Andrew Lam's Blog - Posts Tagged "technology"
Vietnam and the Cell Phone Revolution
Vietnam, a police state where freedom of expression can come with a multi-year prison term, is awash in cell phones. Whether for talking, texting or taking photos, Vietnamese are buying up mobile devices at a rate exceeding the country’s own population.
A sign of the communist nation’s rising affluence, it is also undermining the state’s monopoly on information.
For years Vietnam has been a major producer and exporter of cheap cell phones. In 2010, itreportedly exported $2.3 billion worth of phone sets. Two years later, that figure jumped dramatically to $8.63 billion, up 122 percent from a year earlier.
Now, with phones available for as little as $20, ordinary consumers are buying up sets that would otherwise have been bound for foreign shores.
According to the latest statistics reported by TechniAsia, there were 145 cell phones for every 100 Vietnamese in 2012. For a country “whose population is just over 90 million,” it adds, “that amounts to more than 130 million mobile phones.”
And buyers aren’t limited to the middle class. Everyone has them, from elementary school kids to impoverished pedicab drivers. Teenagers have them, too, of course. On motorcycles, Vietnamese chat on their mobiles while weaving dangerously through traffic with one hand on the handlebar. They don't even turn them off in movie theaters. In cafes, at restaurants, they have a rude habit of talking to you while looking down to check and send messages.
For the government in Hanoi, which maintains a vigorous Internet firewall similar to the one in Beijing, it’s a troubling trend.
Because beyond the daily chitchat, Vietnamese are increasingly using their hand held devices to document and share scenes that authorities would prefer remain out of the public spotlight. Police wrongdoings are routinely reported, tweeted and shared online. Protests against police corruption and government land confiscation, and even against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, are now organized by cell phones.
A case in point: The world-renowned venerable monk Thich Nhat Hanh, long exiled in France, was given permission to visit his homeland in 2005 and he decided to build a monastery. Called Bat Nha in Lam Dong province, the monastery grew quickly in fame and many young people flocked to it.
But the enthusiasm threatened local authorities, who feared a Vietnamese Falun Gong-style movement. The result was a government-sponsored mob attack in October 2009 that resulted in the injuries and arrests of monks and nuns, and eventually the demolition of the newly built temple and dormitories.
While mainstream news in Vietnam carried little information regarding the event, it was the cell phone that carried the day: Witnesses texted information and sent images of arrests and the demolition of the monastery. The story spread around the world.
Vietnam came out of the Cold War and ran fast and furious into the information age. Once upon a time, owning a fax machine could get you arrested. When it came to information manipulation and control, the communist regime once ran an impeccable machine.
But no more. Internet access went from 200,000 users in 2000 to 30,802,000 users in 2012. Facebook entered the country last year and has quickly captured 10.5 million users, or nearly 12 percent of the population.
"The growth of the Internet is endangering the government," Le Quoc Quan, an internationally renowned lawyer and democracy activist whose popular blog pushes for a multiparty system and more human rights, told the Associated Press last year. "People can actually read news now. There is a thirst for democracy in our country." Vietnam convicted 14 bloggers and democracy activists last week for plotting to overthrow the governing, and some received 13 years jail term. Quan was arrested not long after his interview.
More and more people are blogging their frustrations and anger. But whether or not the general population does in fact thirst for democracy and want revolution is not clear. It’s a citizenry that has no organized opposition, no charismatic leadership that could challenge the status quo, and no serious conversation on a new national direction.
And despite the urgings of leading activists like Dr. Nguyen Dang Que, who before his arrest in 2011, posted online a call for young people to use their cell phones to make a "clean sweep of Communist dictatorship," it’s far from certain that ordinary cell phone users perceive the new technology as a potential tool for revolution ala Arab Spring.
What is clear, however, is that the wind of change is blowing: There's a growing collective discontent against injustices and corruption, and the new communication architecture has loosened the tongue of the general population. And the more informed, the more restless they become. Whether they know it or not, by sharing and swapping information on a national scale the Vietnamese are making revolution happen, one text at a time.
New America Media editor Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His next book, Birds of Paradise Lost is due out in 2013. He has lectured widely at many universities.
Follow Andrew on Twitter
A sign of the communist nation’s rising affluence, it is also undermining the state’s monopoly on information.
For years Vietnam has been a major producer and exporter of cheap cell phones. In 2010, itreportedly exported $2.3 billion worth of phone sets. Two years later, that figure jumped dramatically to $8.63 billion, up 122 percent from a year earlier.
Now, with phones available for as little as $20, ordinary consumers are buying up sets that would otherwise have been bound for foreign shores.
According to the latest statistics reported by TechniAsia, there were 145 cell phones for every 100 Vietnamese in 2012. For a country “whose population is just over 90 million,” it adds, “that amounts to more than 130 million mobile phones.”
And buyers aren’t limited to the middle class. Everyone has them, from elementary school kids to impoverished pedicab drivers. Teenagers have them, too, of course. On motorcycles, Vietnamese chat on their mobiles while weaving dangerously through traffic with one hand on the handlebar. They don't even turn them off in movie theaters. In cafes, at restaurants, they have a rude habit of talking to you while looking down to check and send messages.
For the government in Hanoi, which maintains a vigorous Internet firewall similar to the one in Beijing, it’s a troubling trend.
Because beyond the daily chitchat, Vietnamese are increasingly using their hand held devices to document and share scenes that authorities would prefer remain out of the public spotlight. Police wrongdoings are routinely reported, tweeted and shared online. Protests against police corruption and government land confiscation, and even against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, are now organized by cell phones.
A case in point: The world-renowned venerable monk Thich Nhat Hanh, long exiled in France, was given permission to visit his homeland in 2005 and he decided to build a monastery. Called Bat Nha in Lam Dong province, the monastery grew quickly in fame and many young people flocked to it.
But the enthusiasm threatened local authorities, who feared a Vietnamese Falun Gong-style movement. The result was a government-sponsored mob attack in October 2009 that resulted in the injuries and arrests of monks and nuns, and eventually the demolition of the newly built temple and dormitories.
While mainstream news in Vietnam carried little information regarding the event, it was the cell phone that carried the day: Witnesses texted information and sent images of arrests and the demolition of the monastery. The story spread around the world.
Vietnam came out of the Cold War and ran fast and furious into the information age. Once upon a time, owning a fax machine could get you arrested. When it came to information manipulation and control, the communist regime once ran an impeccable machine.
But no more. Internet access went from 200,000 users in 2000 to 30,802,000 users in 2012. Facebook entered the country last year and has quickly captured 10.5 million users, or nearly 12 percent of the population.
"The growth of the Internet is endangering the government," Le Quoc Quan, an internationally renowned lawyer and democracy activist whose popular blog pushes for a multiparty system and more human rights, told the Associated Press last year. "People can actually read news now. There is a thirst for democracy in our country." Vietnam convicted 14 bloggers and democracy activists last week for plotting to overthrow the governing, and some received 13 years jail term. Quan was arrested not long after his interview.
More and more people are blogging their frustrations and anger. But whether or not the general population does in fact thirst for democracy and want revolution is not clear. It’s a citizenry that has no organized opposition, no charismatic leadership that could challenge the status quo, and no serious conversation on a new national direction.
And despite the urgings of leading activists like Dr. Nguyen Dang Que, who before his arrest in 2011, posted online a call for young people to use their cell phones to make a "clean sweep of Communist dictatorship," it’s far from certain that ordinary cell phone users perceive the new technology as a potential tool for revolution ala Arab Spring.
What is clear, however, is that the wind of change is blowing: There's a growing collective discontent against injustices and corruption, and the new communication architecture has loosened the tongue of the general population. And the more informed, the more restless they become. Whether they know it or not, by sharing and swapping information on a national scale the Vietnamese are making revolution happen, one text at a time.
New America Media editor Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His next book, Birds of Paradise Lost is due out in 2013. He has lectured widely at many universities.
Follow Andrew on Twitter
Globalization: The World Changes America
A good friend, well traveled and educated, views the evils of globalization in very simple terms. It's a world in which everyone drinks coffee at Starbucks and eats at McDonald's and listens to Lady Gaga. That is to say, he sees globalization as synonymous to Americanization, and it depresses him.
But I tell him that he is mistaken. Though sometimes it's hard for many of us Americans to make that distinction, Americanization is only a small part of globalization. And if America is changing the world, the reverse is true also.
For me the most crucial aspect of globalization is the psychological transformation that's affecting people everywhere.
Let me offer my own biography as an example. I grew up a patriotic South Vietnamese living in Vietnam during the war. I remember singing the national anthem, swearing my allegiance to the flag. Wide-eyed child that I was, I believed every word.
But then the war ended and I, along with my family (and eventually a couple of million other Vietnamese), betrayed our agrarian ethos and land-bound sentiments by fleeing overseas to lead a very different life.
Almost four decades later, I make a living traveling between East Asia and the United States of America as an American journalist and writer. My relatives, once all concentrated in Saigon, are scattered across three continents, speaking three and four other languages, becoming citizens of several different countries.
Once sedentary and communal and bound by a singular sense of geography, we are now bona fide cosmopolitans who, when we get online or meet in person, still marvel at the difference between our past and our highly mobile if intricately complex present.
Yesterday my inheritance was simple -- the sacred rice fields and rivers that defined who I was. Today, Paris and Hanoi and New York are no longer fantasies but my larger community, places to which I feel a strong sense of connection due to familial relationships and friendships and personal ambitions.
Once great, the distances are no longer daunting but simply a matter of rescheduling.
I am hardly alone. There's a transnational revolution taking place, one right beneath our very noses. The Chinese businessman in Silicon Valley is constantly in touch with his Shanghai mother on a cell phone while his high-tech workers build microchips and pave the information superhighway for the rest of the world.
The Mexican migrant worker moves his family back and forth, one country to the other, treating the borders as if they were mere nuisances, and the blond teenager in Idaho is making friends with the Japanese girl in Osaka in a chatroom, their friendship easily forged as if time and space and cultural barriers have been breached by their lilting modems and the blinking satellites above.
The differences between my friend's view and my propositions are essentially the differences between a Disney animation and a Michael Ondaatje novel, say, "The English Patient."
Disney borrows world narratives ("Mulan" and "The Little Mermaid," for instance) for backdrops, but it rewrites all complicated stories toward a singular outcome: happily ever after.
It disembowels complexity, dismisses tragedy, forces differences into a blender and regurgitates formulaic platitudes. Thus, somewhere along the way, globalization is somehow equated to how America changes the world.
Ondaatje's novel, on the other hand, is a world rooted in numerous particularities. It's a world where people from dissimilar backgrounds encounter one another and are trying, by various degrees of success and failure, to connect and influence each other. And it's a world complicated by memories and ambitions and multiple connections and displacements. Its unique and rounded characters refute simplification.
America, besides, has changed radically in the last few decades. Demographic shifts are changing the racial make up of the country and by the year 2050 there will no longer a majority in the U.S., since whites will decline to below 50 percent of the population. And the fastest growing population? Asians. And American children are growing obsessed with Japanese anime, while the fastest growing religion in America is Islam.
So, while it's undeniable that the Americanization effects are still taking place, the Easternization of the West is also going on.
Koreatown in Los Angeles and Chinatown in San Francisco and the Cuban community in Miami are, after all, not places created for nostalgic purposes but vibrant and thriving ethnic enclaves.
They are changing the American landscape itself -- a direct challenge to the old ideas of melting pot and integration. Such is the complexity of the globalized world. Ours is a world in motion, in flux: the number of people who pass through those gates at San Francisco airport each year exceeds the entire population of California.
At last count, there were 112 languages spoken in the Bay Area, and 80 in the 30-square-mile city of Richmond, population 100,000.
On warm summer afternoon in San Francisco where I live, turns into the modern tower of Babel. The languages of the world -- Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Vietnamese, and many more I do not recognize -- waft in through my open windows, accompanied by the cable cars' merry cling-clanging bells.
For the first time in human history, all of the world's traditions and ideas are available at close proximity, and with the information of the world compressed and compiled and available at the click of a mouse, and people of the world assembled often in one metropolitan area.
East and West -- the twain has met, with the blessing of shared fascination. Tu Wei Ming, the Confucian scholar at Harvard, calls our new millennium "a second axial age." "It is a kind of era where various traditions exist side by side for the first time for the picking," he says. Traditions not only exist in our global village, they coexist in such a way "that a Christian project would have to be understood and perceived in a comparative religious context," he notes.
So Starbucks and McDonald's golden arches may be proliferating in every major metropolis across the world, but so are Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
Many other original cultures and languages and traditions continue to thrive despite the powers of Hollywood. Think Korean movies, Balinese dancers, kung fu, acupuncture, and a myriad of cultural practices -- these will not simply wash away because CNN and MTV are accessible now to the peasant in his mud hut.
Andrew Lam is editor at New America Media and the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees on America's West Coast, which won the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
But I tell him that he is mistaken. Though sometimes it's hard for many of us Americans to make that distinction, Americanization is only a small part of globalization. And if America is changing the world, the reverse is true also.
For me the most crucial aspect of globalization is the psychological transformation that's affecting people everywhere.
Let me offer my own biography as an example. I grew up a patriotic South Vietnamese living in Vietnam during the war. I remember singing the national anthem, swearing my allegiance to the flag. Wide-eyed child that I was, I believed every word.
But then the war ended and I, along with my family (and eventually a couple of million other Vietnamese), betrayed our agrarian ethos and land-bound sentiments by fleeing overseas to lead a very different life.
Almost four decades later, I make a living traveling between East Asia and the United States of America as an American journalist and writer. My relatives, once all concentrated in Saigon, are scattered across three continents, speaking three and four other languages, becoming citizens of several different countries.
Once sedentary and communal and bound by a singular sense of geography, we are now bona fide cosmopolitans who, when we get online or meet in person, still marvel at the difference between our past and our highly mobile if intricately complex present.
Yesterday my inheritance was simple -- the sacred rice fields and rivers that defined who I was. Today, Paris and Hanoi and New York are no longer fantasies but my larger community, places to which I feel a strong sense of connection due to familial relationships and friendships and personal ambitions.
Once great, the distances are no longer daunting but simply a matter of rescheduling.
I am hardly alone. There's a transnational revolution taking place, one right beneath our very noses. The Chinese businessman in Silicon Valley is constantly in touch with his Shanghai mother on a cell phone while his high-tech workers build microchips and pave the information superhighway for the rest of the world.
The Mexican migrant worker moves his family back and forth, one country to the other, treating the borders as if they were mere nuisances, and the blond teenager in Idaho is making friends with the Japanese girl in Osaka in a chatroom, their friendship easily forged as if time and space and cultural barriers have been breached by their lilting modems and the blinking satellites above.
The differences between my friend's view and my propositions are essentially the differences between a Disney animation and a Michael Ondaatje novel, say, "The English Patient."
Disney borrows world narratives ("Mulan" and "The Little Mermaid," for instance) for backdrops, but it rewrites all complicated stories toward a singular outcome: happily ever after.
It disembowels complexity, dismisses tragedy, forces differences into a blender and regurgitates formulaic platitudes. Thus, somewhere along the way, globalization is somehow equated to how America changes the world.
Ondaatje's novel, on the other hand, is a world rooted in numerous particularities. It's a world where people from dissimilar backgrounds encounter one another and are trying, by various degrees of success and failure, to connect and influence each other. And it's a world complicated by memories and ambitions and multiple connections and displacements. Its unique and rounded characters refute simplification.
America, besides, has changed radically in the last few decades. Demographic shifts are changing the racial make up of the country and by the year 2050 there will no longer a majority in the U.S., since whites will decline to below 50 percent of the population. And the fastest growing population? Asians. And American children are growing obsessed with Japanese anime, while the fastest growing religion in America is Islam.
So, while it's undeniable that the Americanization effects are still taking place, the Easternization of the West is also going on.
Koreatown in Los Angeles and Chinatown in San Francisco and the Cuban community in Miami are, after all, not places created for nostalgic purposes but vibrant and thriving ethnic enclaves.
They are changing the American landscape itself -- a direct challenge to the old ideas of melting pot and integration. Such is the complexity of the globalized world. Ours is a world in motion, in flux: the number of people who pass through those gates at San Francisco airport each year exceeds the entire population of California.
At last count, there were 112 languages spoken in the Bay Area, and 80 in the 30-square-mile city of Richmond, population 100,000.
On warm summer afternoon in San Francisco where I live, turns into the modern tower of Babel. The languages of the world -- Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Vietnamese, and many more I do not recognize -- waft in through my open windows, accompanied by the cable cars' merry cling-clanging bells.
For the first time in human history, all of the world's traditions and ideas are available at close proximity, and with the information of the world compressed and compiled and available at the click of a mouse, and people of the world assembled often in one metropolitan area.
East and West -- the twain has met, with the blessing of shared fascination. Tu Wei Ming, the Confucian scholar at Harvard, calls our new millennium "a second axial age." "It is a kind of era where various traditions exist side by side for the first time for the picking," he says. Traditions not only exist in our global village, they coexist in such a way "that a Christian project would have to be understood and perceived in a comparative religious context," he notes.
So Starbucks and McDonald's golden arches may be proliferating in every major metropolis across the world, but so are Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
Many other original cultures and languages and traditions continue to thrive despite the powers of Hollywood. Think Korean movies, Balinese dancers, kung fu, acupuncture, and a myriad of cultural practices -- these will not simply wash away because CNN and MTV are accessible now to the peasant in his mud hut.
Andrew Lam is editor at New America Media and the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees on America's West Coast, which won the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
