Go to his/her blog: E E E E E E E E.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
From CDT, this repost of a useful article from China Youth Daily, in English on china.org.cn. Article is titled, "My Kid is an Internet Addict", and it challenges the popular Chinese view that juvenile internet addiction is rampant in China, and that internet addiction is a particularly adolescent experience. It also calls for more room for teenage voices to describe their own virtual experiences. It would be a great study to spend time with Chinese teenagers and get their views on the subject. Excerpts:
"…reports are escalating prejudice against Internet use, which is in turn
driving anxious parents to cut their kids off from the Internet. These
biased reports are depicting juveniles as Internet victims, even
stigmatizing them as addicts."
"…adults and experts have monopolized the description of juvenile
Internet usage. They form a consistent pattern of assessment, but the
adolescent participation in their assessment falls short. The
monopolized description lacks introspection and turns a deaf ear to the
teenage voices."
"Many juveniles become addicted to the Internet to escape from the
pressures of real life. Yet when adults criticize this addiction,
experts often ignore the reason why they too become addicted."
"Teenagers get acquainted online. They form groups out of the control
of adults. This process has widened the gap between adults and
teenagers.
Meantime, cyberspace provides an equal, fair place for everyone to
communicate. Appearance, social statue and real wealth are not
important. Real life interactions could certainly drive teenagers to
this less pressured cyberspace."
Reporting from Shanghai.
This is Karl. Karl is an actor, model, MC and runs his own entertainment consulting business. He blogs about all this as well. For example:
"In my experience, and (I seem to say this often) especially in China, that schedules are often floating and you spend many hours waiting for the next shot.
In
the last movie I was filming, we had days as long as 16 hours, with
only 2-3 hours of actual shooting. Unfortunately that is typical for
the industry in China. Though, there is always something fun you can
occupy yourself with. Some people have games, some books, or even
sleep. Once you have memorized your script many times over, there is
still a lot of time you have to practice your basket weaving.
Though the danger of immersing yourself in a book or some other
activity is that when you are called up for your scene, you have to
quickly get back into character and remember the lines and the scene."
Blog: PlanetKarl
Reporting from Fuqing.
This is Ben. Ben is American. Ben taught English for a year and a half. Ben worked a month at a barber shop. Ben sometimes writes stuff for Pacific Ethnography and Orbus Investor. He blogs about some of this as well. For example:
"What I found the most discouraging from a humanistic perspective was
that with the possible exception of Jiang who gets creative pleasure
out of designing hairstyles, I can honestly say that nobody in the
barber shop likes their job. Even Mr. Zheng, if presented with the
right opportunity, would leave the industry if he could. There is an
overwhelming sense of lack of self-actualization, and many of my
coworkers view their job as pointless, literally."
Blog: Ben’s Blog… 小本的博客
Link credits:
1) Danielle Engelman at the Long Now Foundation.
2) EastSouthWestNorth & Ken Erickson from Pacific Ethnography.
An ad for Shanghai General Motors.
The site I got this said "we didn’t quite get this either," so I’ll give a stab at it.
The aesthetic style of the backdrop reminded me of something I saw in a China Esquire a while back, and is, I assume, some sort of abstractly cool & hip scene. As for the many men-in-tights, I can only assume the idea was to have the throng of men symbolize monolithic and grand power. I posit, because you still regularly see groups of soldiers singing trumpet-blaring anthems on TV there, that the image is not as silly as it seems to someone like me.
Is it an effective ad? I’d give them thumbs up for associating the brand with sheer macho-power (it is a car ad after all), but also a thumbs down for using such tactless and old-fashioned imagery.
Growing pains in the advertising world of China.
Via Provokat.
Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed "Mobile China China Mobile").
Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled "Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars" (download):
The research result is that, of the profile pictures analyzed, only 4 of 200 Chinese students abroad used their own picture as their icon versus 58 of 200 Americans.
Yet the sample contains some bias: the data for the Chinese users came from a BBS called 未名空间 while the American sample was UC Berkeley students’ blogs on Livejournal. Additionally, UC Berkeley students are far from homogeneous: I would say that the Chinese-Americans occupy a middle space between the two and therefore dilute the results.
Regardless, the original statistic, 4 of 200, stands. Yet, it’s the remaining 196 that is interesting. For example: why do people like to use baby pictures, and is that actually them as a baby?
Here’s a Flickr stream of more Giant Ant research artifacts, or you can read my 15-minute analysis on MySpace CN vs US profile pictures (blogged back in April).
CICData has a great post on the English blog of its founder, Sam Flemming, which translates some of the nicknames and abbreviations that writers on car BBS use. I’m guessing many of these are not limited to car enthusiasts — FB, or "fubai" (lit., corruption) is probably used offline as well, to refer to conspicuous personal consumption. CIC’s Chinese blog has a number of other posts looking at general net language. Great stuff!
CAR TERMS
Another key aspect of automotive net language is around the
automobiles themselves. Netizens have developed a system of nicknames
and acronyms to refer to their beloved cars.
Camry: 凯凯(Kai Kai), KK, KMR, CMR
Focus: 小福(little Fu), 福福 (Fu Fu), FKS, FCS
Polo: 菠萝 (pineapple)
Peugeot 307: 小狮 (little lion)
Peugeot 206: 小六 (little six)
Audi 4: 小4(little 4)
Nissan Tiida: 达达 (Da Da), DD, QD
Opel: 宝宝(bao bao/baby), 小欧(little ou)
People’s Daily Online, English version, announced a new feature last week:
From today, China Forum will publish a question or a topic on the forum
once a week, you are warmly welcomed to give your answers or opinions
or comments. And best messages will be edited and published on our
homepage attached with your registered name. For those non-registered
visitors, your IP will be attached.
Although it doesn’t say WHO gets to choose the question or topic, the first two topics were chosen from registered readers, and were edited and republished under the heading, "Readers Say." The first is on the value of money in daily life; the second expresses quite clearly changing perceptions of the relationship between college education and employment, and is titled, "Graduation Equal to Unemployment?"
I went into university in 1993, from then
I knew I would have a life that I have never wanted, but this is life.
I hadn’t any power to change it. I would study knowledge that I am not
interested in, and went the job I do not favor. But it is the life I
couldn’t change it so I studied hard, worked hard. It is the life and
destiny.
It would be great it they continue to choose the best topics and responses each week; it would be even better if they would offer the same service for Chinese-language forums. Wouldn’t you love a weekly translation of excerpts from the single most popular BBS post on any People’s Daily forum?
Image excerpts spliced from scans of 王曲, the official journal of Hu’s #7 military school outside Xian. These particular panels are about military training during the War of Resistance Against Japan.
I’ve translated it as best as I could given the image quality.
Taken from Frog in the Well, the China History Group Blog — where you can read their full analysis of the comic.
Recent Comments