Text messaging: the new tool for democracy?

People power ousted Estrada in the Philippines, and popular protests in China that the government has a hard time controlling how they are organized both share one thing in common: they were organized by text messaging on mobile phones.

As of 2005, 27% of China were the owners of mobile phones, which allows for far more expression than e-mails that are censored or blocked by a regime that closely monitors its critics, who are usually viewed as synonymous with dissenters. As of 2006, the Philippines, a country with only 2 million Internet users and 3 million land phone users, had over 30 million mobile phone users, many of whom can multi-task anything they do while text messaging in one hand without even looking at the screen.

It is this extreme familiarity with the technology that helps people overcome the censorship of the news media, even in places like North Korea where some 20,000 mobile phones are smuggled in and used as a primary source of news about the outside world that the DPRK wants none of its citizens to be familiar with in order to protect its regime. Even the most outspoken blogger cannot compete with international text messaging when his or her blog is subject to being blocked or even shut down with heavy Internet censorship.

But development is not what causes people to resort to text messaging to spread information or organize protests: South Korea, which has over half of its population connected to high-speed Internet connections, still has an obvious divide between the people and the information. According to Cathy Hong of the online edition of Christian Science Monitor:

In South Korea, for example, many experts agree that current President Roh Moo Hyun would not have been elected without the help of the Internet and SMS. Back in December 2002, conservative mainstream media favored his rival Lee Hoi Chang to win the election, especially when a former rival who had endorsed Mr. Roh unexpectedly withdrew his support on the eve of Election Day. But Roh's core supporters, who were of the younger "information technology" generation, launched a massive last-minute campaign. They fired off e-mails and text messages to 800,000 voters on the morning of election day, urging them to go to the polls. Source: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-30-politics-text-tool_x.htm?csp=34

So even with greater access to technology, text messaging is now in of itself a necessary tool for the spread of information, especially with technology like the Apple iPhone which grants Internet access for direct access to news articles online that are complementary to people who have configured their mobile phones to receive news via long or multiple text messages. The mobile phone is an important tool in Africa as it is the one piece of technology that links everyone together, especially when farmers in the rural countryside get actual prices from friends or relatives in the city via text messages so that they do not get cheated out of their earnings from the agents who come to pick up their goods to sell to the city and give their own daily prices.

The downside to people text messaging is the limitations on characters each text message. People do not necessarily utilize the dictionary tool, but their abbreviations sometimes habitually end up in written form, including people occasionally writing words such as "2gthr" under the strains of in-class writing assignments, such as in the Philippines.

Beyond text messaging, mobile phone technology has had its own fair share of scandals, from the Tammy Nyp scandal in Singapore of February 2006 when a student's phone was stolen and erotic movies of her and her boyfriend saved on the phone were sent to multiple people and even uploaded to the Internet, despite Singapore's strict controls and censorship. Furthermore, some debates are going on about having mobile phones with cameras being allowed in places such as locker rooms, and security measures need to be taken into consideration amidst the advent of mobile technology, as it is much easier to snap a photo or record a movie of classified information and send it long before being caught.

Not to totally dismiss the use of the video and camera function of mobile phones however is the video below uploaded to youtube of one of many instances in which students have taken video recordings of abuses by teachers. One case in Taiwan caused an uproar and debates on the subject of corporal punishment in Taiwan, available in BBC's archive at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4378412.stm.



Mobile phones have already penetrated popular culture as much as the Internet has, possibly even deeper considering their ease of use and wider user base. Movies such as Japanese horror film One Missed Call show creative interpretations of mobile phone use, such as its plot about a ring tone that plays and leaves a prophetic message of the listener's own voice and approaching death by supernatural means.

Perhaps in the near-future, there may be stricter controls over the content of mobile technology and capability as governments are wary of their people's creative use of the technology, especially when terrorists potentially use text messaging to organize or plan attacks. There is also the potential for governments to take a page from the Israeli government, who in 1996 planted a bomb in the mobile phone of Palestinian suicide bombing mastermind Yahya Ayyash which resulted in his assassination.

So in the age of information and misinformation, we see a new field that is still in its developmental stages in the form of mobile technology, especially having seen what its potential can already do. Just don't go expecting your phone to explode in your face

More articles about the text messaging phenomenon

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-30-politics-text-tool_x.htm?csp=34

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/25/news/internet.php

http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2005/11/010591.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/24/AR2006082401379.html

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1176738,00.html

http://www.bulatlat.com/news/4-25/4-25-texters.html

http://www.time.com/time/asia/asiabuzz/2001/01/23/

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/Mobile-rings-changes-for-worlds-poor/2005/04/21/1114028473872.html

When you're a jet, you're a jet all the way-- or are you?

“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day” go the lyrics of the famous song from the classic American musical, Westside Story. That seems to be akin to the popular attitude with westerners towards religion. If you are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, you subscribe exclusively to that faith, any taint of belief in similar concepts such as Karma is to Buddhism as Providence is to Christianity results in conservative religious fundamentalists denouncing those who believe in false scripture, in spite of existing similarities.

But come over to the Asia Pacific region, especially in Southeast Asia and Japan, it is a different story altogether. Historically, many traditions reveal that the understanding of the world in both Southeast Asia and Japan did not distinguish between the sacred and the profane, as spirituality was part of their everyday life. Such spiritual traditions are varied and diverse.

One example shows how shamans and ancestral worship are important, such as going to shamans to communicate with ancestral spirits in order to find out what makes grandma so angry that she takes it out on the family by preventing a young couple from bearing any children. Another important example are rites and rituals such as mamemaki in Japan that is celebrated on the day of setsubun, setsubun referring to the day just before the beginning of each new season, and mamemaki performed by throwing soybeans out the door to cast away evil spirits from the previous season and prevent new ones from coming into the next. Most noticeably even today is the penchant for spiritual protection in the form of amulets and other lucky charms which people carry around for good luck or protection. But what happened to these when the advent of exclusive religions such as Christianity came when Europeans did, as well as the attitudes of little or no tolerance for traditional beliefs and superstitions?

Some current arguments show that in these cultures, there is no separation of culture and religion, because religion is part of their culture; it was what defined their outlook on life and was the basis of all their activities, from music in sacred rituals to government structure, such as the way Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple was built to replicate the cosmic home of the Gods. So even when you have a high concentration of Islam in Indonesia or Christianity in the Philippines (yet some superstitions still remain especially in the form of amulets for good luck), how does this work out?

Here’s the thing: those beliefs never left with the arrival of the religions of the west. There is a western misconception that these traditional belief systems worship a wide pantheon of gods and do not respect the authority of a supreme deity above all, which is actually far from it.

The issue is not really a matter of inconsistent spiritual practices and religious beliefs, but a matter of definition and level of involvement. In the West, people tend to view religion as synonymous with the institutions that represent it and thus can eliminate it from their daily lives since they can separate themselves from it due to separation of the sacred and profane, especially with people feeling a greater attachment and more relief from the Almighty Dollar or science as a way of explaining how things work or even manipulating nature. Coupled with the fact people don’t feel too happy about church on Sundays asking for donations and thus taking away money, their source of comfort and society’s life blood, we can see why the spiritual realm of the gods has a limited role in society, even though the dollar says, “In God We Trust.”

Back East, however it is another story. An interesting discovery pointed out by UCLA history professor Herman Ooms shows that in a consensus of religions in Japan, 140% of the population are listed as Buddhist. Where does the other 40% come from if 100% is supposed to be the entire population? The answer is quite interesting: people checked off more than one box identifying which religion they felt they were, and the majority felt sympathetic towards Buddhism, practiced Shinto rituals, and got married in western-style Christian weddings. So interestingly enough, a person who checked off these three choice can theoretically be practicing three religions, which is difficult for a westerner to fathom if he believes that religion is a set path to meeting the Supreme Being, and we can only walk one path, not multiple.

In the value system back East however, this is not what religion is, since there is a very thin line between religion and culture as noted earlier. Though difficult to convey, essentially there are categories of importance in terms of spirituality that all fall under the overall belief system of these societies. Fellow history professor at UCLA Geoffrey Robinson on a visit to Indonesia wondered how a Muslim family in Indonesia was able to practice a ritual that could essentially be classified as ancestor worship in spite of the popular understanding that Islam was a strict religion with no tolerance like its brother Christianity. To the family who explained this to him, they felt that it had no conflict with Islam at all, that it was simply a part of their tradition to honor their ancestors. The key word here is “tradition.” Much like the Chinese in Hong Kong who use Feng Shui to make use of the sacred geometry of the universe for luck and prosperity who find nothing wrong with their conscience on the way to church Sundays, these practices would best be understood as traditions or superstitions in western eyes. Professor Herman Ooms, on a trip to Japan before, once asked a lady if they actually believed in the rituals they practiced, in going to graveyards for people to pay respect to ancestors, or in the good luck charms that people buy. Her response said it all about religion and culture: “Do you believe in Santa Claus?”

In a sense, people become too attached to tradition that it loses meaning, much like going to church becomes routine and it is no longer a spiritual day that reminded people of the powers that be. Why is Sunday in the United States a day when banks are closed and people somehow feel lazier than any other day of the week? Why does it seem weird to open up a drawer in a motel or hotel and not find a Bible placed by the Gideons? It is when the religion becomes so enmeshed in the culture that the culture takes it in without needing the religion to justify or explain it, since it becomes the norm.

Pay attention the next time you go to Borders bookstore and look by the cashier to see such novelties such as Buddha-in-a-box or a miniature Zen garden and more to decorate your desktops as well as offer a little more enlightenment. Why be a Jet when you can be whomever you want to be and reap the benefits of it all, just like the Japanese and most people in Southeast Asia do?

The Tesseract of Globalization

Put several squares together and fold them up, and you will have a cube. If you were one of the imagined Flatlanders from Edwin A. Abbot's 19th century literary classic Flatland, you would be bound to the Second Dimension and only be able to imagine those several squares to idealize what a cube would look like, but never truly know it until you have experienced it. Our own situation here is trying to understand the concept of the hypercube through the tesseract, an unraveled hypercube, which exists in the fourth dimension, one dimension over us. Like a Flatlander bound to the second dimension, he can only imagine several squares combining to form a cube, but can never truly fathom the cube without experiencing beyond his dimensional prison.

Keeping with this metaphor and knowing that globalization is an inescapable truth that only becomes harder to deny, we still find ourselves trapped in understanding the world through our default categorizations as we visualize a superficial world through our limited understanding, whether it comes from a lack of information due to the filtering of what is available by hiding it from us, or by what is highlighted for us.

But in spite of all the images on TV, the Internet, magazines, and the accounts of others, we have to remember that this is only a fraction of the other world we have not experienced; like a Flatlander cannot imagine a cube because he only understands the square, we cannot understand this hypercube of reality solely based on the information out there, no matter how much detail we have.

Whether it is an Indonesian nationalist's account of his country's history, or a socialist reporter's understanding of outsourcing in the People's Republic of China and its effect on workers' wages and conditions, there are many truths that are out there they are eager to reveal, but it is their perspectives that create the biases that are evident in their choice of replicating their experiences; from these accounts come a false picture of reality that has some truth in it and is thus only a fraction of what's really out there.

Whether it is Noam Chomsky's conspiracy theories or Tom Plate's chaos theories on popular news media, both cases illustrate the potential for misrepresentation of the world through the media, as well as inherent cultural biases that influence the cultural insensitivity that prevents adequate research and choice of words.

In the case of Noam Chomsky's conspiracy theories, it is believed that the news media deliberately attempts to maintain the status quo as it is influenced by the dollars of the consumers who buy the products from the corporatioons who bombard them with advertisements and control what the media focuses on through corporate sponsorship. In making the real world issues of ongoing genocides or human trafficking less significant by allocating less time to them and more time to sporting events, people are bred to become apathetic machines who consume and consume like animals in a farm. So in this case, it is lack of time given for actual thought as well as limited information which leads to hardly a fragment of the overall picture of reality. The metaphor here is a used-car salesman trying to sell a car for more than it's worth: he cheats the customer by withholding information of better deals or vehicles found elsewhere, and lies about his credibility, achieving the effect of limiting the consumer's choice and making him believe that it is also the best choice.

In the case of Tom Plate's strong case for chaos theory, the news media is definitely influenced by consumer dollars and corporate sponsors, but not to the extent that people are mindless slaves: more specifically, it can simply be explained that it is a matter of stupidity, not sin. From the space restrictions, the rushed editing jobs, lack of sleep from the reporters and editors, as well as differing educational backgrounds and different needs of the audiences, sponsors, and bureaucracy, the real issue is the chaos that arises from an entire organization trying to both earn money and please everyone at the same time, which is a very obvious case that explains why the world is difficult to grasp from the news stories and images that we are fed. The metaphor here is of an office secretary being told to multi-task and accomplish several objectives within a five-minute time frame, from making 200 copies of one document, faxing another one, making a new pot of coffee, answering and connecting an expected phone call to her boss, as well as dealing with any other assignments that come in: this high level of expectation and small time frame is what causes many people to get annoyed when mistakes happen during any of the tasks or if any of them are not completed.

With two proposed reasons for the misinformation fed our way, whichever you choose to believe is one thing, but the important thing to know is that we can not wholly rely on the news media for our world understanding. Thinking critically from the information we receive is one thing, but knowing that there is plenty of information out there to dig through is another thing; the lack of time (or interest for many) prevents us from getting a better perspective that comes from looking through that myriad of information. Suffice to say, we all live on the same planet earth, which is the same shape and size it has been for millions of years, but we all live in our own different worlds, based on different experiences and subjective understandings of what the world is, or whatever it happens to be, if there is any objectivity at all.

Brain drain: Manila’s finest don’t live there anymore, nor do they want to

The first time I dropped out of university was probably one of the better decisions I’ve made in my life.

The travel advisory currently issued on the Philippines by the U.S. government meant that UCLA had cut off its Education Abroad Program in the Philippines for fear of sending students to their untimely demise. However, the university UCLA is affiliated with there is reputable, so I will withhold its name out of respect for the institution.

Ignoring post-9/11 norms of paranoia, I went there independently to study for their first semester to see what life in a local university—the most prestigious public university with many Filipino intellectuals as its alma matter, including former president Fidel Ramos—would be like through the eyes of a self-proclaimed citizen of the world who could survive in any environment, thus influencing my (perhaps misguided) attempt to live and study like the typical Filipino student.

An entire semester of tuition for a local (lucky for me, I am a dual citizen and have an apartment there) was approximately $70 U.S.; some of my textbooks at UCLA cost more than this. And in a country with English as the other official language, I wouldn’t have to worry about learning another language, making it fare more attractive to earn credits and save on tuition, and comparatively cheaper than studying in England, which even former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once jokingly remarked about America and Britain, “it is the English language that divides us.”

Churchill could not have been more prophetic about my experiences in the language divide in Manila: I survived for three weeks before wisely abandoning my futile attempts at university life, since we all knew English, but spoke another language entirely, preventing us from seeing eye-to-eye.

On the first day, in spite of looking the same and dressing down to fit in with the other students in a country where the average family’s income converts to just a little over $3,100 U.S., I stood out like a marshmallow floating in a cup of hot chocolate, and I’m not white.

There was something about me that caused everyone to pay attention to me, even while hiding my California accent, wearing sunglasses to avoid direct eye contact, and shuffling my feet like everyone else did instead of hurrying off to class. Perhaps it was my obvious surprised reaction to a snake coming out of the toilet when I went to relieve myself, which everyone else laughed at and shrugged it off as the janitor was called who himself took a nonchalant approach as he went to remove it, everyone seeing it as just another thing that happens, much like overgrown grass in the floors and trees all coming into parts of the building.

My cover being blown already, I was thankful that my professors let me know that I would not receive any special privilege for being an American. Instead I get stigmatized.

Looking for the non-existent textbook store, I was instead pointed in the direction of the long hallway of Xerox copying stalls, having to go to several in order to obtain copies of entire books as my assigned readings. A handful of texts fresh off the copier, I can only describe the long march between buildings as equivalent to crossing deserts, even when riding overcrowded jeeps and squishing between hot, sweaty people.

My second day of classes, a syllabus was then distributed, followed by the assignment of groups and topics. Group work already? Okay, I can deal. I was part of a group they jokingly nicknamed “United Nations” due to my partner being half-Armenian, but already a third-generation Filipino. We did our research and picked a presentation date, and I did the same for my other two classes, which followed a suspiciously similar pattern of topics and assigning of groups.

It turned out to be a very popular university professor’s technique in the Philippines: getting paid to be a teacher who does not teach. They introduce the subject material, then assign topics after the one or two week introduction for student groups to research and present to the class for the rest of the semester, criticizing students for not presenting what the professors would emphasize had they been giving the lecture.

In a history class, students were told to read chapters, with each group presenting a few chapters and themes, getting awarded higher grades for giving snacks and theatrical presentations. In a chemistry class, when a professor spent half an hour wondering why her equation was wrong got embarrassed when my friend, a visiting white guy from Massachusetts, said that she had it wrong because it was upside down, and left the class saying that since we understood the subject material so well, she wouldn’t have to explain it anymore. This is when he got screwed over for homework and became the enemy of the students.

By the end of my third week, I jumped ship and had an extensive talk with my long-time mentor from Boston living in Manila in a self-imposed exile, who had spent time as both a professor and student in that university, saying that his time there in the 1970s was exactly the same, and praised me for being wiser than him in my choice of dropping out instead of dragging out a semester, like he did for two years.

The basic formula ended up like this: teachers don’t earn enough money, so why waste effort on teaching? Let the students pay them to be just as unhappy. The students, however, are to be praised for being ruthless and enduring four or more long years of this in attempts to improve their family’s place in society. A sad fact of life there is that moving up in society is either marrying an American or moving the U.S. And if staying in the Philippines means ending up being overworked, underpaid, and not appreciated turns once-hopeful students into bitter professors, then we can see why the conditions of Manila are pushing out these promising and hardworking individuals who slave through systems similar to this university in attempts to rise above their conditions and class. Until they find reasons to stay and contribute instead of looking for greener pastures such as the U.S., Manila only loses its potential every year.

Women in Southeast Asia: another status quo

Before the advent of Europeans and Christianity, Confucianism and cholera, women in Southeast Asia until the late 16th century were equal to men, and many times even above them in traditional societies. Believe it or not, this is history. It is hard to believe when the region of Southeast Asia is plagued with social and developmental problems, as well as being the hotspot where the most international human trafficking and sex slaves are found in the world. Amidst these and religious conflict or political turmoil and corruption, Southeast Asians can look back at history and hold their heads up high even by pointing to current events in comparison to the west.

How many leaders in the west have been women in the past 20 years, besides New Zealand's Helen Clark and the United Kingdom's Margaret Thatcher as each country's former prime ministers? Not too many, compared to Corey Aquino of the Philippines and today's Gloria Arroyo, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma/Myanmar, and Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, amongst many names. When people talk of how these societies are backwards and women are unequal, amidst sex slaves and religious extremism forcing women to cover themselves, they really miss the bigger picture. It is a paradox to understanding this when women can find themselves at the bottom of the social hierarchy yet be at the top of the political chain of command, but this is nothing strange to the people who live in these societies.

Even historically, women have traditionally held much higher importance in Southeast Asian societies than men, for they controlled trade in the marketplace since men were out sailing, were leaders many times since rulers simply had to prove that the Gods favored them, preferred over men as palace guards in some old sultanates since they were seen as more trustworthy and less likely to seize power in a coup d'etat, diplomatic relations since men were seen as too brash to be rational when trying to make peace, and most importantly were their religious leaders according to traditional animist and shamanistic beliefs, related to their sensitivity to life for bearing children parallel to their sensitivity to the spiritual world. And amazingly, they controlled the househould as well, even drawing the attention of Chinese traveler Zhou DaGuan who observed that "men should expect their women to seek company in their bedchambers from others if they were to abandon their women for more than ten days, for women had their needs and men had their responsibility to meet these needs..."

All of this changed when Christianity came with Europeans to much of Southeast Asia (namely the Philippines and Eastern Indonesia, plus pockets of Vietnam), and China with Confucianism to most of Vietnam. With their traditional beliefs being forsaken and de-sanctified by Spanish missionaries who would urinate and defecate on Philippine idols telling them that their gods were dead, people watched the status quo reverse, with men becoming priests and women becoming nothing but child-bearers. In Vietnam, women became housewives as well, for Confucianism and its social relations dictated women had to submit to men, namely their husbands. By the end of the 16th century, women were not in the best position they could be in.

Fast forward to the twentieth century with all the developmental problems and armed ethnic and religious conflicts. Fighting wars over centuries-old conflicts seems to imply that these folks in Southeast Asia seem to be the kids you just can't keep your eyes off of for more than a minute before they jump at each other's throats. Far from it.

Brad Pitt once said that war was "old men talking and young men fighting", but when you look at the iron ladies of Southeast Asia, they call the shots and they haven't called off their soldiers, leaving more men to die. Goodbye loyal customers in the Southeast Asian sex trade? Nah, we have western sex tourists coming in and out for their fix. Plus, they make more money off of westerners since they charge them more than they charge locals. Women are back in the marketplace as well, since it's harder for a western tourist to bargain with a pretty young girl who pretends that she doesn't understand his English as she proceeds to rip him off before a kid on the streets steals his thinner wallet. Finally, before he goes home, a nice Filipina Catholic nun can send him off to a confession booth so not only what happens in Southeast Asia stay in Southeast Asia, but he can be forgiven by a legitimate organization as well, making it that much easier to forget.

Okay, all of these are facetious comments, but the end result is, you can't categorize where women in Southeast Asia stand in the social ladder in modern times that easily, considering their political roles today and historical roles in the past. But what can be said about women in Southeast Asia today is that they have by far some of the biggest tolerance and strength of will to endure centuries of the ever-shifting status quo. If you think Asian women are submissive, stay away from Southeast Asia.

If Asians can think, then can Americans learn geography?

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Donald Rumsfeld at Department of Defense news briefing Feb. 12, 2002, available at http://www.slate.com/id/2081042

Donald Rumsfeld left out a very-often unmentioned type of known here: the unknown known, the things we don't know that we know. This is a fundamental flaw in a world where we are overloaded with communication, particularly with the advent of the Internet. It is not that we are missing the fundamental facts; it is that we are not looking at the big picture and putting the pieces of the puzzle together!

Don't lose too much hope, though. We don't know how to make the pieces fit because we don't know what the solution is or what the big picture should look like, though we like to hypothesize.

Take the American surprise at the global rise of China over the past 20 years: unless you were actively questioning the way the American media categorized China as pinko commies with a complete disregard for individual freedom, you would never guess they would suddenly grow into a big player on the world stage. All the information was there, but not all of it was presented to Americans.

Now, if you were a Sinophile, you would surf the Net for all things China-related, and you would be a fool to limit yourself to American news sources (especially if you limited yourself to English language sources as well).

One way to explain the phenomenon of why many were surprised was that the news media was portraying a different picture and limited our potential for understanding and making our own conclusions, due to foreign policy and cultural biases. If you're not angry about being lied to, maybe you should be: the majority of the American news media today tends to strongly emphasize conflicts of development and corrupt government officials and synthesizing it with Asia's economic "miracle" in an attempt to show what the price of progress is in the region.

But you should also probably be a little more sympathetic towards Americans and their media instead of outraged, considering:

1) the United States is a big country with so much going on that people tend to only care about what goes on in their community, and if anything more, what their State and Federal government affairs mean to them;

2) the information is there, but that doesn't mean they'll read it or access it;

3) alternatively, they may not even have the means to access all the information, such as the non-tech-savvy and those who can't read (illiteracy is still common); and

4) how much does a West Virginia coal miner care about the new independence of East Timor, let alone why should he care when it may have no effect on his life whatsoever?

Now to totally throw that one around by reiterating the earlier statement of the unknown known: there are things we don't know that we know, and it can and will hurt us because we don't prepare for it. Biggest example: all the information for 9/11 led up to it, but it was virtually ignored because it was categorized as low-priority by the higher echelons of national security, and through that perspective, we didn't expect to be attacked, yet we knew we were going to be attacked. To hit a little harder, the Detroit automobile manufacturing industry didn't know how bad Japan's rise would affect them and destroy their industry.

Fact of the matter is, we should care about Asia. We should learn Mandarin Chinese and Japanese (and potentially Korean soon) for business and political reasons (and because your boss may just speak one of those as his or her mother tongue), plus because it gives us access to information that is not limited by our English. We know that it's important because we don't know what can happen, and though we do know that the less we know, the stupider we feel when someone tells us that the Philippines is in Asia, not Latin America.

A tribute to the best waste of time: celebrities

When people pry themselves off of their blogs and online communities, it's a bit hard to find out what's going on in the streets outside of their apartment highrise since they're disconnected from word of mouth. They are not, however, altogether hopeless, as the Internet is another privilleged resource for their daily dose of wasting time. After all, there are incentives to traverse the streets of Hong Kong and New Delhi, amidst the aroma of stinky tofu and chicken curry, amidst the hustle and bustle of crowded streets and city lights. Some of those incentives are entertainment, and what better incentive than entertainers themselves?

If love can move mountains, then sex can shake the foundations of reality and the universe. And this isn't pornography, this is sex appeal, coming from beauty. Who better else than perhaps the world's most beautiful woman, Aiswhwarya Rai? Bollywood's biggest starlet and former 1994 Miss World, has a myriad of fans worldwide, and the websites keep on coming. Aishwarya forever is no exception to this, with a site that collects all of her filmography, interviews, pictures, a message board for all her followers, and news updated daily, those who need their quick fix can head over to http://www.aishwarya-forever.com/home.html. Leave the curry in the oven; it should be ready once you come back from the video rental store with a handful of her awe-inspiring movies. Even for those who don't want to spend time navigating the site, the bar at the top has splash images to give would-be viewers a look at the stunning actress. The archive of files are always growing, with contributions from site members not just limited to news bulletins or message board posts, making it a very inviting site for one-time visitors and enticing for regulars.

Not to leave out the opposite sex (or those who just admire the masculine abstract as opposed to the feminine divine), there is Chinese-American superstar celebrity based in Hong Kong, Daniel Wu, with his own equally devout following of fans and just as many sites. Although the site has more of a teenage girl's blog, it is the most informative with news updates by a dedicated host and a growing photo archive. Let the married women turn the other way as they hide their ring-bearing fingers when Daniel Wu graces their computer screens, and do yourself a favor by preparing for it when you check him out at the most resourceful site on Daniel Wu on the Internet, at http://inlovewithdanwu.50webs.com/. Although not as inviting since it does not allow for the interaction the way Aishwarya's site does beyond its tagboard (like a comment guestbook but not a message board), as posts and updates are made by the webmaster herself(?), though some of the pictures and news posts are contributed by regular visitors, but they are not allowed to post on their own, since they rely on e-mailing the webmaster who credits their discoveries every time the sightings are posted. One gripe about the photo gallery is that it is linked to a Yahoo! photo album, which is understandable for the frugal webmaster who is dedicating the time and money to the site for your viewing pleasure.