September 2nd, 2011
2010 was a good year for Muse magazine. Three years after its launch, its mix of long features, short fiction and cultural criticism had earned it respect as one of Hong Kong’s most insightful cultural journals. It was sponsoring public lectures, film screenings and a search for Hong Kong’s up-and-coming cultural talents. In September, it made its first real foray into the digital world by launching an iPad edition.
So it came as a surprise when publisher Frank Proctor announced, at the end of the year, that the December edition would be Muse’s last.
“I didn’t see it coming,” says Leo Lee Ou-fan, a scholar of modern Chinese literature who wrote a regular column for Muse. “Muse had become Hong Kong’s representative to the outside world, but the sad part is that right at the point where it was being noticed, Frank couldn’t afford to continue.”
Three months later, another well-respected magazine, C for Culture, published its last issue. Both magazines had suffered from the same simple fate: they ran out of money. Loyal readers and cultural observers were left wondering: does Hong Kong have what it takes to support lively coverage of the arts? And without that coverage, can Hong Kong ever develop a mature artistic and intellectual culture?
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March 1st, 2011
Newsstands, Cusco
Few of the last ten years have passed without claims that yet another innovation — the rise of blogging, then microblogging, social networking, then the spread of smartphones, and, most recently, tablets — had the potential to reshape the way media is produced and consumed. The journalism world has been appropriately shaken and stirred: in the US, falling print revenues precipitated a “great magazine die-off“. Taken aback by the rate of change, “legacy” publishers continue scratching their heads in search of future profit models, while academics ponder whether anything resembling the traditional print publication can persist in the brave new world of incessantly streaming, instantly updated, massively mobilized media.
Sifting through this sea of speculation, it’s easy to forget how much of the planet has been left behind by the conversation — and the expensive technology by which it’s made possible. While it’s true that the explosive growth of some communications technologies has been so comprehensive as to reach even war-torn corners of the world (Mogadishu, of all places, boasts a startlingly sophisticated cell network), indicators of widespread internet connectivity — nevermind social networking — are much less evident. A map showing the connections forged by Facebook, for example, renders poorer parts of Africa and Asia as dark as empty oceans. While other social networks dominate some parts of the two continents, many areas are actually still terra incognita for the “world wide” web.
The existence of a “digital divide” has not gone unnoticed in the past. Still, many commentators have barely stopped to think about the impact of new technologies on far-flung regions before applying generalizing, “world is flat” thinking, not only assuming such tools’ widespread use, but crediting them for coincidental social movements, from the 2009 protests in Iran to the uprisings currently sweeping the Arab world. (It’s worth noting that only about 20,000 Iranians had Twitter accounts in 2009, and only 21% of Egyptians have internet access today. Numbers in Libya and Yemen are even lower. Even if some of the protests behind the recent revolutions were initially organized online, they were only won once offline populations had been urged — by other means — onto the streets.)
Unsurprisingly, the ocean of exuberant hype about new frontiers in tech leaves little room for discussion about the way media is experienced in the many niches where print still does reign supreme. It’s a disappointing trend, since it not only means that we often misperceive the ways such places receive and process information, but also the extent to which new media growth over the last decade has (or hasn’t) actually changed the now-wired world.
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March 27th, 2010
Kate McDonnell points the way to a promotional magazine published in 1964 to attract tourists to Montreal. It’s partly a snapshot of Montreal in the mid-60s, but also in large part an example of how the city was being branded and its image constructed in the years leading up to Expo 67.
The text is bilingual, but the English articles are often a perfunctory approximation of the French versions. There’s feature stories on the Museum of Fine Arts (“a bustling community centre for Montreal’s two cultures”), the booming business district (“the driving force of all Canada”) and the artificial islands being created for Expo (“the raising from the waters of new land in Man’s world”). Everything is written in a smart but unwaveringly optimistic language that comes across today as quaint and naive.
In 1964, Montreal was still on the cusp of modernity, its metro system under construction, its iconic skyscrapers still being dusted off. While a number of articles trade in the “France in North America” cliché that has served Montreal’s tourism industry since the birth of modern tourism, there’s more focus on the brute commercial and industrial marvels of a city that was still in its economic prime. In today’s tourist literature, the romantic French clichés remain, but any talk about train building and highway construction has been replaced by fuzzier praise for the city’s creativity and innovation in music or design.
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March 22nd, 2010
Earlier this week, in a Kwun Tong industrial building, three young people sat in a smoky studio talking about art, family and music. Every so often, they took a break and played a song from My Little Airport, an independent band known for its twee sound and ironic lyrics. After an hour and fifteen minutes — fifteen minutes longer than scheduled — they came out of the studio to make way for the next hosts.
All in all, a fairly ordinary night at Hong Kong’s newest radio station, FM 101, which launched last autumn and broadcasts both on the web and the FM dial. That wasn’t the case a week earlier.
On March 4th, police and officials from the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) forced their way into the studio and seized $20,000 worth of transmitting equipment. FM 101 is a pirate radio station that broadcasts without a licence, which means its hosts and guests run the risk of hefty fines and even jail time. The station’s founders say they are deliberately circumventing Hong Kong’s broadcast laws in an attempt to force the government to open the airwaves to small, non-profit radio stations.
“All I want is a place to play indie music,” said Leung Wing-lai, 28, a musician and one of the station’s founders. “It’s absurd that this is illegal.”
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October 20th, 2009
The basement of a shopping mall is the last place you’d expect to find the stirrings of a revolution, but that’s exactly what is happening in a tiny studio on the bottom floor of Langham Place. For the past year, Radio Dada has been dishing up indie music and irreverent discussion about Hong Kong arts and culture. Not only is this volunteer-run operation Hong Kong’s only independent radio station, its internet-based approach finally breaks free of the shackles that bind Hong Kong’s airwaves.
“Radio Dada is an experiment on how to build a radio station in Hong Kong,” says rapper and graffiti writer MC Yan, who is also the station’s musical director. “People are surprised that we do it without any money. But it’s not about money. It’s about freedom. Hong Kong is full of self-censorship, it’s way worse than in China. People here have no guts and no balls. We’re here to fix that.”
Despite Hong Kong’s reputation as a bastion of free expression, it’s actually illegal to run an independent radio station here. Only three radio stations — two of them commercial, one run by the government — are allowed to broadcast over the air. Nobody else has succeeded in getting a broadcast licence. In 2005, when a band of pro-democracy activists started a pirate station, Citizens’ Radio, that broadcast weekly political commentary, their offices were raided by police.
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July 23rd, 2009
Hong Kong’s government has finally decided that sacrificing its air quality in favour of cars, buses and trucks isn’t such a good thing after all. Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising departure from its reluctance to make big plans, the government pledged to fight roadside air pollution by revamping the city’s vast bus network, planting more trees, expanding bicycle infrastructure, creating “low-emission zones” in the city’s most congested areas and permanently pedestrianizing nearly two dozen streets. Emission standards would also be tightened for boats and private vehicles.
While details on many aspects of the plan have yet to be confirmed — and of course it’s still just a proposal, with no guarantee that any of it will be actually put into place — it has the potential to drastically improve the quality of life in Hong Kong’s central areas. In Mongkok, the network of pedestrian streets already in place would be expanded, while vehicles that do not meet the highest European emission standards, known as Euro IV, would be banned from the entire neighbourhood. Vehicular access outside the pedestrian areas would also be limited.
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March 27th, 2009
I never thought there could be another major newspaper that would make the Montreal Gazette seem hip and with-it — but then I started reading the South China Morning Post. Whereas the Gazette at least tries to overcome its fuddy-duddy image as the newspaper of record for grey-haired West Islanders (sometimes quite successfully, as in the case of On Two Wheels, its insightful bike blog, or Andy Riga’s new city life blog), the SCMP has almost willed itself into irrelevance. Its website still hides behind an overly-restrictive paywall and it has made only the most hesitant steps towards new media. What it desperately needs is something like the New York Times’ City Room, but the SCMP either doesn’t have the resources or the will to do that.
But there’s hope. Earlier this month, the SCMP teamed up with entrepreneur and cultural critic Sir David Tang to host a forum to discuss the future of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a government-led effort to turn a swath of reclaimed land into a centre for the arts. The forum will be led by a panel of international cultural elites (see below) but the public will be able to ask questions. Interestingly, the SCMP has asked readers to send in their questions via YouTube, and the best of these will be shown at the event. The response hasn’t been overwhelming, to say the least (just three people have posted videos so far), but at least it’s an opportunity for those who might not normally attend a forum like this to make themselves heard.
I’m tempted to post a question myself, if I can think of a way to boil down all of my concerts about West Kowloon into a single coherent sentence. The entire project is terribly misguided, an opinion shared by just about everyone but the government itself, and the current discussion is as much about how to avoid a complete disaster as it is to create a successful cultural district. The official plan calls for three large theatres, a 10,000-seat performance venue, four museums, an art exhibition centre and at least four public plazas. Unfortunately, if that’s the recipe, the final product will be an utterly indigestible mishmash of giant mega-projects, not a lively and creative neighbourhood. It’s a bureaucrat’s vision of culture, the skin without the bones, an entire neighbourhood of Lincoln Centres and Places des Arts.
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February 23rd, 2008
Chinese and English newspapers at a newsstand in Vancouver
When Sept Days sent Montreal journalist Xian Hu to Afghanistan last December, the weekly Chinese newspaper was not only making a statement to its competitors in the community here, but to mainstream newspapers as well.
“We want Montreal to know that the Chinese community wants to integrate into society,” said the newspaper’s publisher, Ling Yin, and part of that involves giving Chinese immigrants an opportunity to debate national issues like the Afghanistan mission in their own language.
“Our initial goal was to see, from our own eyes, what the NATO and Canadian troops are doing there. We don’t want to hear just from La Presse or The Gazette, we don’t want to know what the so-called mainstream is saying, we want to know ourselves,” she said.
Rather than send Hu to cover Canada’s military operations in Kandahar, Yin decided that it would be more effective to send her to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, to hear from ordinary Afghans what they thought of international reconstruction efforts and life after the Taliban.
For the 54-year-old Hu, who had no experience in journalism before joining Sept Days, the trip was a revelation.
“I was shocked. I thought it would be more developed, especially after six years of reconstruction,” she said. Her experience was made all the more tangible by the fact that, rather than living in a hotel for the week she spent in the country, she stayed in the houses of “friends of friends of friends” and explored the city to speak with ordinary Afghans about their experiences.
Her journey gave Hu enough material for two feature articles, one that looked at how Afghans perceived reconstruction efforts and another that examined why Afghan women continue to wear the burqa.
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