Cultural Musings #2
April 30, 2009
Twitter as Distillation of Validation of Cultural Membership Groups
Here’s some musings on Twitter that I dug out of a canned post of mine. I should probably flesh it out into something more, but it gets the main message across;
“Twitter, is the fertile soil to plant, grow, share and trade cultural norms – the medium in which is used to emit and transfer. In fact Twitter is more than just the medium, it’s the ideal medium. The social networking element keeps tweeters in touch on a minute-by-minute basis while not binding them to any real time conversation. The tight word count moderates each sentence making it low fluff and straight to the love. The response system flaunts replies to people within the same network. This whole set up is ideal for users to flirt and trade ambiguous nudge, nudge, wink, wink commentaries among each other, and then transmit their dialogue to onlookers. It’s a contained system, built around the utterance, a distilled cultural transmitter. As said to death in the cultural studies field, language = culture. Therefore Twitter’s composition is a fantastic, quantifiable way to observe memberships groups defining their cultural identity. It’s in Twitter that I draw much of my reasoning as it’s a transparent model to view this culture.
When I cruise through other people’s Twitter pages and observe the small talk, I’m often baffled at what’s actually going on. People declaring their membership roles or attempting to grow their seed, by throwing strings of replies to others. It’s a society alright. A society where people are constantly stating their roles and relationships. To “fit in” people have to acknowledge the presence of a membership group, whether they’re in it or not. And with only 140 characters to play with, you need to be discrete about this, which is where the love letters, and ultimately masturbation come into play. In Twitter, if you want to be part of the elusive membership group you have to wank it all up on an open stage, and therein lies my frustration, as the audience member of that stage.”
“The Foreign Game”
For my next column, I’m considering tackling the problems with creating a “foreign game”. That is in the same sense as a foreign movie. The inherent issue is basically that games require an interface outside of the avatar’s own world. Such things as menus, on-screen hub etc. These features take one out of the immersion of the game world. Now, how does one get around these issues when creating a a game with a foreign language as the only language.
Too Kind to be Cruel
Basically because of the whole face system, it sometimes seems that Chinese people are too polite to be critical as they lose face when transmitting something negative to someone else.
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Cultural Musings #1
Cultural stuff, that’s what I’m meant to be talking about! Umm..I’m always pondering over new cultural stuff each day, I think. Recently here are the ideas clouding my mind;
The Chinese Perception of Friend
This one has really resonated with me recently, there have been two situations that have made this stick in the ceiling of my brain, I’ll mention one of them here. Over the holidays (likely beforehand), I made myself a new pen-pal from Shanghai. I hadn’t talked to her for over a month, when one day she started talking to me about feeling sad about somethings. That day she was dumped by her American boy friend as he wanted to be with another Chinese girl. Pretty heart breaking, she also failed at some English competition too, which is less tragic but still. I mean, what kind of jerk says that to the person they’re breaking up with? Particularly with a culture where friends can take on a different meaning (I’ll get to that soon) What a tosser eh?
Through consoling this girl and discussing the issue with her, another issue that’s always been at the back of my mind solidified. What I (properly) realized is that in China, friends are only very close (she directly said this to me actually). You don’t really have acquaintances, or, rather they’re not very important, but you’ll do anything for your friends. Much like the analogy Robert DeNiro made in Meet the Parents, there is a circle of trust. When you become friends with a Chinese person, you become friends for life. Achieving this is harder than making a normal friend, you need to first gain their trust. If I said that all the students in one of my classes were all my friends, they probably wouldn’t consider it that much of a stretch, even though our relationship doesn’t extend beyond the classroom. In China, people would never think like this, they, in the same way as staff members or store clerks, are cogs in the operation of life. They do their thing, you do yours – separate.
When you enter that (friend) membership group, you’ve become a very important member of this person’s life. This was highlighted well in one of my readings which cited from a China Daily an article where one person heard that their friend in another town, far away, was considering divorce with his wife, so the friend quit his job and moved to his friend’s town to comfort his friend and convince him not to do it.
I noticed that this occurred when I first become friends with Hanxue. I’d previously spent every week of the last year (2007-2008), being mates with (one of my best friends) Xi Wei. I helped him with his troubles and he did the same for me. Xi and Hanxue are very close friends, so when Xi put me in touch with her in Shanghai, she went out of her way to help me (as a favour to her close friend Xi). She helped me find an apartment, find a place to eat, get access to the internet as well as just spend time with me as a friend. Several times I questioned her motives, because this seemed so unprecedented, so unrequested, so selfless.
I put this question to another friend I’ve helped her out many, many times over the years, and sometimes she helps me out too. I asked her about this and pretty much said “what would you do for me, as a friend?”. Her response? Well “anything”, because (in her words) we are good friends and will be good friends forever. That’s comforting to know.
Perhaps more so than anyone else (hmmm…Xi Wei), I like to joke a lot with this person, and during our conversation on Chinese friendships I repeatedly made jokes about her using me to fix her translation homework. I usually make these jokes with her, and this time I was unsure how she felt about that. While she joined in on the jousting, truth is she was leaning more towards believing them and didn’t feel so good about that. Although she knew I was kidding, she felt bad that I would say that considering our friendship. That’s how serious its taken.
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Dwell on my Transmission
Wipeout certainly didn’t aid in clearing my head. I’ve reached Breakdown which is the final component in HD’s octagon structured system of race events. The intensity has come in for the crunch again, all races in this section are Phantom; the highest racing speed in the game. I originally thought that the pod combat would play a real peripheral role, but it’s been near opposite approaching these final stages. You almost rely on them to survive or to fend of the vicious, face less combatants. I’m looking forward to waxing some words on this one, the game is more or less tuition in managing curves. Curves are incremental to the design, gorgeously so. I can’t wait to write up my thoughts.
I find that when I’m at my busiest I can never seem to keep writing in this thing. Thus implying that I’ve currently been rather busy? Well, this year, probably not. The past few weeks have been pretty substantial for DanielPrimed, I’ve been offered two quality freelance gigs (I’ll reveal the second one later) and have been receiving some solid attention. I’ve managed to lock the writing down to a new post (500 words+) every second day which is quite the achievement I think. The topics are tasteful, arguments mostly persuasive and writing style is improving steadily. I’m pleased with how it’s all going actually. With the GSW column, link backs and responses I’ve been getting, you might be fooled to think I’m actually getting good at this. That’s great, I’m so pleased, but am still miles away.
Today I feel pretty pissed off actually. I’m frustrated at one of my teachers for a number of reasons that all popped up the other day. Firstly we’ve been given the rather tricky assignment of hunting down some literature from an Asian language (Chinese) and then explain how the distinct nature of the language (through means of grammar, words, meaning, methods of speaking, phonology, whatever) communicate culture. I’m struggling with this idea, and my Chinese friends are all clueless – I went to them for suggestions. I can’t imagine how some of the students who’ve never learnt an Asian language will tackle this. I’m also frustrated at how he dumped a pile of recommended readings on me before the holidays for my project. I asked for some readings, so he lent me 6-7 books, but most of them are basic outlines of Chinese culture, Maoist history and all that, not really relevant to my project (Chinese communication). I found out yesterday that I have a project proposal to get done by next week, and unfortunately I have a weak base in terms of references. It shouldn’t be an issue really, I have cribbed some ideas from here and there, and filled the rest in with references from the literature review. At least I’ve pushed most of the readings out the way for now. Truth is, there are no readings on my topic, my project is delving into the unknown and considering that unknown is “how Chinese people manage their language among identities”, it’s tragic to see how little academic literature has been written on it.
I’m kinda frustrated at that because I want to read some books that may be relevant to the year-long project that can actually help me. Goffman’s ‘Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ is going to be great once I clear off the remaining three books lent to me. I’m already very familiar with Goffman’s ideologies, and have probably read chunks of the book already through the readings. Still I want to read the whole book. It should be pretty useful for the project, but I also want to tie it into a super critique on Portal and the deconstruction of the institution. Fantastic stuff.
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For your consideration, a blog about video games as written by myself:
