I don't know much about the states anymore. The speed with which things change (and the fact that I never had a smart phone until very recently) means that in the two years since I last visited the USofA so much has changed that anything I know about US culture is already horribly out of date. Maybe someday I'll spend enough time stateside to catch up on things like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and whatever other 'apps' the kids are using these days, but keeping up with the trends in China while also writing a dissertation is plenty taxing in the meantime. China, of course, has its own equivalents of many of these. Weibo (微博, literally 'micro-blogging'), for instance, is like China's Twitter. The extremely popular "WeChat" (Ch: weixin 微信) seems to be a kind of all-purpose application, used for socializing directly with people in your friend network via either vocal or written media, leaving status updates for everyone to see, and even make video phone calls to other users, while weishi 微视 lets you make and share videos of 8 seconds or less (like a video instagram?).
One of the most interesting apps (in my mind at least) is chang ba, an app in which people sing into their phones, and then put it up for anybody (and I mean literally everyone in China just about) to listen. Earlier incarnations of the app only let you sing, karaoke-style, into your phone as it records. You can use the internal microphone, or anything with a 1/8" jack that plugs directly into your phone. More recently the makers have added video capability, such that people can make and share videos of them singing favorite Chinese and Western songs. Some of the people posting videos are incredibly talented. There's a group of kids from Sichuan who rap in Sichuanese (which is awesome), and make sing a variety of popular songs in dialect (as opposed to putonghua, which is far more common these days). The songs on chang ba are karaoke version. You have the background sound, but no singer, leaving you to take care of the singing, unmolested by that pesky original track. The advantage over traditional karaoke, however, is that you have the leisure of singing from the comfort of your own home. Singing a song numerous times until you feel like you've done a good enough job to share it with the world. I suppose this is not entirely unlike the phenomenon of putting such videos on youtube (the very same phenomenon that gave us such cultural luminaries as Justin Bieber). Some people, have begun using these for purposes other than singing. With background music, they might show someone how to put on (obscene amounts of) make-up in under 4 minutes. Or they might use them to make quick commercials, hoping that some viewer might randomly stumble upon their video and choose to buy their products. Still others, lonely souls indeed, pour their hearts out for the chang ba community to hear: young lesbian couples, girls dealing with heartbreak, etc. In these cases, it seems that people are drawn to this technology for a range of reasons: the sheer enjoyment of singing a song and making a music video, the sense of community derived through the wireless world of chang ba, a simultaneous feeling of anonymity (among the masses of users) and notoriety, the potential for fame, and the chance to turn a profit, to name but a few. I am supposed to be becoming something of an "expert" on this country (and particularly its Western regions), but sometimes i still feel flummoxed by the technological things going on here. Whether it's the emergence of new terms like tuhao 土豪 (which is sort of like 'nouveau riche,' but refers specifically to the sort of opulent and garish consumption of certain members of this group), or of new technologies that I'm supposed to be able to fit into my life. Personally, I don't like being accessible so often. It's very distracting. At the same time, there does seem to be one general urge tying all of these together: the desire to avoid anonymity to be anonymous or alone in China's megalopolises, and the 1.34 (or so) billion people living in the country.
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About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |