Sometimes it’s like the lifting of something. A burden, or a veil. You see clearer then, things suddenly begin to talk, or even swing. It happens, not of your doing, like a dance. Sometimes it’s the opposite, you are drawn into something, but feel paralyzed, unable to make the right move. You get bigger, clumsier, struggling hard to keep out, take a breath, keep your balance. Sometimes it’s none of these, more like a careful response to something, you are clear-minded and rational. You weigh your risks, place your bets, try to stay true. You fend off the temptations and open your heart.
In Praise of another Virtue
After talking about courage as the worthiest of virtues it is time to praise another one of highest, probably equal rank: the ability to enter other peoples minds and hearts, to see the world with their eyes, to suffer their pains, to cherish their joys. This is a capacity essential to what people these days call “emotional intelligence”, and thus to all social behaviour and nearly everything that is good and fun.
This time I am going to let somebody else do the argument, someone far more eloquent, far more knowledgeable. Read the revered novelist, comedian, actor, director, blogger, geek Stephen Fry on the topic of Imagination.
Chilling at Bookworm
People are wearing their coats and scarfs today in the big glass house that is the main room of Beijing’s legendary Bookworm café. Outside, the afternoon sky is brilliant, but temperatures have suddenly dropped well below zero. A strong and biting wind penetrates the glass walls and lets them groan. No way the heating can make it against this assault of northern asian frost. It’s a weather outside that could kill an ill-protected person within few hours.
Still in the Dark Ages?
If you want to learn about online media in a certain market, one of the first steps is to get the correct numbers. Starting from the general demographics, going on with overall usage patterns and more detailed data about specific market segments, down to the hardcore access data of single websites.
“When scarcity is the norm, complexity seems valuable.”
There is a question coming up from time to time when I introduce my research project to chinese friends and students or western expats living in China, especially when I talk about my interest in the portal websites: Why is it that chinese media websites, especially the portals, look so completely different from western ones? Chinese pages usually are packed to the brim with hundreds of headlines and links, whereas western news sites, even the portals, consistently present much less content, usually with shorter pages and a much spacier layout.
An ad hoc count at the Sohu homepage, done in the evening hours of December 1, found, under a navigation leading to 67 different channels, a total number of nearly 1000 links (forgive me for being not utterly scientific here), most of them headlines, some of them links leading to channels or subchannels. For comparison, Germany’s biggest portal T-Online offers 24 channels, and a number of around 200 links, 50 of which belong to a special subnavigation at the page footer.
On Loving McDonald’s (Aren’t We All?)
In times of crisis it’s ideas that count. That much has just been forcefully argued by Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books. You might think, well, that’s kind of trivial, isn’t it? Indeed, but there are still human resources in the upper echelons of management especially in the media industry that haven’t understood the message. They respond to the obvious misconception of the current pipe systems by applying even more hydraulics.
Renewed, Transfigured, In Another Pattern
Trying to understand Zuola’s old and new roles as citizen reporter or network engineer, we should consult another important contributor to CNBloggerCon, the Hongkong-based Sino-American Roland Soong. Unfortunately, Soong had to cancel his trip to the conference for private reasons, so he published his announced talk on his blog, the legendary EastSouthWestNorth.
Soong is one of the most important ‘bridge bloggers’, crossing the all-important language boundary between the Chinese Internet community and western readers with carefully selected translations of chinese language blog and forum entries. In his talk he reflects on his work and what has changed over the last five years. There are too many valuable and fascinating insights in Soong’s talk to summarize it fairly. I can only recommend to read it thoroughly. Instead I want to focus on one aspect I find particularly intriguing.
Talking with Zuola
Blogger Zhou Shuguang (周曙光) a.k.a. Zuola or Zola, who some days ago was barred from going to Germany by the chinese authorities, has also been one of the more conspicuous participants at this year’s chinese blogger conference CNBloggerCon, two weeks ago in Guangzhou. In front of the entrance to the conference venue, Zuola sold t-shirts showing his picture, most of the time you could see him networking eagerly, distributing his name cards, advertising his talk.
People knowing his reputation as one of China’s most famous citizen journalists could easily see that there was a subtle re-branding going on. Zuola.com (his Skype handle) is still promoting himself as an advocate of those common people who are neglected by the mainstream media. But he doesn’t want to be seen any more as ‘blogger on demand’, who can be called to help and publish the suppressed truth. He is now a “Network Engineer”, says his namecard, and many participants misunderstood the announcement of his talk, thinking he would talk about technical topics like GFW evasion. In fact Zuola was giving a lecture on how to become a citizen journalist. His newly declared aim is the empowerment of the chinese people to self-publish their concerns.
Fever
God, how many years since I last went out for noise! D-22 Club south of Qinghua campus, several acts. Lots of girls on stage, cute and loud. Discernible influences, like B-52s. Then another one, boys this time, don’t know the name. Probably LAVA|OX|SEA. Nothing as impressive as an ingenious, well-coordinated three-piece band. Following Radiohead, this one. Tinnitus. Joy.
Yay Me!
Sometimes, unexpectedly, there comes a solution and a plan.