in Der Spiegel called São Paulo: Laboratory of Violence provides easily the most graphic but detailed and informative picture of São Paulo’s heightened level of violence I have seen:
The criminal underworld in Sao Paolo wields a power that rivals the Brazilian government’s. It organizes deadly violence but serves as a welfare state, while the city’s wealthy have withdrawn into luxury neighborhoods and feel safe only when they travel by helicopter. Is Sao Paolo a forerunner of the 21st-century metropolis?
For Sao Paolo, 2006 is the year of violence. Never before have there been such intense and protracted battles between gangsters and the police, concentrated attacks that paralyzed the giant city for days… All this violence amounted to a challenge to the Brazilian government by the criminal underground. According to people in the favelas, it was high time. Sao Paolo proper has 10 million inhabitants; it’s the sixth-largest city in the world, the largest in the southern hemisphere. In this chaos of wealth and sordid misery, gleaming skyscrapers and gray huts, the criminal underground has issued its call to arms, and the upper classes have retreated deeper and deeper into enclaves of wealth…
Since this year’s civil war, though, the [“Primeiro Comando da Capital” or “First Command” – the main criminal gang operating in São Paulo] builds internal coherence through fear and trust… and the message of the violent “demonstration” was simple: This city is ours.
Rio witnessed a similar spike in violent crime in 2006 and 2007. Groups like Rio Body Count have used different means, including their blog, to convey a message of opposition to violence of this nature. Accessing the site on September 19 of this year and using Google translator, one passage on the site reads
At the beginning of the project, the shock was gigantic… [An average of ten] died per day, and the people had started to debate on the violence, on the real necessity to decide everything with more violence. Many blogs had appeared to debate the subject, others had deepened the speech, similar projects to the Riobodycount had been initiated in other States of Brazil, and the numbers had been growing each time more…
This violence, peaceful protests against it, and police actions to counter it also entered the mainstream media and made it onto citizen journalism blogs. Roger Cohen wrote about the current violence in Brail and its causes in the New York Times, and on the French citizen journalism site AgoraVox, J.N. Paquet had this report on the Rio de Paz (“River of Peace”) movement placing 3,000 black bags filled with sand on Copacabana beach in Rio to represent the 3,000 people killed in their state during the first half of 2007. He includes the following picture of the Rio de Paz cemetery:
Alan Mota at OhMyNews, a Korean citizen journalism site, wrote about a police reaction to the rise in violence, which involved coordinated efforts by 25,000+ police officers across Brazil and yielded over 2,000 arrests.
Other Brazilian uses of social media
Like any outlet for citizen journalism, Brazilian sites cover many topics – the blog reactions to violence discussed above being just one (rather grim) example. Also writing in OhMyNews, Antonio Carlos Rix covered the Eu-Reporter (“I Reporter”) site, which he describes as “a collaborative section at the famous Brazilian print newspaper and online newspaper O Globo.” Rix also points to two articles by OhMyNews reporter Ana Maria Brambilla, one about citizen photojournalism in Brazil, the other about professional relationships between citizen journalists.
Concerning corporate blogs in Brazil, Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research shares his experiences from a conference in São Paulo:
CEOs here want to blog. I met with CEOs of companies large and small, and this question kept coming up. “How much time does it take?” “What if someone criticizes us?”… I was intrigued that this idea was so popular. I think businesspeople in Brazil are more used to taking risks.
And beyond citizen journalism and the blogosphere, Richard MacManus writes about a host of Brazilian Web 2.0 applications that have emerged within the past two years. He covers, among others, Videolog.tv, theYouTube clone I mentioned above, the Gazzag and Wasabi social networks, the BlogBlogs and OverMundo blogging services, and the Flogão photo sharing service.
So in short, Brazilian social media applications and social media users are extensive and growing, and they use these media platforms to discuss a wide range of topics. As Internet connectivity and Internet use continue to expand in Brazil, the numbers of Brazilians using these applications to put their voices on the Web will do nothing but increase – and, I predict, increase rapidly.
Work Cited:
Euromonitor International. (2006). International Marketing Data and Statistics 2007. 2nd ed, v. 2. London, U.K: Euromonitor International Plc.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
Global social networking
Did you know that Americans do not have the largest social networking communities in the world? According to market research by Ipsos, America comes in fifth place in terms of number of people connected to a social network – South Korea comes in first. According to Ipsos,
Leading all other markets in its love affair with social networking is South Korea, as half (49%) of all adults in this country have visited at least one of these websites in the past, while over half of all online adults have visited a social networking website in the past 30 days… In comparison, about one in five American adults (24%) have ever visited a social networking website.
The chart they include is the best part of this announcement. It points to South Korea and Brazil as being the most active social networkers, with China and Mexico closer to the U.S. but still more active than American social networkers. (additional reports about these findings here, here, and here).
Furthermore, According to research by comScore, a company that measures Internet use statistics, different services gain and maintain popularity in different regions of the world. While social networking in the U.S. is dominated by MySpace and FaceBook, Latin and South America (Brazil in particular) primarily use Orkut, and the Asia/Pacific region uses Friendster first and foremost, and Orkut as a numerically solid alternative. As the comScore press release notes,
MySpace.com (62 percent) and Facebook.com (68 percent) attract approximately two-thirds of their respective audiences from North America. That said, each has already amassed a large international visitor base and both appear poised to continue their global expansion. Bebo.com has a particularly strong grasp on Europe, attracting nearly 63 percent of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is firmly entrenched in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent). Friendster also attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region.
And ironically, all the companies in the comScore study are American. Some have just wound up being more popular in other countries besides America. But are there social networking services born in other countries, which cater to people in those countries? Absolutely.
Danah Boyd has provided a (partial) list of foreign social networks, as well as the languages in which they are published and the number of profiles each has. She lists
– Cyworld (Korea)
– QQ (China). Here is a link to the English version of QQ, which has a South African web address and a much cleaner appearance than the Chinese site.
– Hevre (Israel)
– Lunarstorm (Sweden). British version here.
– StudiVZ (Germany). StudiVZ has mirror sites in French, Italian, and Polish, as well as a Spanish language version targeting South America, but no English version.
Her commenters have listed still more services – one pointed in particular to this list, which lists many non-American services. All told I’ve looked at perhaps 30 to 50 non-American social networking services, some of whom claim tens of millions of users.
And yes, foreign social networks can look different from American ones, and people of different nationalities may use them differently from people in the U.S. or discuss topics that wouldn’t reach an American audience. For example Hevre, an Israeli site, looks like this:
La Zona, a music industry oriented social network maintained by MTV Latin America, looks much closer to American social networks than Hevre does, but even then (to my mind at least) this site has a distinctly more Latin American appearance than a U.S.-based social network.
In terms of how people in different countries use social networks differently than people in the U.S., Forrester Research’s Vice President and Principal Analyst Charlene Li wrote a report on Mixi that noted certain cultural differences in how Japanese people network with each other. I found these characteristics of particular interest:
– Invitation-only participation. Most of the Mixi users I spoke with said that they use Mixi only to connect with their friends. The most used feature – the “diary”. They update their own and frequently check their friends’ diaries. While essentially a blog, many users don’t consider it one, as it’s really only for their friends.
– Anonymous profiles. As a rule, the Japanese don’t use their real names on their profiles. While this is also often true in North America, I found it interesting that users made it a point to tell me that they didn’t use their real names. Also, very few of the Mixi users I spoke with said that they had ever interacted with people they did not know, the complete opposite of the behavior usually found on MySpace.
– Heavily mobile-based. Several users told me that text messaging updates actually facilitated participation as they were more comfortable writing than engaging in face-to-face conversations.
– Structure. Unlike MySpace, Mixi is highly structured with minimal ability to change the layout. The users I spoke with liked the structure, as it created certainty about how users were to interact with each other.
Writing in the International Herald Tribune, James Shih echoes Charlene’s thoughts about the structure of Mixi in this article. He notes that
MySpace, for example, has often been described as a “free-for-all” in which members can easily create multiple profiles, add their own programming and post other kinds of media, like pictures, music and videos… Mixi of Japan, however, has a much more structured approach. A person can join only if invited by current members. Personal profiles are based only on text, except for three photos (premium service allows more). Surprisingly, users do not seem to mind. In fact, most members do not post pictures of themselves, opting instead for photos of celebrities, scenery or pets.
This article continues by discussing Cyworld, which it says blends elements of virtual worlds (such as Second Life) with social networking:
Cyworld is yet another story. Personal profiles are dominated by the Miniroom, a 400- pixel-by-200-pixel space that users can decorate with digital furniture, wallpaper and other objects, much as they would decorate real rooms. An avatar, or a character representation referred to as Minime, is also in the room, and the user can change Minime’s clothes, hair and facial expression. In fact, users pay real money to buy the various virtual objects to spice up the lives of their Minimes.
By comparison to Japanese Mixi users, Chinese people are more willing to network with people they do not personally know – in fact they are even more willing to do this than American social networkers are. This chart from the eMarketer report I linked to above indicates that Chinese people are far more outgoing when it comes to social networking than their peers in Europe and the U.S., and the report itself adds that
Among adult Chinese broadband users, 80% had discussed hobbies or interests online via a social network, and 78% had used a social network to meet new people. Less than half of users in most other markets surveyed said they had used a social network for either of those purposes.
The internationalization of social networking has caught the attention of American services as well. MySpace in particular has branched out to other countries. They have dedicated this entire page to their global network, and generated media buzz such as this Victoria Shannon article in the Herald Tribune. But as to how successful these transplanted networks will or will not be among different demographic segments of the world’s population, Bob Ivins of comScore has the most pertinent observation. He notes that
A fundamental aspect of the success of social networking sites is cultural relevance… Those doing well in certain regions are likely doing an effective job of communicating appropriately with those regions’ specific populations. As social networking continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see if networks are able to cross cultural barriers and bring people from different corners of the globe together in fulfilling the truest ideals of social networking.
So I’ve just thrown a bunch of information at you. Now it’s your turn – I’d love to have your thoughts as a comment. Have you encountered the international sphere in your own social networking activities? If so, did you encounter any cultural differences you found particularly striking? If you met someone from a different country through your network, did s/he talk about his/her home country? If so, what did s/he say?
Posted by Aaron Bowen
Why should we talk about (international) social networking?
There’s been an ongoing discussion about whether social networking is a passing fad or a form of connection that is here to stay – and if it is here to stay, how pervasive or inconsequential it will be, and what it will look like as social networking applications continue to develop and reinvent themselves.
The single most significant expression I’ve seen of this outstanding question comes from a discussion on the ACRLog, the blog of the Association of College and Research Libraries. In discussing David Bickford’s assertion in this thread that the 1970s notion of library service done over CB radio was a passing fad, Marc Meola asks if Web 2.0 services such as social networking are a fad or something that is here to stay. Two people responded that certain aspects of Web 2.0 are fads while other aspects will stick around. But a recently minted librarian named Michael C. Habib commented that
MySpace and Facebook are 2.0 as it gets and it would be hard to argue that they have only been picked up by tech geeks. Those services also incorporate blogging, commenting, and photo sharing. Wikipedia, E-Bay, and Craigslist are also 2.0 as it gets. These are just a couple of examples, but the idea is that 2.0 is already mainstream and well entrenched in peoples daily use of the internet. Sites like Flickr might point to a newer breed of 2.0 technologies, but 2.0 is here to stay.
Agreeing with Habib, I wrote that
As the introduction of the Internet to a mass audience in the 1990s showed, it is in a library’s interest to pay attention to disruptive technologies. I would rather be guilty of paying attention to a fad than missing out on the “next big thing” — and 2.0 continues to demonstrate day by day that it is anything but a passing fad.
Other voices have echoed this thought when discussing social networking services explicitly. Forrester Research’s Vice President and Principal Analyst Charlene Li famously described social networking as being “like air.” Jenny Levine at the Shifted Librarian wrote in March of this year that
Hopefully it is becoming clearer that we [as LIS professionals] need to pay attention to virtual worlds because they are going to be a part of our collective, professional future. It’s up to each of us individually how much of a role it will play in our personal lives, just as we make decisions about books, television, the internet, parties, movies, parties, etc. are, but between Sony’s plans, the BBC’s forthcoming online children’s world, Second Life, There, and other virtual spaces, we’re seeing further illustrations of why librarians need to understand how cultures and interactions work in these spaces for our professional lives.
I believe the same to be true about blogs and networking services like FaceBook as well. These applications are affecting and will continue to affect the world of information in new and significant ways, thereby impacting the work we do as library and information professionals. And given that Internet-based information is borderless (with the exception of certain countries where a national government seeks to censor Internet information, a topic I will discuss in a later post), the different forms of social networking services are taking root all over the world.
Writing from Bangladesh, Mahfuz Sadique produced one of the best introductions to the global blogosphere I’ve ever read. He touches on the most significant themes I have seen discussed in foreign blogs, particularly blogs in the developing world. These themes include Internet access, instruction in using a blog platform to generate content, the size of the blogosphere in a given nation compared to the total population of the country, the socioeconomic backgrounds of blog readers in the country, issues of local language and blogging in local languages and non-latin scripts, and localized content such as citizen journalism (and how this content affects traditional journalistic reporting and potentially invokes censorship on the part of a national government. Sadique paints a picture in which many challenges remain in terms of growing the Bangla blogosphere and using it to produce useful content that can inform Bangladeshis and foreigners alike about life in Bangladesh. But he also notes the blogosphere growth that has occurred in Bangladesh, and such successes as opening up the blogosphere to the Bangla language:
Only around one per cent of people in Bangladesh currently have access to the internet. As a result, before the blogging boom, the national presence on the web… had been sparse… However, since blogging has become a popular pastime, the entire Bangladeshi presence on the landscape of the internet has changed. In the beginning Bangladeshi bloggers had to write in English because of technological barriers. But with the incorporation of Unicode (which is an acronym for a standardization of symbols, Universal Code, which recognizes Bengali characters) into various blog-hosting sites, the number of Bangla blogs has risen exponentially. This was best demonstrated by a blog hosted by a Danish-Bangladeshi site, Somewhere in, when it launched an exclusively Bengali blog platform site — ‘Badh Bhangar Aawaj’. According to Hasin Hayder of Somewhere in, ‘there are around 5000 bloggers continuously writing’. The figures are staggering; since it started, a little over a year back, more than 31,000 articles and 350,000 comments have been posted. The ability to blog in Bangla seems to have liberated Bangladesh from its initial online inhibitions.
Because of thoughts like this in the blogosphere, and the fact that the blogosphere continues to foster active participation and discussion around the world, I believe it is important for us in the library profession to have an understanding of how people use these services, and what types of information they use the services to communicate. Certainly there exist considerable challenges for bloggers and social networkers in many countries, such as those Mahfuz Sadique touched upon. But given that people around the world are using social networking services to connect, network, communicate, and share information on global issues and events, library and information professionals have an interest in examining this trend towards internationalization, and considering where and how they may play a role in this international conversation. Given that social networking services will continue to become a prominent means by which people around the world exchanging information, library and information professionals have an interest in monitoring and understanding this global trend.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
What do we mean by social networking?
I am not asking for a comprehensive definition. I have yet to come across any definition that does anything more than offer an understanding of social networking in the broadest possible terms. On August 6 of this year for example, the Wikipedia defined social networking as a service that “focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.” I don’t disagree with any of that, but it doesn’t by itself offer me a greater understanding of what a social networking service is. The Wikipedia staff doesn’t find it adequate either, and have flagged the article as being in need of expansion and of additional material to support the ideas in the article.
I ask this question more to define some boundaries on what Amanda and I (your blog moderators) are proposing for discussion. Common understandings of social networking services hold that services like FaceBook and MySpace fall into the rubric of social networking, and I believe this is what the SIG-III officers had in mind when we came up with the idea of having this discussion.
I have since expanded the scope of this discussion to include the blogosphere as well. Like the networking services listed above, the blogosphere meets the criteria of the Wikipedia’s broad definition of social networking. (And yes, so do image sharing services such as Flickr, video sharing services such as YouTube, and virtual worlds such as Second Life. I have chosen to focus on blogs and FaceBook/MySpace-style services for discussion on the SIG-III blog, but I would be remiss if I failed to note other applications and services that have networking aspects as well). With this in mind, we welcome your ideas on our discussions of internationally focused blogs and networking services, but please do not feel limited by this focus. Please comment on any post you like, and if you would like to contribute an entirely new thought or post, please send it to me at sigiiiblog [at] gmail.com.
Beyond that, here are some more comprehensive definitions of social networking – all open to discussion, debate, and critique. In March of this yeah, Danah Boyd offered the following description of a workshop she put together with Nicole Ellison and Scott Golder at the 3rd Annual Communities and Technologies Conference. In their description they loosely considered social software to “include social network sites (e.g., Cyworld, MySpace, orkut, and Facebook), contemporary online dating services (e.g., Friendster, Spring Street Personals, Match.com), blogging services (e.g., LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger), tagging tools (e.g. del.icio.us, Digg) and media sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr).” Then in June, Danah offered a definition of social networking specifically:
To count as a social network site, the site MUST have 1) a public or friends-only profile system; 2) a publicly articulated list of “Friends” who are also on the system (not blogrolls). Friends must be visible on an individual’s profile and it must be possible to traverse the network graph through that list of Friends. If the site does not let you “comment” on Friends’ profiles, please indicate that. This is not necessary although it is a common component. I’m not interested in dating sites, community sites, or blogging tools that do not have public profile + friends that are displayed on profiles.
Socialmedia.biz further describes some of the primary characteristics of social networking services:
1. Communication in the form of conversation, not monologue. This implies that social media must facilitate two-way discussion, discourse, and debate with little or no moderation or censorship. …
2. Participants in social media are people, not organizations. Third-person voice is discouraged and the source of ideas and participation is clearly identified and associated with the individuals that contributed them. Anonymity is also discouraged but permissible in some very limited situations.
3. Honesty and transparency are core values. Spin and attempting to control, manipulate, or even spam the conversation are thoroughly discouraged. …
4. It’s all about pull, not push. … In social media, people are in control of their conversations, not the pushers.
5. Distribution instead of centralization. … Social media is highly distributed and made up of tens of millions of voices making it far more textured, rich, and heterogeneous than old media could ever be (or want to be). Encouraging conversations on the vast edges of our networks, rather than in the middle, is what this point is all about.
And concerning the blogosphere specifically, Paul, a blogger at a South African blog called Chilibean, echos the first and second of Socialmedia.biz’s points. He writes that “a blog is a conversation. Blogs are structured to facilitate interaction between the blogger and the blog’s readers and use simple tools like RSS feeds, comments and trackbacks to keep those conversations going. Blogging lends itself to informality because of the emphasis on the expression of an authentic voice as an essential element of a blog.”
So if you have any thoughts on the nature of social networking as I have presented it here, please leave a comment. Otherwise, I’ll be posting more about the international face of social networking later this evening or tomorrow.
Posted by Aaron Bowen
The SIG-III Blog 
