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Is everything OK?
I'm very excited to be here because often
this idea that you don't actually know
what's going on is a frustration for when
I try to explain things.
So I've decided that I'm going
to start by actually allowing you to
experience surfing the web
in China.
So I've done some screenshots
before I came
first. I'm going to start.
The first part is with a VPN
on so you can get the idea of how slow
connections are and how frustrating it
is.
And I'll sort of talk through this
experience with you.
And actually, before I start, let me just
say so my goal here is
for you guys to really get
an idea of what it feels
like to be on the Chinese Internet.
So I'm going to really like over since,
like, throw a lot of things at you.
OK, so just be prepared.
Let's hope this works.
So it looks here I'm
trying to get on Facebook, so this is
Baidu, which is a Chinese search engine.
It's not really loading very well with my
VPN on.
As you can see, Yahoo!
Usually works without a VPN,
but for some reason today it's not
because sometimes it's a little sketchy,
a little weird.
And looking
up Tumblr, Tumblr is usually not
blocked also.
But as you notice, with my VPN like
it's very slow, don't have a lot coming
in.
Yelp is barely loading
a Facebook Google
down.
These seem to be really working for me.
This is very frustrating, as you can
imagine, especially when you're trying
to do things and stay connected to the
West.
So for some reason, New York
Times seems to load OK.
And luckily, this is a GIF animation, so
we don't have any streaming issues,
which I'll talk about later.
Also now I've decided
I'm going to turn it on and off.
I'm going to turn it off.
So I'm going to see if I can see any of
these pages.
And now I'm going to search the Chinese
Internet and we're going to see actually
how fast it loads without using a
VPN.
Look at that.
It's pretty efficient, actually, when
you're not trying to get outside.
These are some videos.
The search engine,
Dubon is actually
kind of like a music site.
Taobao is the shopping site.
As you can see, this is a Chinese
Internet.
So now I'm going to take you through
Taobao a little bit and
just paid really close attention also
to the esthetics of this page.
Lots of things like blinking
at you right now. I'm looking at movies
now. I'm going to look up cell phones
can see how fast you can see my options.
You can see advertisement
esthetics on the side.
OK, so now I'm actually just looking at
men and I
want to pause it right here.
So actually what I typed in was actually
just the word for man.
And as you can see, I've got some
really interesting project products
for men.
The thing is that in terms of
how you can find even things you need,
like certain products, if they're
products like this, you can't
just type in dildo
and find it. So there's even
a way about finding certain products
online.
OK, so that comes into play with sort of
like creativity creatively going
through how to exist
on this Chinese Internet.
Right.
So let's look at some of these products.
Well, so pornography may be
illegal in China, but toys
are not.
So these are just a few examples.
And I'm kind of previewing this because I
want you to understand that the culture
is incredibly vibrant and everyone has
the same desires.
So there's options.
However, actually,
if you notice back then, I don't know if
I can go back because I've been having
trouble with the video. But you notice
how there were stickers on and
kind of censoring certain parts of the
image. I want you to keep that esthetic
in mind because we're going to talk about
that again also.
Let's see.
So now I'm looking at Germany
and look at all the beer,
some of it's real German beer, most of
it's fake German beer.
And just in case you need some
birthday shampoo,
we have that in China.
Also,
I tailored this for the Germans.
This is a streamy.
I'm just I'm going to kind of stop soon
just to show you how fast video also
streams. YOKU is basically
like YouTube and it's pronounced
yoku, not you yuku,
by the way.
So, yeah, you can see that video actually
streams quite quickly.
Um.
Yeah, we got some dancers.
Yeah, I think you get the idea of the
esthetic and kind of what it's
like, the differences between trying
to access the Western Web in China
versus actually just existing
on the local platform.
So let's move in and talk about what that
means.
So the Chinese Internet,
I like to call it the Internet,
essentially. It's obviously a cross
of Chinese and Internet and essentially
it means
an Internet with Chinese characteristics.
OK, that's
what we're going to kind of talk a lot
about today.
Now, the thing that we have to understand
is it has its own ecosystem.
It has its own existence and a way of
doing things right.
So instead of Facebook and Twitter, we
have Weibo and Cucu.
Instead of Google, we have Baidu,
YouTube, YOKU, eBay and Etsy,
Tarbell, Alibaba, WhatsApp,
WeChat.
OK, so everything
that you have outside
of the Chinese Internet
exists inside of the Chinese Internet.
OK, so this idea that it's a desolate
or barren or empty landscape
is very untrue.
And that's what I really want to talk to
you about today.
So.
The biggest difference at this point in
the history of the Chinese Internet is
that it actually mostly exists on a
device like this.
So thinking about that,
if you think about most of us in this
room, probably first access the Internet
through a very large computer.
It was expensive, it was slow,
it was dial up.
So we had a certain expectation for how
to surf the Internet.
Right.
At this point in China's history, the
majority of people experiencing the
Internet for the first time
are experiencing it through a mobile
device.
OK, so their expectation
for how they interact,
for how they maneuver through
things, the speed at which it goes, is
very different from most of us.
We also have to consider this.
So this is
a really funny advertising from Wishin
or WeChat, which is one of the
biggest mobile app platforms, and it
keeps getting bigger and bigger.
And in this, it basically says that
they are going to change the world.
So and that's kind of what I'm going to
talk about.
So that moves
me onto my research, which is
partly anthropological and
also partly performative.
I call it the Internet Archive.
So to explain that Internet archive,
what I use is something
called people nearby.
And it's a function in the app
that lets me use the location
based services of my device
and access other people in.
And I think it's around a thousand
kilometer or thousand meter
radius.
So it's very location based.
OK, a lot of what I've collected
for this archive has come from places
like Beijing and Shanghai,
Graylin, Shenzhen,
Chiun. I think there's like six different
Chinese cities, also Korea, Texas,
now Germany.
So what I'm showing you
is how I access this.
So this is if I were to go and view
people nearby, this is what
I would find in different areas.
So it becomes very interesting,
the fact that it is location based,
because everywhere I go, I find out new
things about how people interact
with this app and exactly what is
their relationship to China.
Because this is a Chinese app.
It is owned by a Chinese Internet
company. So it is a part of
the Internet.
OK, and
so here's San Antonio, Texas, where I
was briefly before I came here,
and here's Germany.
And what I found in Germany is actually
it's mostly German
men and a lot of Turkish
Iraqi people,
which I wasn't surprised, which has
a reputation in the Middle East already.
So I wanted just to give you an idea of
how this happens, OK?
And I kind of go through and I start
looking through profiles, any profile
that has.
It tells me that I can look up to 10
posts, which means they've kept their
account open.
So I go through and I
collect images in open accounts
like this or profile images.
So they're all public images.
So what do I do with these images?
Well, I'm looking for patterns and
collections and I'm trying to find out
what what's going on in China
in the virtual world.
A lot of times you can view what I am is
like sort of a document documentarian.
So I'm a documentary photographer
because a lot of these are actually
screenshots.
This is an example, again, to look at the
esthetic of the Chinese Internet.
OK, we have a lot of busyness, a lot of
color, a lot of
bling, a
lot of different text
in the same image.
It's a little overwhelming.
One of the artists that I work with
is her name saying Now
I'll talk about her later.
She likes to describe
the Chinese Internet as an Internet
ecstasy.
OK, so let's keep that in mind as we
move forward.
So what do I find
in most? I'm going to show you a few sets
of things I find quite often.
And one of them.
Oh, actually, we're going to talk about
graphics. I'm sorry.
So, again, here, we're just reinforcing
that Internet ecstasy feeling.
Notice all the hearts.
And actually this is what an open
moments page looks like.
So if I go if I can go into an account,
this is what I'm looking at.
And then below that will be the
posts that they make.
OK, this is a really great example.
We have a few things going on here.
We have a Chinese lamp,
we have some roses, some Christmas
candles and presents.
And what does it say?
It says greetings.
Good morning. Good morning.
It says good morning in two ways.
It's all Shanghai and so on.
Same meaning.
But they decided that it was necessary
to say it twice.
So, again, this gives you an idea of how
things sort of get mixed up and it's just
piecing together when it comes to
esthetics.
So this is probably a retailer and she
is probably selling beads like this,
what she's using to make this
edited part is a Chinese
app called Made to Seduce You.
I've used it a lot myself.
And guess what?
Chinese people use it a lot, too.
So this is a very common esthetic.
Is this sort of overload?
And if we think about that early Taobao
page where everything was blinking and
everything was boom, bam, whatever,
it starts to translate in every
part of life in China.
But I think it's really quite special.
He's saying, like how like have a great
it's a great time.
He's look, he's having a great time.
So now let's say we're going to have a
traditional picture.
We still need to have some chaos
if you notice all the different patterns
everybody's wearing on their shirts.
And if you also notice the background, we
have bling on the background
so you can escape
this. It's beautiful.
So this is actually a photograph I
took in the park.
I like to spend a lot of time in the park
because I think what I
do on the Chinese Internet is kind of
like it's a virtual landscape.
So often I look at what I do is if it's
like a virtual street that I'm walking
down and I'm seeing things.
But sometimes for me to understand those
things, I actually need to exist in
real life, which is why I live in China.
So I spend a lot of time at the park
because it gives me a really
nice place to see a lot of diverse
types of people.
So do you
notice his esthetic, this miss
mismatching into his shirt and it's
chaos. So this Internet
esthetic exists in the physical form.
It is everywhere.
OK.
So we're going to talk about that more
later year.
So I'm telling a little story,
so if you haven't gotten that yet,
so what are some other things that I have
in my archive?
Lots of hearts.
So this is a funny one, because
to play, you know, a lot of the way
that things work on the Chinese Internet
is word play and
no play.
So in this case,
five to zero is
in Chinese who are ling.
But it sounds a little bit like
I love you in Chinese, which is
what I need.
So they've decided that
if you make five, 20, it means I love
you without actually having to say it
or use the characters.
So this is Internet speak in China.
And it's interesting because in WeChat,
it allows you sometimes during
like Valentine's Day or different
holidays, if you type five, 20 little
hearts will float down the screen.
It's very interactive.
Also something to consider.
The experience online in China
is very interactive.
Moving on, so someone made a nice
dinner for his love and there's
crabs and heart kandal,
somebody has decided that their dog
needs a heart.
Food in shapes of heart.
Rhodes's.
Shrimp, this is a particularly beautiful
one, I think
they get very, very creative with their
hearts. Let me tell you,
see, we could do it.
Why not on your desktop, have one
and why not post an actual
heart?
This is the heart of a
38 year old woman.
So that moves into another portion,
which is
how actually like explicit
purpose can be.
There's not the same kind of censoring
for gruesome things.
OK, so it's very interesting.
I find a lot of injuries, like
I find a lot of people posting injuries,
very vivid ones in the far
left. It actually there are very
straight lines. So it's kind of
yeah, it could be self-induced.
I also find a lot with
IVs in the hospital.
So these are common
and that moves into the hand ones.
I have so many images
like this and they're very random.
It's like an object in their hand.
Sometimes their hand is doing something,
sometimes the objects doing something,
sometimes they're just holding it.
But what I really want you to pay
attention to is how actually when you
start to look at these, it almost looks
like you're entering that space yourself.
Right?
It has this perspective of virtual
experience. Right.
Like that first person, so like let's
let's keep that in mind also.
OK, so this is
the circle of life.
Yeah, I find I don't know why I find this
quite often. Also
food you'll notice on the second
row, middle row.
There's a nice one that's a little
surprising.
You don't catch that usually.
I get to see in people's houses, so
I get to see what their house looks like,
what kind of technology they're using.
This is a whole series of TVs
which I'm going to move into of the house
is a little bit I get to have like a
very intimate perspective
of how people are living in China.
And it's very odd, actually.
I have images inside of migrant homes
or migrant dormitories,
inside of student dormitories, inside
of very, very wealthy people.
So there's a very huge economic
diversity in the country as well.
These static we saw earlier, it's kind of
happening here, too, right?
Do you see it?
Not as extreme, but it's there.
Um, so here's
some other ones.
There's always pictures of food.
This one's quite funny.
He's got a bottle.
Yes, my wine.
But I don't think it's actually the
original name because that looks like a
sticker on top of the original
label. And the Chinese name is actually
a Maitua, which sounds like, yes,
my my
wine. So it's sort of a funny wordplay
and these are a bowl of chicken feet.
So this is a really interesting cultural
pairing because wine is not a traditional
red wine is not a traditional alcohol
beverage of China. It's something
imported.
We also have Tylenol, also something
imported and something very traditional,
which is the chicken feet.
And beautiful, beautiful,
still lives of all
kinds of interesting objects.
I'm sort of showing this because in the
archive there's also a lot of different
qualities of of resolution
which can reveal to me demographic
as well what kind of phone they have.
This is a beautiful still life also.
So I'm going to kind of move into Apple
products are also something very
heavily made fun of in China
by Chinese people because it's a status
thing. So I'll just quickly go through
these.
We have yeah, we have a few
iPhone seven.
That's a nice one.
So, yes, some more technology.
These are webcams in different.
Most of these are from gaming like
like Internet cafes.
People covering this kind of comes back
to the topic of
when people do want to do when people
do want to censor themselves because they
do know the degree of which images
are used.
They will do it intentionally and they
use different apps to do
that in kind of funny ways.
She's done an interesting job here.
She's it says, hey, hey,
it's a smiley face next to it.
She's also blurred out everything around
her. These are also some important things
to consider
face.
There's a hard again,
so this is Tianjin, and
I'm realizing that I actually might
have to jump through some stuff.
Because I'm going to run out of time and
that's the only thing I want you guys to
be able to see some artwork also,
but I am going to talk about this meme,
which is quite funny.
There was one day not too long
ago, we had many weeks of smog
and then there was this glorious rainbow.
And everybody's feed looked like this in
Beijing just over and over and over
of rainbows.
So actually, one artist in my field made
a beautiful rainbow picture in honor of
it.
And what was interesting about this was
that the meme only lasted as long
as the sun set.
By the time the sun had actually set all
of the images, all of the jokes, all
of the pictures were
basically gone.
And what was left was
this amazing gif animation
for a meme that only lasted
two hours max.
It's pretty good,
really.
Yeah, so
money is really big, lots of money,
piles of money, especially
money and phones also
really big.
Notice their apple phones, although they
could be fake ones.
I'm not sure.
So these are collections that I do.
I post every day in my WeChat moments
to sort of as a daily performance
of showing and revealing
and learning more about these images as
an archiving collection.
So it's been installed actually at
Project Space, which is owned by a German
and Hungarian women
in a show called Hong Kong one, which is
Internet, Internet, Internet.
And I typically will
install it on a mobile device.
And so people can come in and there
actually can witness it because I post
every day. So it's a performance
in real time.
So that brings me to the art portion,
which I'm thinking I still have time for.
I started a project as a result
of this.
The archive began because my research
partner, Gabriel at the city,
he's actually a media anthropologist,
specifically focused on Chinese Internet.
And he was the one that introduced me to
all of this.
We started a band and then we started
researching.
But we propose
that we write a paper looking at
Chinese selfies initially.
And so I spent that's how the archive
started actually two years ago.
And I spent eight months with just
collecting selfies.
During that time, I realized I wanted to
understand more because there was all
this amazing stuff happening
and that's how it became
what it is. So the archive now is about
20000 or more images.
So it's a small data, but it's very
telling and revealing, as you saw
earlier.
And this influenced I was already
researching artists dealing with
technology in China because
I come from an Internet background,
tech, art background,
and the Chinese Internet is a whole new
landscape.
And I was getting bored of the Western
Web and I thought to myself, man,
this is a whole new place that we don't
know anything about.
And I bet there's some interesting art
happening, too.
So I moved to China four years ago
to do this and then started this
archive two years ago, which is basically
the pairing of the archive.
And the work with artists is
excuse me, important because
I have a very in-depth cultural
perspective of what's happening
in China that influences
for influences in
how I can understand the art and what's
being expressed and why.
And that's very important to understand.
So I started noticing
that and it's actually a play
medicine, which is citizen and
Internet came out of 1984,
not the book, but life.
And at the time it was a word coined in
the West for a unified web freedom.
But for some reason they use this word
to describe Chinese Internet users,
because when Internet sort of
entered China, it
was a unified experience.
It was the first time the country could
sort of connect across all over
the place and sort of voice and share
in their ideas and opinions
and anything else.
And so this is why they were referring to
they refer to Chinese netizens.
OK, so a play
on that to make the
Chinese name because I need a Chinese
name.
It's Wang Yong, which is just
Internet friend network.
And what that actually translate to, it's
referring to the early years of BBC
boards and chat groups.
Right. A lot of people made very,
very close friends on the Internet in the
early years.
So with the that I'm looking at
a lot of things and I started
commissioning New Hive was
supporting some of this, I'm moving
a lot into interviews.
My biggest thing is I like to interview
these artists and ask things like,
when do you remember hearing about the
Internet?
What's the first piece of technology?
I'm very interested in creating
a timeline of experience with
the history of technology in China also.
So my first artist was
Mao, and she did
she did a nice little show online for us
and she named it. Meanwhile,
in China, which is a
Western meme, but so in love
will never feel tired again.
And it's so tired is spelled
wrong. And that was a chinless Chinglish
accident that she made.
And then we decided to keep it because it
was very appropriate.
So she did.
I'm not going to talk about all of it,
but she did one piece
where we ended up splitting the screen.
This is a video that
comes from this meme.
There was a meme with a kid
born in the 90s who wrote like
So in love, will never feel tired again
and ended up becoming viral.
And then somebody this is an
example of a website called Bill
Dot Com, which allows people to stream
their own videos and then comments
just run across.
It's very interactive.
Right.
And so
she splits it. It's actually in YOKU
and in YouTube.
And so when you're in China, you can't
see the YouTube side.
And when you're in the Western world,
yoku like load's very, very slowly.
So this piece specifically is straddling
both Internets at the same time.
If you want to see it, I'll give you the
website later and you can
go through it. So the one
thing actually the first piece that
she did dealing with the Internet was in
2007 called The Blind Spot.
She spent three months taking
a dictionary, Chinese dictionary
and a list of Google censored words
and blanked them out.
So this is the first piece I'd ever found
that was really directly
dealing with what
the Internet was in China at that time.
That was in 2007,
which leads me to Ferna.
She was doing some screen paintings in
2008.
And this one is particularly interesting
because if you notice, it's a Google
C.N..
In 2010, Google left
China because they were
not into the censorship
issue or Sensorites censorship laws
that were going into place and they
routed everything to Hong Kong.
So this is a really interesting piece
because it's documenting a screen
that no longer exist for
a very specific reason
and she's gaming.
So that interactivity thing is a really
big thing to understand about the Chinese
Internet.
It's an experience.
This is where and she's quite interesting
because she is the first
artist who's also curating works online.
She has an online gallery called
sorry, called Big
Bad Gallery dot com.
She did some really interesting projects.
So if you want to know it later, ask.
So this piece is called Oriental Giants.
And she actually what she does, I can try
to access it.
She.
Might not load.
We've been having trouble with loading,
basically what she did is sort of a
like an open source crowd surfing
project where she's trying to get people
to send her images and information about,
like giant Mao Zedong
statues around the country.
And she's creating a statistical map,
ironically, on Google Maps
of things in the of
these giant Mao statues all over
the country.
And this is interesting.
She's so Katis is actually an
American and she did a project.
She's working on a project called Human
Spam.
The biggest experience with mobile
device is the way that information
is flooded. People are so connected,
you don't ever not have your
phone. You never log off, literally.
So she was doing some pieces where
she was actually spamming everyone
and like only regurgitating information.
And this is a play on sort of when
you lose the search engine, actually,
and you don't have that browser to go
explore the Internet and you're
functioning mostly in something like we
chat, everything becomes,
oh.
Did I press something?
Yeah, I do.
Well, so this says, ah ha ha ha.
So it's kind of funny that it's laughing
at us.
I don't know what happened.
It's, uh.
Yeah.
Thanks, guys.
Let me find where I was anyway,
so her work with human spam is
this basically this idea that if
you're you know, if you
use the search engine, then basically
you're losing like that exploratory
factor to go and find things.
And so what happens is information just
gets like regurgitate.
It's in cycles.
So it kind of feels like this.
You're just seeing all the same stuff
over and over again.
That's kind of what it feels like on the
Chinese Internet. Now, this is something
she did. I can play very quickly
playing on this and it just shows you the
interactivity.
So she types and she pastes
from somebody else's misu.
And this is.
See, when you say certain things, stuff
flies down the screen,
so the like I said, the experience
is very much about interactivity, which
means the virtual world is a very special
place and means you're always connected
together and never logging off.
So that virtual world experience
and not real life experience are exactly
the same thing that's
very different from the West.
We may think that we're always logged on,
but not like this, I promise you.
So this is our for time.
They did another piece commissioned by
New Hive for noticing
it and they're playing on this
idea. It's called Nine Computer Exercises
for the 21st Century Online Digital
Interactive Era,
which is a great title.
And it's based off of this
idea in Chinese.
There's daily routine and daily practice.
It's a part of the culture.
And so they're sort of playing on this
digital era and the idea of
how do we exist when this is that
reality, when we are always interacting,
when we're always online.
This is an example of the piece.
So it gives you instructions.
Each each side gives you instructions.
So, yeah,
they also did some pieces we're using
Tabbaa were they they were called ideas
and they would ask people to make art for
them.
So in this one, they're asking you to
find a bunch of stuff, the same weight,
like a pile of books, a bunch of pork,
and like weigh them and take
photographs for them.
And this one's quite funny.
They're asking someone to buy this piece
by and make it themselves.
And what they have to do is get us like a
stage smoke machine and like stage
this whole scene and take photographs
and videos and then, like, send it back
again. That's an artist playing off of
that interactivity.
I asked them about Choung
use a traditional idiom or poem
in four characters, and I asked them to
make one up for the Chinese Internet.
So they have to Miyamoto,
which is mysterious.
You can imagine how deep it is difficult
to guess or comprehend.
This is a Chinese person's
perspective of the Internet in China.
This is happening right now by a
performance artist, BAEO and Frohna
Poonam, which we saw earlier.
She did that Google CiarÃ¡n painting.
They're doing it through an app
called Fifty One Rebo dot com,
which is like a domestic
live streaming.
So you can have your own, like, reality
show.
What I want to show you, these are some
screenshots.
So what you're seeing here
is that virtual and real
world paired together.
So they took actually this
is a friend who did this.
This is an image she took at the studio
while they were recording and
she realized it didn't have
that right esthetic.
So she went and blurred it.
She used to zoom Mumu and like
you. Yeah, Masu sees
you and like, basically blurred the whole
thing to make it feel right.
And she did this in the digital realm.
Right.
Because then she could share it properly
on the Internet.
This is actually just what the scene in
the live broadcast things actually look
like.
OK, so that physical, that virtual,
they're all real. They're the same thing.
This is what the app looks like when
you're featuring it.
And it's again, it's interactive.
Everyone's bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,
giving you images, giving you content,
super sensory overload.
So one new one is interesting for her,
quote, I'm sorry, I am rushing,
I kind of overprepared.
I asked her what she considered herself,
and she said that she saw herself
in different physical forms and
identities in the virtual
world and she sees herself
actually becoming less and less in real
life and more integrated
online. So I'm seeing
this consistently with artists working
with technology.
The body is losing entire meaning,
identity is losing meaning.
And the virtual existence
or the reinvention or creation
that comes with virtual life
is prime primarily
what they're sort of moving into, which
if you think about what we saw
earlier, digitizing
the real life like that, seamlessness,
a virtual and physical, and
the way that something like we chat is
everything. It's centralized.
You can have boyfriends and girlfriends
and get taxes, pay your bills.
So.
That leads me to Wangs in
thinking about that virtual world.
She did an eight Hertz hypnosis
lab thinking about that mind,
focusing on that mind and
actually losing the body.
Also looks very cheap Internet, right,
and so she does hypnosis and
she's actually moving more into VR
with Oculus now, and I
asked her about like what this
experimentation is about and what she
wants to create.
And she's working on at the moment is
VR hypnosis.
She wants to actually
basically have an entire experience
that's entirely mental and dimensional
on like many different levels
of perception, because if you imagine
what hypnosis is, it's about going
and sort of figuring out the issues
or dealing with issues.
Right.
So that leads me to my conclusion.
This is also from the archive.
What I'm leading to is that this is
actually an example for all of us of
what's sort of happening in the world as
we continue to advance
with mobile technology.
It's not a doomsday thing.
It's just a reality we have to consider.
And we have to think about what this
means in
legislature, in choices, in
production of materials, all of these
things. So this basically this says
that the Internet is like OPM
100 years ago, 100 hundred years now,
a hundred years later.
And this is made by a Chinese person.
However, it's in a traditional
it's it's not simplified.
Chinese is traditional.
So I don't know if this could actually be
from Hong Kong or Taiwan maybe
or very far south, because
in mainland we use
simplified usually so.
You know, China is the first country in
the world to actually
officially, like, say
that Internet addiction is a serious
psychological problem.
I see it every day.
Again, we have that pairing side
by side of the
digitizing of real life and
real life, wanting to become a cyborg.
These are also from my archive.
And what I'm trying to say is that in
this massive archive,
I'm seeing these trends emerging.
I'm seeing how life is becoming
digital and virtual and
less and less physical.
And as you can see here,
he's already ready.
And he's he's like thinking about
it.
It's like, I'll try this on.
So what do we do with this idea?
Well, I think there comes
a little of this first.
I think first we we need to keep a sense
of humor.
And as we can see from a lot
of some of the memes and some of the
content that I've shown,
the Chinese Internet has a great sense of
humor, actually.
So even considering, you know,
everything that is happening in that it's
a walled garden, it
is flourishing, it has its own digital
landscape and it's affecting creativity
and very fascinating ways.
And that's actually what I am most
interested about my studies
is looking at how are you limitations
actually begin to emerge, new ideas
or experiences.
And the reality is the entire world
is becoming virtual and digital.
And so we all need to be considering
what direction we take with this.
And I suppose
it is.
Thank you. In Chinese.
That's a good.
All right, we have plenty of
time left for questions and answers,
so if you have questions about
the very
interesting Chinese Internet, please come
to one of the social mikes
so everybody can hear you.
And I think we'll start with a question
from the website.
Yes, the Internet would like to know, is
it common for Baidu to track and analyze
WHANG users or Web users behavior
for statistics like Google Navteq
does or like it's
done in the Western world?
Yes, sorry, I didn't
understand.
The question is, is it common for Baidu
to track and analyze Web user behavior?
I do, yeah.
I don't know. I don't study Baidu.
I mean, I study user interactivity and
WeChat. So I'm specifically looking
at like how people exist in this app.
So that's not my specialty.
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
All right, then we move to the mike over
there.
Hi, thanks for this. This is great to
see that it's so vibrant and interactive.
Yes, of course.
There is a documentary that came out
about a year ago called China's Web
Junkies, where
children who were addicted to
gaming or like just the Internet in
general, were putting these boot camps,
military style boot camps in order to
break them of the habit.
Could you speak a little bit more like
how the culture, the older generation
and the younger generation are kind of
interacting over the Internet and
technology and their creativity
and their vibrancy?
You know, in my archive, I actually have
a lot of diversity of age as well.
So there are a lot of older people that
are interacting and we chat for sure.
So it's becoming commonplace.
And part of that is because most business
is done. A lot of business, not most,
I'll say a lot of business is done
through WeChat.
The centralization of the app also plays
into this virtual, like
constant virtual experience, because
you can pay your rent, you can have a
virtual girlfriend and boyfriend, a
virtual secretary, you can get
a taxi.
You can use people nearby
for hooking up.
You can
chat, video chat, group chat,
youth. There's retailers, people sell
everything.
So in terms of that interactivity, I see
mostly like in terms like older people,
they tend to be businessmen or retailers.
So they're using it specifically for
e-commerce with younger
people. It's definitely more about
sharing and broadcasting.
I quite funny, I
had a retailer, WeChat
friend, and she put me in a mothers group
of 100 Chinese women once
and it was immensely fascinating.
It was like every morning at seven a.m.
they're all talking about what they're
going to feed their kids, what kind
of detergent they should use,
like where can they buy this or that?
So the group chats are really functioning
as discussion platforms
for people to connect and solve,
solve issues in their life and also
to share information.
Yeah. Does that help?
Great, thank you, cool.
All right, that we will just stick with
that, Mike, and your question.
Your question, please.
Thank you for a great thought.
It was very interesting.
I have a question.
Could you please say a bit
about the online dating in China?
What is the perspective?
How do people, both men and women,
advertise themselves?
I believe you know something about it.
Studying.
I mean, in your study, from the
perspective of a foreign woman or
no, I mean, professionally,
you study Internet, so that's what I
meant, actually.
Well, I mean, I don't know personally.
I don't use any Chinese dating apps.
They are used. I mean, with my experience
when I first started the archive, I
actually my profile was a Chinese woman,
like a very beautiful Chinese woman.
And so I was
doing this because I really wanted to see
what kind of natural interactions were
happening.
And sure enough, two years ago, it was
just lists and lists of men contacting
me. Very rarely was it women.
So I'm finding that definitely this
people nearby function is used for
dating. And while I've been in Germany
and other parts of the world using it, I
see the same thing because
I don't know that
a lot of Germans maintain
people nearby function in Germany
for Chinese business because I'm finding
it's mostly Germans or Turkish or Middle
Eastern. So that tells me it looks like
it's more interactive for dating
in Texas.
It was weirder because my profile
is still ambiguous and they thought I was
Chinese. There was a lot of white
men contacting me
in broken English.
I had broken my characters,
I think thinking I'm Chinese
in terms of other areas.
I'm not familiar.
I don't use Chinese dating apps.
So yeah,
I can only give my perspective.
So yeah.
OK, perfect,
then switch over to the other side of
the room.
Um, I would like to ask
you if you are sure that you haven't
been trolled maybe
by the culture, because if I was
looking at my Twitter
timeline and the
regular time lines of maybe professional
Twitters, uh, that
would be the same cultural,
um, well,
discrepancy, I would say.
So you're saying that I'm trolling?
No, no, no.
Being trolled.
Yeah, it's like Emmetsburg culture
compared compared to, uh, maybe
Facebook or um.
Well, maybe like nine gig.
It's a bit more intense.
Maybe.
I mean, again, it comes back to like
the the purposes for use
are going to be different in China
because the cultural context is
different. So if the apps
used for centralization of most
experiences,
the reason I know that the men contacting
me are interested in hook up is
because of the things that they say.
No, I mean, I'm sorry.
I misunderstand.
No, I didn't I didn't reflect on that.
I just said, oh, yeah. About the talk
itself in general, about
I'm sorry about the talk itself.
Oh, the talk itself about trolling.
No. Know the images you showed.
Maybe they were just not serious.
Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of the images
are incredibly playful, but that's a part
of the culture.
That's a part of like online experience
is.
Not being serious and humorous.
Yeah, I guess it's a part
of the meme culture.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the
question.
All right, then we'll maybe move to
another question from Twitter.
Ursy I actually would
like to know if you have experience or
comments on Chinese image boards
of Chinese like BBS boards.
Yeah, I can't
talk about that.
OK, thanks for a number of reasons.
I will say this, I will say this.
From what I understand, like many of
the artists that I interview about their
early experiences, like BBS boards
were like were the first
sort of point of interaction.
And you didn't have streaming sites in
the beginning.
So everything was sort of shared
with links and links.
And people would create portals served
outside of the Chinese Web and send links
to share certain kinds of content through
Spoors.
I have heard of one BBS boards that
was made for Chinese men who want
to pick up white girls.
And so they give you they all talk about
giving each other by advice of how to
get a foreign girl
for Chinese men.
So it's.
Yeah.
So it's nice, but another question,
Brooke, I guess it is your dating
question. Also.
Hang on a sec, I think you're Mike's not
on yet.
Just repeat the question, please.
Have you taken a look at the opposite
side, like if there is a Chinese person
doing the same thing for the Western
Internet?
I don't know. Actually, I haven't.
Is there does anyone know?
I think it would be very hard because,
you know, for me to collect this amount
of image, you have to have a database and
a like of a function that allows
you to collect images in this
way. That's location based.
So the fact that it's a radius
of people when I turn on people nearby
means that the characteristics,
the kind of images I'm getting are
based on location.
So when I was in Korea, you know, I'm
finding images that relate to why Chinese
people are in Korea.
A lot of it's like buying makeup.
So there's tons of piles of hotel
rooms with makeup everywhere and
suitcases.
Now, imagine if I went to places like
Africa where China is actually
investing in infrastructure and you
have a lot of Chinese workers building
railroads, things like this.
I would also have a very particularly
location based sense
content that tells
me what's happening in Africa and
relationship to China.
And that's what's quite interesting, is
we have this idea of the Chinese Internet
being something only based in China.
But like I said, WeChat
is still the Internet.
It's still a Chinese Internet
with characteristics of Chinese culture.
It's related and it's based in China
and it's mobile.
And so that begins to show us
actually what role China has on
a much larger global scale because
it's a location based feature.
OK, all right, then switch over there,
OK?
I would expect that that people
interact quite differently online,
depending on audience, whether that
they're talking to their their their
work colleagues or their family or their
friends. Could you maybe talk about how
that affects the kind of
visual styles and how they
kind of how they behave?
Yeah, I mean, I have people in my field
that I don't want to see things.
So you can actually block people from
seeing your moments.
And this is the really interesting
function of the fact that we chat is also
group chats and an individual chat.
So what actually happens is these
individualized groups exist
and they're formatted or they become
about topics or a group of people
with shared interests.
And so that becomes the, you
know, putting everything in little boxes.
That's part of it.
I've also talked to young Chinese
students and there's I
know a few that they use
Cucu more with their friends and they use
WeChat more with their parents.
And that seems to be a platform.
The difference in platform allows them to
separate that as well.
Yeah.
OK, perfect. Um, yeah.
Thanks for your talk, I have a short
question, they do experience any
situation when
a Chinese person was
so surprised by, let's
say, kind of Western content, like,
did you show anything which is special
for, let's say, Western Internet
to the Chinese person?
And it seemed so weird as
this stuff seem weird for us.
I'm trying to think because, you know, a
lot of the kind of people I would show
that to would be artists or
like very open minded creative people.
And most of them already have weapons.
Most of them have already studied abroad,
typically because it's an education class
thing.
I think that's the other thing we have to
consider is that when we talk about
people who are really wild in this walled
garden, they're of
a certain class.
Right. Because when you do
have a certain education background or
you come from a certain demographic, you
have opportunity to travel.
And so you get experience
on Western webs.
And then if you come back to China, you
want to stay connected to your new
Western friends.
So you have things like PNS
or you just use WeChat because WeChat,
you know, the reason I use it and my
parents uses because it's the quickest,
most reliable way to stay in touch
without me having to use that slow VPN.
So that's also something to consider.
Yeah, it sort of like jumps over that
wall a little bit.
Thanks.
OK, you get the mike to
the right, please.
Hey, yeah, also, thanks a lot for the
talk, was so interesting that you showed
this kind of parallel Internet.
But in terms of the net out of the
Chinese artists, I thought it was very
similar to, well, Western art.
And how much do you think these two
influence each other?
Yeah, because ultimately a lot of these
artists who are working, you know, the
the lens, the art market landscape in
China still very, very traditional.
So artists who are working with
technology or the Internet
are the much younger generation.
And so they're already a little Internet
savvy and are familiar with the Western
Web. So, yeah, of course, they've been
influenced.
You know, what happens is like we have a
global esthetic now
across the way.
We all sort of adopts you
can see this if you go to like most
cities, hipster culture exists everywhere
in Africa and South America, in China,
like so there is sort of a global
esthetic. And so those influences
still exist in China, which is
why you're seeing some similarities.
I would say the differences come in
the platforms themselves or
the cultural context, for
example, their personal influences
or something like using WeChat that
are very Chinese specific.
But yeah, OK,
I see. One more question from the other
side.
Last image that you showed to
me was kind of very political in
the sense that it referenced the great
the century of great humiliation
and then it referenced like traditional
imagery, not traditional lettering.
Could you talk more about the
political context of that image or if
there was one?
I mean, I don't see the political
context most of the time and images like
that, because I like images like that are
very common and they're commonly posted
like Chinese people use meme
like imagery to sort of comment
on those kinds of things.
And so it's
it's almost like a solidarity factor.
It's like this is this situation
that we're in. What let's laugh about it.
And that's a part of feeling like
we all get it.
Now, what's going that I mean, what's
happening?
I think there's you know, it's a country
that's changing incredibly fast.
And when you have an economy
that moves that fast, it's a little
bit ahead of society in terms of the
way of thinking.
And so there's
a lot of like lag.
I think there was what Alvin
told future shock.
I don't know if you've ever read this
book.
It's this idea of like
you have a people who are like a hedge
and then there's this this
society that's moving at a certain speed
and certain technological advances are
societal.
Things are ahead of us and then humans
are not quite ready for it.
And so it becomes this like shock of the
future at the speed.
I sometimes feel like that in China.
Sometimes I really feel like
I'm existing in an alternative future.
And I think everyone feels this.
And it's going by very it's really,
really fast. And so what
happens is it ends up being translated
into like endless, endless memes
like this that also
talk about politics.
And that's the easiest way to talk about
politics is with humor.
That's. Yeah.
Thanks. Sure.
So I don't see any more questions in the
room, but we have a little girl from the
Internet.
The Internet would like to know what is
your favorite Chinese cinematic movie?
My current Chinese favorite Chinese
cinematic movie.
I don't I don't like Chinese movies.
That's the truth. I'm sorry.
OK, yeah, but there's another real
question I was wondering.
I was I was wondering in the in
terms of censorship and this being
a very big platform, if you have
any data on how things
are censored on on
any topic of that.
Yeah. So some background on me.
I actually I grew up in Saudi Arabia in
my early childhood, but my parents are
Americans. So when you're a foreigner
in Saudi Arabia in the 80s, you're
monitored pretty. Extremely.
So I grew up with a very, like, high
awareness for this.
And so self censorship is
something very natural to me, which is
also why I was interested in the Chinese
Internet.
Generally, censorship happens with the
person first, like
it's really a there's parts
of like the Internet,
for example.
They realized very fast that
in Weibo that if you,
you know, typed certain text, it could
easily code could be written to basically
censor that very quickly.
Right. So to get creative,
they realized, oh, you could have a jpeg
of text and this could
spread around really fast
before it was taken down.
So that innovation there's a lot
of that comes out.
Is this creative innovation to deal with
the situation?
It plays on language, it plays on
formats, and then
it plays in Meems.
Again, these memes sort of become
something that generates the
solidary of experience.
So, yeah,
it always starts with self-censorship, to
be honest. Yeah, thanks.
OK, so, um, I don't see any more
questions, and we are almost out of time,
so thanks again, Michel.
Sure.