Travels in the Riel World

From China to Cuba, governments have done their best to control technology and the internet in an effort to keep their societies from becoming too open. They’ve had some successes, but it’s nearly impossible to stop people from connecting to the outside world, as shown by this International Herald Tribune article about Cuba.

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet café remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned café charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary - about $5 - to use a computer for an hour…

Yet the government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night. Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.

Still, it does take dedication and persistence for Cubans to maintain these channels of communication with the world:

Yoani Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde Cuba , a Web site based in Germany. Sánchez has attracted a considerable following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully written gentle critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba…

Because Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet café, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand.

There is an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about cell phone use in Africa - not only the dramatic increase in the number of cell phone users across the continent, but also some of the unique ways in which people utilize the phones as compared to the way they are used in the West. An excerpt:

Over the past decade, the number of cellphone users in Africa has grown faster than anywhere else in the world.  According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles unit, the continent’s cellphone usage has increased about 65 percent annually for the past five years – from about 63 million users in 2004 to 152 million in 2006.

“Cellphones are in the deepest rural areas in Africa,” says Saadhna Panday, of South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. “More people have access to a cellphone than a land line.”

And the way people use and care for their mobile phones is different than in the wealthy, BlackBerry-addicted West. Here, people send text messages to friends, but also use their cells to do banking and organize political rallies. In areas with no TV, farmers use phones to get agricultural news and weather reports. (The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange, for instance, sends text messages with up-to-date market prices.) In townships, entrepreneurs will set up cellphone booths, where passers-by can use airtime for a slightly inflated price.

In all these ways, says Panday, cellphones have increased networking among Africans and have lessened the global “digital divide” between haves and have nots.

With all of the depressing news that comes out of Darfur, it’s hard to believe that a mere re-design of a cooking stove could make any dent in the suffering there. But a reconfiguration of this appliance may, in fact, help alleviate at least some of the daily difficulties for long-suffering residents there. Newsweek has the story.

First, the challenge:

The violence in Darfur has not only left at least 200,000 dead but devastated the already arid landscape. More than 2 million people now fill groaning refugee camps; as they hunt farther and wider for firewood, they are denuding whole swaths of the countryside. Gathering firewood can now mean a seven-hour round trip, during which women risk rape and mutilation at the hands of the Janjaweed militias that lurk in wait. (Men can’t make the trip in their stead—they’ll simply be killed.)

Then, the solution, as devised by Ashok Gadgil, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California:

Gadgil worked with lab colleagues and students at UC Berkeley to modify an existing Indian stove for Darfurians’ needs. “Cook stoves, although they look simple, are very complex creatures,” he says, “which is why you can’t simply sit in Berkeley and say, ‘Well, this is the stove for you’.” While the Indian stove excelled at producing low-intensity heat for cooking rice, for instance, Darfurians needed a high-powered flame for sautéing onions, garlic and okra, ingredients in their staple dish, mulah. And since most families cook outside, the stove also needed to cope with the region’s strong winds.

The result of their efforts is the Berkeley-Darfur stove (darfurstoves.org) … the stove requires 75 percent less wood than an open fire, and a wind collar makes for a steady flame. That means fewer risky trips outside the camp. And those who now pay for firewood, Gadgil estimates, could save as much as $200 a year.

The final step, still being worked on, is production and distribution.

They won’t be handing the stoves out as charity—”Giving something away turns the recipients into beggars,” Gadgil says—but at $25 apiece, the devices are out of the reach of most families. Gadgil favors some sort of leasing plan, allowing families to rent the stove for about 50 cents a week. The ultimate goal is for the refugees to take over the program, from manufacturing to distribution, which would mean jobs and income.

There is no doubt that technology can influence a society, but can it also change a culture? That question is part of an intriguing article in the Christian Science Monitor about internet use in China, which has grown rapidly in recent years.

In 1999 there were just four million Internet connections in China; by the end of last year there were 137 million. More than 70 percent of Chinese children between ages 7 and 15 had used the Internet at least once, according to a survey Sun’s center carried out last year. That was nearly half as many again as the 2005 figure, and the total rose to 87 percent when only urban youngsters were polled.

This increased internet use seems to be forcing at least a few changes in the Chinese educational system, which is slowly morphing from a teacher-centered style to one in which students are more involved in the learning process. A potential result of this in the long-term, of course, could be a more open, more decentralized Chinese state, one that is less amenable to top down control.

Excited and emboldened by the wealth of information they find on the Internet, Chinese teens are breaking centuries of tradition to challenge their teachers and express their own opinions in class.

Wearing jerseys emblazoned with the names of European soccer stars, downloading weekly episodes of “Prison Break,” listening to 50 Cent, and reading Japanese comic books, China’s current high school generation is plugging itself directly into international culture.

And it’s giving the kids ideas. Ideas that could one day transform the way this country is governed.

“The Internet has given Chinese children wings,” says Sun Yun Xiao, vice president of the China Youth and Children Research Center.

Many are using those wings to fly in the face of received wisdom about how and what they should learn, and about how much respect they owe to authority. “Today students ask you, ‘Why?’ And if you don’t have a good answer, they won’t necessarily accept what you say,” says Zhao Hongxia, a young teacher at a private school in Beijing. “In my day, if the teacher said something he was always right.”

The Inca Empire of South America was known for a few of its architectural achievements, as well as for a remarkable system of roads and bridges that enabled fairly quick communication among communities that were scattered throughout the rugged terrain of the Andes Mountains.

The NY Times just ran an interesting article that combined a bit of culture and science when it provided an overview of the Inca transportation system, and particularly the suspension bridges that were built across canyons. These bridges were made from natural rope fibers.

Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.

So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century…

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.

The Peruvians apparently invented their fiber bridges independently of outside influences, Dr. Ochsendorf said, but these bridges were neither the first of their kind in the world nor the inspiration for the modern suspension bridge.

On the one hand, automobiles are automobiles. It seems that there is, or should be, an objective way of producing vehicles. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be a surprise that even the design of cars is influenced by culture. That, at least, is the implication of a recent article, which notes:

The main language spoken at the Shanghai auto show is Chinese, but the vocabulary of the designs is polyglot: Italian flourishes, high Japanese roofs, German solidity, American assertiveness.

The Italian flourishes, German solidity and American assertiveness are all traits of those national cultures, so it makes sense that they should also be found in cars designed in those countries. The story that I linked to above is interested in whether China’s developing auto industry will eventually forge its own unique design characteristics.

China has the world’s fastest-growing auto market and has already overtaken Japan in domestic sales; it now trails only the United States. Both multinational and Chinese automakers have learned that it is a lot easier to build new car factories than to instill a new generation of Chinese designers and engineers with the sensibilities to have a lasting effect on global automotive design.

Chinese automakers like Chery, Great Wall, Landwind and others rely on Italian design studios to come up with concept cars that lend pizazz to their increasingly elaborate auto show displays. Production models remain similar to existing Western and Japanese models…

Such limitations are not stopping automakers from trying to determine what buyers in China really want. And with money and talent pouring into the industry, practically everyone here agrees that it is only a matter of time before China starts to become known for car design as well.

“Each country has their own vocabulary or tastes for design, and especially in China they have a very long history” to develop such tastes, said Katsumi Nakamura, president and chief executive of the Dongfeng Motor Company, a joint venture of Nissan and the Dongfeng Group.

NPR recently did a four-part series called “Hacking the Himalayas.”  It looks at several interconnected topics, including how the community of Dharamsala, India has been changed by the influx of Tibetan refugees; how Lhasa, Tibet has been affected by the settlement of ethnic Chinese; and how some Tibetans are utilizing technology and the internet to stay connected and to preserve their culture.

Here is an excerpt about Lhasa, Tibet:

Inside what’s known as the Tibetan Quarter, the timeless rituals of faith unfold. At the ornate, massive Jokhang Temple in the heart of the quarter, visitors are greeted with the sights and sounds of prostrating pilgrims. They stretch flat on the ground, then rise up, palms clasped in prayer. The stone beneath is polished smooth from centuries of this devotional gesture. The towering Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s former residence, dominates the horizon.

But just a short rickshaw drive away, a different world unfolds. Outside the Tibetan Quarter, Lhasa feels more like a modern Chinese city, full of garish sights and sounds. The pace of change has never been faster than in the last decade.

And about technology differences between Lhasa and Dharamsala:

While some Tibetans have access to the Web, it’s not the freewheeling information superhighway Westerners enjoy — thanks in large part to the so-called Great Firewall of China. …

It’s telling that in the Tibetan refugee “capital” of Dharamsala, in northern India, a team of experts works to build a large wireless network for Web access. The goal is to open a flow of news and information about what’s happening in the Tibetan homeland. But within Tibet, those voices remain unheard.

Since culture influences the very way we perceive the world, it’s natural that it should also affect the way in which video games are designed and constructed in different countries.  Aleks Krotoski of gamesblog (via Cross Cultural News) examines this topic on her site and looks at some of the differences between Western and Asian video games.

One obvious difference is in the types of characters and situations.  She uses a wikipedia entry as a reference to determine that:

Western RPGs are set in a fayirie fantaysie type of environment, with bawdy barmaids and lots of rats. They tend to be dark, brooding, and the action often takes place in a location where at least one of the main characters has to be English. Tolkien-obsessed. …

Far Eastern RPGs, on the other hand, are often set in colourful spaces which feature a mix of traditional “Eastern history and mythology”. They also take manga and other highly stylised content as their inspiration, whereas we take elves, warriors, etc.

Even more interesting, I think, are some of the differences that are based on our cultural perceptions of the world.  Her sources here include a blog entry from Terra Nova and research done by Prof. Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan.  Krotoski writes:

…there’s some evidence to suggest that people from the West and people from the East differ on more than game content; we also differ on what we pay attention to. This may have implications for the types of games we each prefer. (Terra Nova) eloquently explains findings of a study by Prof Richard Nisbett:

“One of conclusions of Nisbett’s work is that given an image a Westerner will tend to focus on prominent details where as someone from Asia will take in the images as a whole and the relationship between things - they tend to give a more overall, complete account of a scene.” …

“Another point that Nisbett makes is that Westerners tend to assume linearity but Asians assume circularity. For example he gave in a recent interview was a stable set of circumstances a Westerner will tend to think that this signified a trend and that things will continue in the same fashion but an Asian will tend to think that it is indicative of the potential for change and ultimate return to some pre-existing state.”

Cross-cultural specialists regularly note that Westerners view things according to their component parts and see time in a linear fashion, whereas Asians see the world holistically and view history as being more circular.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see these perceptions also show up in video games.  One more indication of the importance of culture in understanding the world.

Did you know that the Pakistanis lead the world in looking up the words “sex” and “Danish cartoons” on Google?  Or that the British are on the look-out for handcuffs more than anyone else on the planet?  Or that “democracy” is searched for quite often among Mandarin Chinese speakers but much less frequently by Arabs?

These are some of the nuggets of interest unearthed by the new Google Trends, which enables users to find out which countries, cities and languages lead the world in searches for particular words.   You can spend hours playing with this new tool.  For an overview, though, this article in the International Herald Tribune has some cool facts.

“This is a fascinating project, effortlessly offering a glimpse into regional and cultural habits and differences that is otherwise nearly impossible to reproduce,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University.

Is nationalism destroying the internet? Newsweek tackles that question this week.

Until now the Internet has been a uniquely bottom-up, nonhierarchical, seamless form of global communication. But all that is changing, as governments, multinational companies and individuals battle for control over the digital landscape. Nations are arguing over how the Web should be governed and regulated, dragging old foreign-policy grudges into cyberspace.

It’s true.

The kosher phone is stripped down to its original function: making and receiving calls. There’s no text messaging, no Internet access, no video options, no camera. More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and other offerings are blocked.

Even more interesting - some Arab phone companies are also interested in the device for use by conservative Muslims.  Hey, anything that Israelis and Arabs can agree on can’t be all bad.

The Chinese government exerts quite a bit of control over the internet, but it’s inevitable (isn’t it?) that the technology will still greatly impact that society over time.  An article in the LA Times points out one example of the internet’s power.

…in today’s China, the freedom to speak one’s mind is increasing, especially in cyberspace. More than 110 million Chinese surf the Internet, and an estimated 20 million have become registered bloggers, said Fang Xingdong, founder and chief executive of Beijing-based Boke.com, which boasts 8 million bloggers since it went online in 2002.