Seriously – they weren’t 16? Great blog here detailing the hacking. The internet does appear to be forever, even in China.
China
“Psychopathology of Anonymous EFL China Teacher Forums”
A surprisingly interesting blog post:
The Psychology of Cyberspace
Dr. John Suler, a clinical psychologist, computer enthusiast and professor at Rider University in New Jersey has written prolifically about the psychology of cyberspace. In his book of the same name, he offers some very thought-provoking questions for us to consider1:
Does online anonymity and freedom of access encourage antisocial personalities?
Do narcissistic people use the access to numerous relationships as a means to gain an admiring audience?
Do people with dissociative personalities tend to isolate their cyberspace life from their face-to-face lives? Do they tend to engage in the creation of multiple and distinct online identities?
Are schizoid people attracted to the reduced intimacy resulting from online anonymity? Are they lurkers?
Do manic people take advantage of asynchronous communication as a means to send measured responses to others, or do they naturally prefer the terse, immediate, and spontaneous conversations of chat and IM?
Are compulsives generally drawn to computers & cyberspace for the control it gives them over their relationships and environment?
Do histrionic people enjoy the opportunities for theatrical displays that are possible in online groups, especially in environments that provide software tools for creative self-expression?
After five years of being a member of, as well as managing, a couple of EFL forums for foreign teachers in China, I’d say the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. The problem, as I see it, is a multifaceted one.
As discussed in the aforementioned article, foreign teachers in China can accurately be thought of as an oppressed group who engage in negative behaviors towards each other that are collectively referred to as “horizontal violence.”2 These behaviors include but are not limited to devaluing, discouraging, scapegoating, backstabbing, sabotaging, cheating, exploiting, and conspiring. To varying degrees, depending on the particular individuals involved, these behaviors are tempered or constrained through face-to-face contacts and the eventual establishment of personal acquaintanceships. However, the anonymity that the Internet provides induces what researchers refer to as the “online disinhibition effect.”3 That is, in the absence of face-to-face contact and under the veil of anonymity, these aggressive behaviors become uninhibited and are unleashed—and clear evidence of this can be found not only among these forums’ registered members but among their moderators and administrators as well. To the degree that the “fellow patients” are running the “asylum,” so to speak, these forums can be (and typically are) very toxic environments, psychologically speaking.
Thinking About Blogging
To blog is to desire a certain communion with others – an exchange of ideas. On the other hand, it is a remarkable tool of the free market, the open marketplace of ideas. Communal and individual are tensions explored by Isaac Mao in a Guardian interview “China’s first blogger.” Mao’s analysis is a thoughtful self-examination and an optimistic interpretation of both blogging and China’s future, which he sees blogging as playing a part in advancing. We are from a culture that prizes individualism highly; his analysis comes from a different perspective. As Mao notes
Mud Buns
The Chinese government have shown themselves to be bunch of peasants with dung on their boots when it comes to international propaganda. The term in Chinese is “tu bao tz” (土包å) – pork buns (bao tz) made out of dirt.
Forget Yang Pei Yi (楊沛宜) and Lin Miao Ke (林妙å¯) – well, mostly. Forget the CGI fireworks. Forget that the enormous number of people used in the opening ceremony were from PLA song and dance troupes.
The big scandal of this Olympics isn’t even that that China promised to clean up its act (and its air) when the games were awarded, and this is exactly not what we are getting.
The big scandal is that China is showing us just exactly why investment there is still risky; why the “golden opportunity” everyone seems to be thinking lurks in China’s market is as frail as a butterfly. The Chinese government still has its fingers in every aspect of society, and that makes the shift from stable to unstable business environment just a power struggle away.
America’s Alliance with Taiwan
In the recent article of “Strategy and Tactics”, an excellent magazine that I highly recommend, they discussed the threat from China with a sobering assessment of the potential outcome of a war between the USA and China over Taiwan. China’s military is becoming more and more effective each year as the country gets richer, and China’s technical capabilities are increasing by the day (think of how much of your electronics are “Made in China”). As I read through the article I thought of all the casualties our carrier and air forces would suffer while repelling a Chinese attack across the Straits of Formosa, the open ocean separating Taiwan from the mainland, even in the “best case” scenario.
At the end of the article I had what was, for me, kind of a heretical thought:
“Why are we even in this alliance with Taiwan, anyways, and is it worth a war against China?”
In the past Taiwan has been seen, rightly so, as a bulwark against Communist expansion. In the years following WW2, when the Communists took power in China (in the late 1940’s), the USA was looking for dedicated friends in the region, not only for Allied troops but for bases that could be used to counter the Communist threat (both Russia and China).
Over the years, however, the situation has changed. China has gone from being a nearly-insane, Mao led “cultural revolution” type of society to one that is fiercely free-market based and where most forms of expression, with the exception of political discourse, is not too severely repressed.
Hong Kong was integrated into the fold, and while human rights haven’t increased in that country, they haven’t noticeably decreased, either. Certainly the hand off went pretty smoothly, much better than the doomsayers (such as myself) would have predicted.