RemSpace

Perhaps the best description for China’s rise as an economic power nowadays would be “a looming threat”. True to the fact that China has more than a billion people within its vast expanse of so-called middle kingdom, is its ever-accelerating economy. Its insatiable thirst for oil and hunger to penetrate the global economy is shaking the foundations of our global society. China is redrawing the map of geopolitical power that was once conquered by America since the fall of communism.

As China embraces capitalism by signing into the world trade organization, albeit continuing with the legacies of its Maoist rule, China is no longer a sleeping giant. But China’s rise is at the detriment of the rest of the world. Its $2-trillion economy owes in part to its cheap labor, but to a certain extent that it breaches the intellectual property rights of legitimate companies. For some, China is considered a counterfeit country. Name it, and China has an alternative for it. And it comes at a very low price. No wonder all around the world, never be surprised when you see products made in China. And with its central bank undervaluing its yuan to a dollar (therefore making local goods relatively cheap), all China-made products can easily flood local markets even in third world nations, at the expense of losing the market for local goods like the Philippines.

China also plays a very pivotal role in the international political field, especially with its thirst for oil to fuel its industries. It knows where to position itself into for its own interest, that’s why it befriends Iran and Sudan, America’s “foes”, for oil. It also possesses the world’s largest military.

China can be considered a superpower wannabe, but it is not alone. Japan’s powers may have waned, but it still proves to be a potent nation; Europe positions itself as another force to reckon with, the likes of Britain, France and Germany all have their voice in the international political field. And there is Russia, as hungry as china (though a smaller economy), and a looming threat as well to America’s dominance. Plus there are other not-so-economically-strong nations that gained capacity to produce nuclear power (Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan, etc).

So China, welcome to the club. But don’t expect to overthrow the United States for good. China’s language, mandarin, remains a complex language to understand. And its political will is weaker compared to America’s. It may trounce the latter in economic terms, but in all aspects, America remains supreme. But then, China is a welcome addition to the elite club of “first world” nations siphoning off wealth and resources from the more numerous but less powerful third world countries. Oh well, and its population… strength in numbers indeed. So strong in fact that there was a running joke about China’s dominance over the bigger Russia, as to why the iron curtain can’t invade or impose its power on the bamboo curtain. (Make the Chinese file in line, surround Russia, and urinate on it. Let’s see if Russia won’t sink…)

(In her sixth Sona, President Arroyo played hostess to her cohorts in the government rather than report to the nation)

It is expected nonetheless that the Congress, whenever a president would deliver the State of the Nation Address, would obviously provide a grandiose spectacle of the rich-poor divide, and the widening gap between warring factions in the government. But as always the highlight of the show is none other than the president’s speech to the people about what has transpired in the whole 365 days of his/her authority, and the goals needed to be attained for the benefit of us all.

Yesterday, President Arroyo delivered what is supposed to be the State of the Nation under her regime. Donning a red gown, and employing Powerpoint presentation to visually aid her hour-long message, the President instead hosted what is perhaps the most “showbiz” of all her speeches – a sure box-office blockbuster.

Showbiz, because she thanked all her “supporters” and those who believe that she is the “rightful, duly-elected” leader of this forsaken land – for me, what a waste of time! (as she said to her “adversaries” who she dared to bring it on)

She promised to talk on economic matters and said that no political issues would be tackled during her speech. And yet with her uncanny cleverness to weave her stance on charter change throughout her address, stressing on her willingness to initiate electoral reforms, and bring back the authority to the people and the provinces from “Imperial Manila” (federalism), Arroyo managed to get away with her words and earned herself the applause of her “supporters” – evidence of the political chicanery she has mastered in her six years of stay in Malacañang.

But those are just icing on the cake. The meat of the matter is her set of goals that include above all reorganizing the economic structure of the country by dividing us into five mega-regions with specific industrial concentrations. To further achieve these colossal goals, she promised (as always) a lot of infrastructure improvements in the transport and logistics of goods. Again, failing herself not to include politics in her speech, she promised to cut down red tape and that would begin with (what else) the Constitution. Which means that Arroyo is opening up the country to wholesale foreign investments, letting them scour our resources and leaving us with only a handful or even empty-handed.

And all those colossal projects translate to astronomical budget allocation. Which means that either the government imposes more taxes or borrow from international lenders once more to augment the needed finances for those. And these projects are too precious in the eyes of the crocodiles in the government. Come corruption, and these projects would suffer the same fate of our other white elephants like the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant and the Naia Terminal 3, and the overpriced Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard.

While they believe these projects would propel our economy back in the black, the common tao all hardly believe these verisimilitude. None of those projects can immediately address their need for food, shelter, education, job, health care, and other basic services that the government is mandated to provide.

She thanked the people for the “sacrifices” they have made for the sake of salvaging our economy. And that means she is thanking all Filipinos for staying poor and relying on the droplets worth of help that the government can only provide the people while they advance their political ambitions with the people’s money.

She is against political killings, and she pledged to introduce reforms in the justice system and urged the people to cooperate with the government to stop these extra-judicial killings. Oh, tell that to the Marines (unless the Marines are already against the chain of command). But for muting the free exercise of assembly and expression, Arroyo’s blinded initiatives to suppress her opposition all creates a harsher climate of repression and violence that she unconsciously accorded with the military and the police. For saying those, Arroyo has failed to hold herself and her militia responsible for the killings that have taken the toll of student activists, journalists, freedom fighters, militant groups and others fighting for the same cause. And did I mention that Arroyo also thanked Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan of the 7th Infantry Batallion, who is infamously known as “The Butcher” for masterminding the killings of political leaders and activists in the provinces?

None from the president’s speech reflected so much the real score of our nation. Reading between the lines, all the president laid down is an ambitious wish list that neither we nor they have any idea where to muster the necessary budget for those, given the fact that the proposed 2006 national budget failed to see fruition. The president’s speech is, above all, another rhetorical attempt to fool the people that we are indeed economically strengthening despite all odds. And the Sona provided the venue for her to host the biggest not-so-obvious display of political survival since the Marcos regime. And the applause all brandished a gesture of support for an administration that has made it a point to heed to the caprice of its hungry patrons.

The people no longer expected so much from her statements other than “glorifying” herself and her regime. That the country according to her deserves a new form of government while eluding from the corruption and election rigging charges slung against her is in simple terms a fantasy. And to urge the deeply-divided country to unite for prosperity might overwhelm her. Unless the government can easily provide for the needs of the people, desiring for unity is useless.

It is obvious how the president underestimated the consequences entailed in trying to accomplish those goals. For the president’s dreams remain a great leap of faith. True, prosperity won’t happen overnight. But so is unity.

The following article was published in the “Among the Audience: A Survey on New Media” special segment of the internationally-renowned newsmagazine The Economist on 22 April 2006. I hope you may get interested to read this: (This article was typewritten verbatim, applying the British writing style)

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It’s the Links, Stupid

(Blogging is just another word for having conversations)

“If you want to have a fun debate, ask bloggers what a blog is,” says Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo! Only a few years ago, the debate would have been short. So few people blogged that most of them knew one another and could probably agree on a definition. Today a new blog is created every second of every day, according to Technorati, a search engine for blogs, and the “blogosphere” is doubling in size every five months. From teenagers to corporate executives, the new bloggers all have reasons of their own for engaging in this new pursuit.

What, then, is a blog? A “personal online journal” is the definition that most newspapers, including The Economist, offer when they need to be brief. That analogy is not wrong, but nor is it entirely right (conventional journals usually come in chronological order, whereas blogs are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top). More importantly, this definition misses the main point about blogs. Traditionally, journals were private or even secret affairs, and were never linked to other journals. Peeking into the diary of one’s big sister typically led to a skirmish. Blogs, by contrast, are social by nature, whether they are open to the public or only to a small select group.

The word “blog” appears to date back to 1997, when one of the few practitioners at the time, Jorn Barger, called his site a “weblog”. In 1999, another user, Peter Merholz, playfully broke the word into “we blog”, and somehow the new term – blog – stuck as both a verb and a noun. Technically, it means a web page to which its owner regularly adds new entries, or “posts”, which tend to be (but need not be) ahort and often contains hyperlinks to other blogs or websites. Besides text and hypertext, posts can also contain pictures (“photoblogs”) and video (“vlogs”). Each post is stored on its own distinct archive page, the so-called “permalink”, where it can always be found. On average, Technorati tracks some 50,000 new posts an hour.

Among the other technical features of blogs, two highlight the quintessentially social nature of blogging. The first is a “blogroll”, along the side of the blog page, which is a list of links to other blogs that the author recommends (not to be confused with the hyperlinks inside the posts). In practice, the blogroll is an attempt by the author to place his blog in a specific genre or group, and a reciprocal effort by a posse of bloggers to raise each other’s visibility on the internet (because the number of incoming links pushes the blog higher in search-engine results). The other feature is “trackback” which notifies (“pings”) a blog about each new incoming link from the outside – a sort of gossip-meter, in short.

Blogging is also about style. Dave Winer, a software engineer who pioneered several blogging technologies, and who keeps what by his own estimate is the longest-running blog of all (dating back to 1997), has argued that the essence of blogginess is “the unedited voice of a single person”, preferrably an amateur. Blogs, in other words, usually have a raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality. This definition would exclude quite a few of the blogs that firms, public-relations people or newspapers set up nowadays. If an editor vets, softens, or otherwise messes about with the writing, Mr Winer would argue, it is no longer a blog.

This explains the initial appeal of blogging as an outlet for pure self-expression. As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, a well-known blog on American politics, put it when asked why he blogs: “It beats yelling at the television.” But venting an opinion is usually only the start. “At first, I saw it as about publishing; now I see it more as a revolutionary way to communicate,” says Mena Trott. The company she runs with her husband Ben, Six Apart, illustrates this with its three main products. Their flagship, Movable Type, with its obvious publishing connotations, is a popular software service for heavy-duty or celebrity bloggers, including Mr Reynolds. So is TypePad, a similar service with web-hosting thrown in. Blogs powered by these two products have an average of 600 readers, says Ms Trott, although a few are read by more people than are some newspapers.

But Six Apart’s third product, LiveJournal, is a very different kind of blogging tool. Some 60% of LiveJournal users are under 21 and female, says Ms Trott. Many of the posts are about who snogged whom last night and what happened next, why I’m sad, how adults don’t get it, and so forth. Other psots ask things like, “Anybody want to catch King Kong at 8:00?” and have the replies in the comment pane below within minutes. That is because many adolescents consider e-mail passe, and instead are using either instant messaging (IM) or blogging for their communications, says Ms Trott. Like blogging, e-mail was supposed to be “asynchronous”, meaning that the people taking part do not have to be online simultaneously. But today’s adolescents have never known e-mail without spam and see no point in long trails of “reply” and “cc” messages piling up in their in-boxes. As for synchronous communication, why adults would send e-mails back and forth instead of “IM-ing” is beyond them.

The Dunbar number

For these LiveJournal blogs, the average number of readers is seven, says Ms Trott. Such small audiences are common in participatory media. Indeed, they may conform to the biological norm, whereas mass-media audiences may have been an aberration. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Liverpool, has studied primates and discovered a surprisingly stable ratio between the relative size of the neocortex (thought to be responsible for the evolution of intelligence) and the size of groups formed by particular species. For humans, Mr Dunbar calculated, the upper limit is about 150. Many clans, tribes, fan clubs, start-ups, and other groupings remain well below this limit, as do most blog networks.

The LiveJournal groups of readers are typical of the new-media era in another way. The bloggers (ie, creators) are one another’s audience, so that distinctions between the two disappear. Creators and audiences congregate ad hoc in meandering conversations, a common space of shared iamgination and interests. MySpace.com, a social-networking and blogging service that last year was bought by News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, reflects this quality in its name.

Conversations have a life of their own. They tend to move in unexpected directions and fluctuate unpredictably in volume. It is these unplanned conversational surges that tend to bring the blogosphere to the attention of the older and wider (non-blogging) public and the mainstream media. Germany, for instance, has been a relatively late adopter of blogging – only 1% of blogs are in German, according to Technorati, compared with 41% in Japanese, 28% in English and 14% in Chinese.

But in January this year “the conversation” arrived in Germany with a vengeance. Jung von Matt, a German advertising firm, had come up with a campaign in the (old) media called “Du bist Deutschland” (“you are Germany”). The advertisements were intended “to fight grumpiness” about the country’s sluggish economy, said Jean-Remy von Matt, the firm’s Belgian boss.

But German bloggers found the idea kitschy, and subsequently dug up an obscure photograph from the Nazi convention in 1935 that showed Hitler’s face next to the awkwardly similar slogan “Denn Du bist Deutschland” (“because you are Germany”). In the ensuing online conversation, Mr von Matt’s campaign was ignominiously deflated. Outraged, he sent an internal e-mail to his colleagues in which he called blogs “the toilet walls of the internet” and wanted to know: “What on earth gives every computer-owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?” When bloggers got hold of this e-mail, they answered his question with such clarity that Mr von Matt quickly and publicly apologised and retreated.

Inadvertently, Mr von Matt had put his finger on something big: that, at least in democratic societies, everybody does have the right to hold opinions, and that the urge to connect and converse with others is so basic that it might as well be added to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “It’s about democratisation, where people can participate by writing back,” says Sabeer Bhatia, who in March launched a company called BlogEverywhere.com, that lets people attach blogs in any web page with a single click. “Just as everybody has an e-mail account today, everybody will have a blog in five years,” says Mr Bhatia, who helped to make e-mail ubiquitous by starting Hotmail, a web-based e-mail service now owned by Microsoft. This means, Mr Bhatia adds, that “journalism won’t be a sermon anymore, it will be a conversation.”