In a move to exert greater control on citizen speech online, the government is requiring that Sina Weibo and China’s other microblogs register the real names and identification cards of users in several cities. Those who do not register this week in many major cities like Beijing will not be allowed to share or forward posts; after a period of testing, the policy will go into effect nationwide.

Translation: Real Name Registration

As Ethan Zuckerman blogged earlier (my response here), Sina Weibo and other Chinese social media are scarcely studied in English-language academia.  He conjectures that part of this is likely an assumption that the spaces are censored to the point of lacking character.  I certainly had that assumption before diving into the Chinese social media sphere.

But as Tricia and try to show in our essay, this assumption just isn’t right:

Despite these challenges [of censorship], many still make efforts to post critical messages, which are scattered amidst the plethora of apolitical posts. Clever users rely on code words, pictures, image-based text and viral memes that evade the keyword algorithms and pass undetected under the watchful eyes of censors.

It’s incredibly lively out there, and there’s plenty of political and social critique.  But there’s also regular fun, like sharing pictures of cute cats and spreading memes about celebrities.  All of this is threatened by real name registration going into effect–it’s just not as fun to share without anonymity.  And for those engaging in political critique, it can also be dangerous.

This meme, which I found floating around Sina Weibo, explains the realities of real name registration. The figure up top shows what's possible with a registered ID: forwarding, commenting and private messages. The bottom basically says you can only see what everyone's saying. But you can't speak.

For the sake of brevity, Tricia and I left out a number of compelling examples of how users are engaging in critical issues each day.  Here are some fantastic examples of how social and political critique happens online:

Dalian Protests: The summer protests against a chemical plant in the northeastern city of Dalian were sparked by fears that a storm could cause the plant to leak toxic chemicals. Some 12,000 city residents used Weibo and other social media to organize the march and post pictures from the actions.

Save the Child Beggars: Take the common practice of posting “instant photos,” which Tricia wrote about previously in the context of dating. These instant photos have been turned into a digital Amber Alert of sorts. A popular Sina Weibo account, called “Instant Photos to Save the Child Beggars”, posts and forwards user-submitted pictures to more than 200,000 followers. The images show children begging on the streets, and the account aims to tap into Weibo’s broad network to unite them with their parents.

Free Lunch Movement: Crowdfunders familiar with Donors Choose and Kickstarter will understand actions like the free lunch movement, launched by hundreds of Chinese journalists. Leveraging Weibo, the group raised a reported 20 million yuan, or 3.79 million dollars, to provide free lunches for school children in China’s lowest-income areas.

As a designer and artist, I also can’t help but admire the design strategies that netizens use to evade censorship and spread political messages. I just reviewed an exhibition of politically-themed posters from the 60s and 70s in California and was realizing there’s so much overlap and shared graphic language between today’s political memes and yesterday’s political/activist posters.

Many of those posters became memes in themselves–remixed and redistributed and even crowdsourced (albeit on a smaller scale). I keep collecting images I come across on Sina Weibo and maybe one day could turn them into some kind of exhibition. There’s a certain craft, if not an art, to developing an effective political meme, and Chinese netizens certainly have it down.  (I’ll be discussing this more at ROFLCon in a few months, but in the mean time, you can view my Chinese Meme Report on 88 Bar for more.)

One of my favorite images from the "Beijing Fashion Week" meme, which panned officials at China's annual political summit who were wearing luxury fashion. This image of Xu Jiayin and his Hermes belt went viral. Xu is a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

What has the effect of real name registration been so far?  I chatted with a friend of mine in China who said that it’s becoming like LinkedIn, which is to say that the liveliness and color of the space is rendered dry, professional and harmless.  I’ve certainly seen evidence of that myself.

But I also know China’s netizens aren’t going to back down so easily. They’ve found a number of creative ways around the already stringent censorship techniques, and they’ll eventually find a way around this one.  There are already a number of strategies floating around online.  It will be very interesting to see how netizens sidestep this latest effort in controlling digital media. But their efforts will no doubt be limited, and the amazing conversations and creativity on Weibo that emerged in 2011 could be just a blip in China’s social media history as everything is placed under tighter control.

I’ll end this post with words from Yu Guoming, deputy dean of the School of Journalism at Renmin University in Beijing (one of China’s most prestigious universities).  In the party-owned Global Times, he wrote the following:

It is true that the coming of microblog has posted tough challenges to traditional governance. A competent government could learn how to deal with it while improving its own capability along the way. Simply installing a compulsory real-name system in a bid to dodge the learning curve is just lazy ethics and poor governance.

The real-name system will inevitably add an extra layer of caution in people’s online communication. They can no longer talk freely as they used to, and this will weaken the power of public criticism of government officials and other people who hold power, as netizens will have to watch their mouths. We shouldn’t forget that the freedom to criticize power is one critical characteristic of a modern democratic society.

In a recent essay for Core77,  I looked at a discussion brewing about QR codes on business cards, and whether they make sense.  I also pointed to tools that allow you to scan a card that doesn’t have a QR code.

The overall point I tried to make is that, even as our professional lives and contacts move more and more into the digital realm, we’re still figuring out ways to get business cards to interface with our digital lives.  In other words, business cards are relevant, and in the most wired country on earth (Korea) they’re practically a staple of one’s work life.

I posted the article to my Facebook, and my friend Dan S. Wang, an artist and educator, commented on the enduring value of business cards (something I’ve written about previously). These cards, these physical representations of ourselves, are still relevant and necessary in so many ways.  But that’s especially true for the creative set:

Dan S. Wang: The persistence of the business card can be attributed not only to the ritual exchange, but also has something to do with the collecting of cards. I have several shoeboxes of cards now and when I come back from trips with new ones to add, it is sometimes fun to sort through them.

An Xiao Mina: That’s a great point – even though Rolodexes have fallen out of favor, it’s still fun to sort through business cards. I think that’s especially true for those of us in creative professions, as people have so many different ways they choose to represent themselves on paper.

Dan S. Wang: The spectrum of quality in design is astounding. The card should represent the person, but oftentimes falls far short. Great artist, lame card-or the other way around. Because they are exchanged at the molecular, person-to-person scale, with that scale’s built in limits no matter how formal or informal the occasion or setting, it seems that the field of business cards is still a level one, allowing for tremendous diversity. All this talk, I think I might have to thumb through my cards today just to enjoy them again.

I can’t believe it’s March already.  We even got an extra day in February and I feel like this month breezed by so quickly.  What’s been shaking in my world?

I’m happy to share that I’m now writing for Core77, the popular design blog that previously focused on industrial design but now encompasses many more facets of design.

I joined the advisory board of Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities section and nominated three great artists/events that I think are worthy of attention.

I gave a talk at the College Art Association conference, the primary conference for arts professionals in academia.  In a panel organized by Sharon Butler and Micol Hebron, I joined a  discussion on artist collectives and collaboratives.  I talked about “hashtag collectives”, the idea of a more open, loose network of artist collaborators.  I’ve not yet written a reflection on the panel but I have written a few reports on the conference and the different events I attended.

I’ve started the China Meme Report, a look at different internet memes in China.  This is part of my writing for 88 Bar, the China group blog I joined recently.  This series of posts will culminate in a talk at ROFLCon at MIT in May (more on that soon).

I’ve pushed out a lot of content this week.  These were some of my favorite pieces:

A curated history of the Grass Mud Horse Song, China’s most enduring and endearing meme

Tasty, sustainable tacos with Manila’s first designer food truck (and the story was picked up in Inhabitat too!)

A review of two great shows at LACMA: surrealism and California cool.

A road trip to Kansas City’s great art scene

A look at live tweeting the arts and what it all means

Chinese state television’s entry into Africa, via Nairobi

Oh! And I’ve quietly soft launched my Knowledge Sharing Wiki.  It’s been a long time coming, as I’ve been meaning to share some of the lessons I’ve learned in working with various digital media environments.  I’ll be expanding on this over time but right now am building out the skeleton for using Tumblr to translate the tweets of Ai Weiwei.

It’s been a relatively quiet month for me, as I’ve been working behind the scenes on a few projects that aren’t ready to go out yet but will be soon.  I’m super grateful for the opportunity to write about interesting things I’ve been encountering along the way.

I was recently honored with an invitation to join the advisory board for Prix Ars Electronica 2012, focusing on the Digital Communities section.  Prix Ars Electronica, part of the larger Ars Electronica umbrella, is the prestigious award ceremony for new media based in Linz, Austria.

Here’s what their Digital Communities section looks at:

The “Digital Communities” category focuses on the wide-ranging social and artistic impact of the Internet technology as well as on the latest developments in social software, user generated content, mobile communications, mash-ups and location based services. Digital Communities” focuses on innovation in relation to human coexistence.

Its main goals lie in first, bridging the geographical as well as the genderbased digital divide and second, bridging across cultural conflicts and third, supporting cultural diversity and freedom of artistic expression. Consideration is also given to projects that advance the practice of sharing and the formation of a “Cloud Intelligence”, and that facilitate access to technological-social infrastructure.

Digital Communities sheds light on the political and artistic potential of digital and networked systems. As such, “Digital Communities” selects a broad range of projects, applications, artworks, initiatives and phenomena around which social and artistic innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time.

It sounds pretty cool, and I have to thank Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber for inviting me to participate on the board and submit nominations.  Since nominations can be public, I thought I’d blog about it.  I’ve written about all of my nominees before in various ways, so none of these should be a surprise.

Kiri Lluch Dalena – Time and Place of Incident
Dalena recently addressed the Maguindanao Massacre, the worst massacre of journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists began keeping track.  Her video installation at the University of the Philippines was very courageous and powerful in its simplicity.  Part of what makes her work so impactful is the way she relies on the Filipino community to help her document much of her subject matter. To prepare for Time and Place of Incident, she used social networks like Facebook and blogs to develop contacts. And for certain hard-to-reach areas, she relied on volunteers to film for her.  It was a true community effort with an extraordinary message.

Ma Yongfeng/Forget Art – Youth Apartment Exchange Project (青年公寓交换)
Ma Yongfeng’s Forget Art collective has developed this great web site, Youth Apartment Exchange Project, that is like airbnb but better: it’s a community aimed at exchanging items, apartments, etc.  The idea is to create a dialogue amongst young people, who often silo themselves into their friend circles.  By exchanging personal possessions, participants learn about others’ lives and experience them in a unique way.  YAEP is part of Ma Yongfeng’s philosophy of “micropractice”, the idea that small changes and practices can lead to larger societal shifts over time.

The Wenzhou Train Collision Meme
This is a more diverse, diffuse group, but the folks who protested against the response to the Wenzhou train collision deserve special mention.  It was a major tipping point in China, showing the immense power of microblogs even within the censored medium of Sina Weibo.  While the discourse continued and served to pressure the government to make some real changes in the administration and even issue a public investigation, the artists who created the visual language of the online protest deserve special mention.  The level of creativity reflected the best intersection of Photoshop with political cartoons with public assembly, and they showed that politically-themed Internet memes can lead to real world change.

Nominations are just the beginning. Nominees are then invited to apply for the formal selection process.  In the case of the Wenzhou train collision meme, I believe folks familiar with the Chinese Internet are asked to contribute their expertise.  In any case, I wish my nominees good luck!

As the year of the dragon begins, I thought it would be a good practice to write a monthly review of what I’ve been up to, the articles I’ve written, and the new projects I’ve worked on.  At the beginning of the month, I went on a great art world road trip with my friend Orianna, as we checked out different art spaces across the Southwest (something I still need to write about).

The rest of the month has been quite busy!  Here are a few highlights:

New York Times Design Honors List

Okay, this isn’t January, but it happened close enough to the end of the month to warrant mention, especially as it’s so darn cool.  Alice Rawsthorn at the New York Times listed our show–Unnamed Design, part of the Gwangju Design Biennale–as a best contemporary show for 2011 in their Design Honors List.  My proverbial hat goes off to curator Brendan McGetrick and director Ai Weiwei, who headed up the project.  Be sure to check out Brendan’s essay on the ins and outs of making it happen.

Bird’s Nest Is Expanding

With Tumblr and therefore Bird’s Nest (Ai Weiwei in English) blocked in China, it’s been harder for our main editor to access our site and review translations.  At the same time, we’ve been growing.  There are now nearly 9000 followers to @aiwwenglish, and we’re regularly sought out by media for translations on what Mr. Ai has been saying.  Which is why I’m excited we were able to welcome André Holthe to the team as associate editor.  In the next month, we’ll be growing our translator base and making the project more open source. So stay tuned.

Blogging for Hyperallergic

I’ve continued my blogging for Hyperallergic, the popular Brooklyn-based blog focusing on "art and its discontents."  This month, I ramped it up thanks to the suggestion of Hrag Vartanian, the site’s editor in chief.  Although I initially hesitated (I generally think of myself as an essay writer!), I’ve realized that blogging is a great writing discipline and continues a practice I do already: write and think about cool things and share about them with others.  This month’s highlights include essays on the growing reach of Kickstarter in supporting artists, the rise of art world memes, and four artists in Asia I’m watching this year and think you should check out too.

Designers Without Borders

I contributed an essay to the Design-Altruism-Project, an initiative of Designers Without Borders, the Uganda-based NGO spearheaded by David Stairs.  The essay looks at JeepneED, an open hardware mobile science lab based in the Philippines.

88 Bar

In the world of Chinese technology, media and design, I’ve continued my blogging for 88 Bar.  This month, my main post looked at how China is becoming a telecom bridge for North Korea through bootleg phones and DVDs.  And this happened in December, but I wrote up a long response post about Sina Weibo and political memes on my blog, in response to Ethan Zuckerman’s call to action for more studies in English-language social media.  I’ll be tackling these ideas further in the coming months with 88 Bar.

Museum of Chinese in America Exhibition

This isn’t happening until April, but they’re already Tumbling.  Curator Herb Tam at the Museum of Chinese in America has invited me to join their exhibition America through a Chinese Lens, which looks at photography by Chinese in America.  I’ll be Tumbling for them for the duration of the show, "offering a live visual essay about her America on our tumblr page", something I’m really excited about.  I’ll blog more about this later, but I did want to draw attention to their Tumblr account, which has been featuring some very touching personal stories of the Museum’s staff and their experiences growing up in the US.

It’s been a good month as I’ve returned to Los Angeles and re-figured my way out around this city, and I’m feeling good about February.  There are a lot of cool projects in the pipeline that I’m not ready to talk about just yet, but I will soon!  And in the mean time, you can always find me on Twitter and Sina Weibo.  See you there!

Pico Iyer has a lovely article out in the latest New York Times focusing on "The Joy of Quiet".  It’s a great read and has a few lovely gems:

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

A good point. I’ve actually increased going outside, with trips up the Great Wall or down the Grand Canyon, after starting to use social media more actively.  And Iyer wrote this:

Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Which got me thinking about the time I did spend in a cloister.  Not a Cistercian one, but a Zen one.  After devoting three weeks non-stop on the phone and Internet and running around Gwangju for the Gwangju Design Biennale, I knew it was time for a short retreat.  I linked up with Haeinsa, a Seon temple (Korean Zen) up in the mountains near Daegu, in the middle of Korea.

"Time to disconnect?" friends asked.

"Yes," I’d say. "I’m really looking forward to it. I think they might even take my cell phone away for the duration of my stay."

Though I hear some monasteries do hold visitors’ cell phones (willfully, of course), Haeinsa did not.  In fact, as soon as I arrived, I found that my room was outfitted with wifi.  ("Welcome to Korea," they said)  I even downloaded the Korean Temple Stay app onto my iPhone to help me learn about the nationwide temple stay program. And when I was in the center of the monastery complex, I raised my phone to take a photo–only to see it ask if I wanted to join the wifi network there.

Cultural context is important. Korea is one of the most wired countries on earth, and so a few QR codes and a weak wifi signal may be extreme already.  In general, I’ve found that the advance of communications technology is more readily accepted in Asia, a continent famous for shanzhai phones, keitai culture and sprawling Internet cafes.  But my experience at Haeinsa points to something I’ve been meaning to write about since my time there.

During my stay, I remember reading about a concept called "Not Two" (不二), a kind of yin-and-yang idea that suggests that dualities and differences are unproductive.  To talk about a digital world and a non-digital world is a fallacy.  The digital world is a part of our lives now, whether we like it or not.  To completely cut ourselves out of email and even social media often means disconnecting from a good slice of our social lives, not to mention all the other amazing opportunities for learning and work afforded by the Internet.  At the same time, as Pico Iyer notes, stillness is important.  It’s good to be fully present, fully alive to the moment without a camera screen mediating the experience.

So how did I spend my time up in the mountains by Haeinsa?  To be honest, I mostly did disconnect.  I wandered the temple grounds (not all of which is outfitted with wifi) and climbed up to the top of Gayasan mountain.  But I didn’t hesitate to post a few photos and tweet about it.  "Not Two", as they say.  The digital and physical worlds can coexist.  What’s important is balance.

Ethan Zuckerman just published an interesting post about the importance of studying Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging tool in China.  He references WeiboScope, a very useful and informative tool put out by the University of Hong Kong to help visualize the popular trending topics on Sina Weibo, one of China’s leading microblog services (there are multiple weibo, or microblogs, in China, and Sina’s is the most familiar to Western users).  It would have made a fabulous supplement for the now defunct trending topics report published by Charles Custer at The World of Chinese.

Zuckerman makes a great point about the knowledge gap with most Americans and Western audiences who’ve never personally experienced the Great Firewall or who have not engaged extensively with China’s Internet environment [my emphasis added]:

I sometimes wonder whether English-speaking scholars pay insufficient attention to Chinese social media due to an assumption that Chinese media has been censored to the point of sterility. I often speak about internet censorship, and American audiences in particular are quick to share their knowledge of the “great firewall”, the “fifty cent party” and other aspects of Chinese internet censorship. Because Chinese censorship has been widely reported in American media, I suspect many Americans know more about what’s not on the Chinese internet than what’s present.

Raise up the truth! — An image flying around Sina Weibo attacking assumed censorship of facts surrounding the Wenzhou high speed rail collision.

I thought I might write a short post to help bridge the knowledeg gap a little bit.  I entered China with the same expectations of a sterile, heavily-censored Internet.  I assumed the only colorful critical dialogue happening within China was on Twitter, as citizens developed tools to write  But as I witnessed and reported with the infamous Wenzhou high speed rail collison on July 23, 2011, the Chinese Internet is far from sterile.  It is indeed censored–sometimes my posts have been deleted, and I know people whose accounts have been silenced for a week or two after they’ve posted too many critical messages.

I soon found that China’s Internet is rife with political commentary if you just know how to look for it and who to follow.  And it’s not just the example Zuckerman cites–that of dairy CEO Niu Gensheng–there’s plenty of direct political commentary, including references to some of the country’s most sensitive topics, like human rights abuses and secret detentions.

A viral, credited comic in response to trumped up charges of pornography around Ai Weiwei.  The Chinese reads: "Today the fat guy will teach you how to appreciate art about the human body."  The full comic can be found on my report on Hyperallergic.

The trick, of course, is how to get past the censors.  As censorship is managed by a mixture of algorithms and actual human beings, there are a number of ways, and they tend to go hand in hand.

First, use code words and homophones. The Chinese language is notoriously homophone heavy.  A word like hexie means harmony, but if you change the tones, it means river crab.  Thus, Chinese users often use "river crab" to talk about how the Internet has been harmonized, or censored by government officials.  Don’t think Chinese users were talking about what was happening in Wukan recently?  They were, and they used the codeword "WK" (in Roman letters) to do so.  Code words and homophones like this occur frequently and spread like wildfire until the censors catch on.

Second, use images as much as possible.   As Chinese Internet users prefer rich multimedia environments, microblog services like Sina Weibo are image heavy.  However, images are on the one hand difficult for censors to search for and on the other hand move too quickly to be ignored.  So these images contain a mixture of satirical content like the Niu Gensheng cow in Zuckerman’s post or, simply, a screenshot of a censored news item.  This is a boon for people who don’t speak Chinese or, like me, have difficulty skimming quickly through Chinese characters, as it means it’s easy to browse a Weibo feed quickly by just glancing at images (it also makes tools like Weiboscope meaningfully useful for non Chinese speakers).

Third, make it viral. Make it catchy and interesting.  While algorithms can quickly catch and censor politically sensitive writing, and human beings can identify images and work around code words, neither can move quickly enough to stop a viral message.  Strong messages are retweeted thousands of times and reposted and retweeted again, by multiple users around the country. 

What’s the result of this?  What does it look like in real life?  Political criticism and commentary can be very dangerous in China.  Public assemblies are dispersed as quickly as possible, and perceived leaders of movements can be disappeared.  Criticism online can lead to your posts being deleted, or even to being sent to labor camp.  The government has tried to control every possible way for citizens to express any stirring discontent.

An image of Ai Weiwei’s head placed atop a grass mud horse, a punning symbol of defiance against Internet censorship.  You can see more of those in my report on Hyperallergic.

I think, then, to Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory, which goes a little like this:

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on – the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

In my post on the Wenzhou train collision memes, I propose that Chinese political memes are unlike most memes–Chinese memes are, in fact, social media street art.  Like the street art I grew up seeing in my native Los Angeles, they have characteristic styles and messages.  They’re funny and rich in imagery, and some of the best memes artists have made a name for themselves.  They dialogue with each other. And they’re edgy and treated as (if not officially) illegal. The Internet police go after a few, but more and more just keep popping up.

If I understand Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory correctly, he creates a dichotomy between people who share pictures of their cats and people who engage in political activism.  In other words, cute cats and activist messages leverage the same tools, but they’re fundamentally different.  But with Chinese political memes, the cute cats are the activist message.  Those who take the time to study the fascinating links and workarounds will find themselves enmeshed in a rich, hilarious and politically insightful social media environment.

(Psst: a quick self-promo: we write a good deal about culture and design issues related to the Chinese Internet at 88 Bar, a group blog with me, Tricia Wang, Jason Li, Jin Ge and Lyn Jeffery)

Artists and avatars. I’m always very conscious about the way I use my avatar, the message it sends to the world. Some call it branding, some call it self-expression, some call it communication. But my avatar represents me in some fashion. Kyle Chayka in LA Weekly wrote a thought-provoking essay about artists and their online avatars:

Think about your Facebook profile picture. For the most part, these small images are close-ups on faces or group photos with friends. Maybe it’s a vacation shot, or a cute picture of your pet. That profile picture is your avatar, a representation of yourself, or a particular aspect of yourself, on the Internet. Avatars, whether on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, are our online ambassadors.

And this is what I said on the matter:

“I often obscure faces to focus us on what else is present in digital media,” Xiao notes. “How can we communicate our identity just through text, or just through images that we share of our life without us in them?”

These pieces subvert the traditional idea of an avatar by forcing us to work without the one avatar we are most comfortable with – our own bodies.

In addition to publishing my first Chinese pun*, the article covers the avatar work of Man Bartlett and Petra Cortright. Bartlett sees “avatar use as an unmediated, organic outgrowth of identity and personality”, while Cortright creates “weird, semifictional narratives” using a mixture of digital tools. It’s like Yin and Yang (and An) in a way: on the one hand, Bartlett says he “has nothing to hide”, Cortright obscures the avatar, and I tend to take mine away entirely.

The word “avatar” is a funny one. It has religious connotations–according to Wikipedia, it comes from Hinduism, where a deity may descend (avatar means descend) into the world. Part of the descent is the physical manifestation, the way the deity looked. But part of the descent was the behavior, the way he or she acted.

When Chayka asked me how I use my avatar, I had this definition in the back of my mind, and so I replied in broader terms, beyond the image and into the actual use of media. This is most pronounced when you compare how I use Sina Weibo and Twitter, both of which are microblog services. Whereas in the former, my activity is driven more by images and personal stories, in the latter I’m more apt to post links and quick reflections. My avatar, the way I project myself in these media, varies because the platforms vary.

Could we expand the idea of avatars, and avatar self-portraiture, to include the full social media presence, rather than just the image? Chayka rightly points out that much of my works obscures the image of our body and face (our primary definition of what an avatar should be) so we can focus on other things–namely, the interaction between us, the message content, the way we use language and tell stories about ourselves and to each other.

I think back to the postcard installation I developed for Yale’s Haskins Laboratories, and how I called it a Self-Portrait in Postcards, a portrait accumulated over time as I sent tweet-like postcard messages to the gallery. This is what Jan Ellen Spiegel wrote in the New York Times:

[An Xiao] came to art through photography, writing and an interest in communication that goes back to her childhood, when she wrote letters to her grandmother in the Philippines. The letters, she said, related little moments that add up to a portrait of the writer, the way social networking does now with a series of – as she put it – ‘totally inane things’

The inspiration for the postcard installation came from a long Times essay by Clive Thompson that changed the way I see the Internet and the way social media works. The essay argued–rightly, in my view–that social media and microblogging, over time, create a sense of who we are. More so than any other media:

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does – body language, sighs, stray comments – out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing.

That article was written in 2009, which feels like ages ago. Since then, we’ve seen microblogging implemented in everything from the Obama campaign to the Arab Spring, and one famous writer argued that social media can’t possibly develop strong ties. But over these past two years, I’ve become even more convinced that the way we represent ourselves online reflects who we are. Our avatars–both our images and our accumulated self representations–are indeed self-portraits, whether we construct them consciously or whether we let them develop naturally over time.

* The Chinese visual pun explained. The first character in my Chinese name, An (安), consists of the character for “woman” (女) under a character representing a roof. My avatar, then, is a bit of a play on the common practice of iPhone-in-bathroom-mirror photography. Standing in front of a women’s bathroom mirror in Beijing, I used the bathroom ceiling to spell my name. Chinese isn’t my native language, so most of my attempts at puns fall flat, but this one got a few laughs on Sina Weibo.

There’s a very nice piece out in this past Sunday’s New York Times about the Arts, Culture and Technology Meetup (aka ArtsTech). Here’s what writer Jennifer Preston had to say:

Unlike some people who never step outside of their online Twitter streams, members of this group use the micro-blogging service to help them follow each other in real life.

“We use Twitter to not only to connect with one another, but to share what we feel brings value to a larger online arts community,” said Ms. Merlino, 26, senior marketing manager at the Guggenheim Museum. “It has enabled us to form both professional and personal relationships that has provided countless opportunities for learning and collaboration.”

I love the pictures they used to illustrate the story (I borrowed one here, photographed by the Times). Contrary to the stereotype of the lonely, isolated, socially awkward social media user, the members of the ArtsTech community are bright, engaging, flourishing online and off. Some are tweeting, some are talking directly to each other. The point isn’t that social media distract from real-life social engagement–far from it, Twitter, Facebook and other media enhance the conversations we have offline.

I wrote this about the group last year, in NYFA Current , noting its online/offline nature:

“Julia and I had been communicating via Twitter about technology and the arts for quite some time,” said Jeffrey Inscho, who heads up public and media relations at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Twitter, with its 140 character limit and in-the-now ethos, makes chats with people like Jeffrey simple and easy. It reduces the typical barriers that might prevent a young unknown from speaking directly with representatives of major arts institutions around the world, and it allows a community to build quickly, both online and off. Jeff traveled to New York to present during the “Mobile Tech for Art Orgs” panel about SREENtxt, a live screen at the museum consisting of SMS messages and images sent from visitor’s mobile phones, which engages visitors with its new, ubiquitous technology.

It got me thinking about my travels as of late. I travel alone, and yet I’m never alone when I land. Why is this? Everywhere I go, I instinctually seek out real world contacts and communities. Social media opens the doors to the first connection, but it’s in person that the relationship is cemented, made more meaningful. Purely-online friendships can and do exist, of course, but friendships I make that are both online and offline are often the most enriching. The conversations continue even we’re not present, and they’re much richer than pure text and icons because we do see each other in person. It’s that synergy that matters.

But there’s something more here. I was pleasantly surprised to see Preston list me on the Times‘s NYC #ArtsTech Twitter list, despite the fact that I haven’t seen the city in well over a year now. (Though I happily did get to spend time with Jiajia Fei in Shanghai and Rebecca Taylor in Hong Kong recently.) When I lived in New York, I made some of my strongest friendships through ArtsTech, and moving clear to the other side of the world doesn’t change that. Far from it: Social media keeps the friendships, ties and conversations going strong.

I think back to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village. I think back to the villages I’ve lived in, from New York’s East Village to Beijing’s Caochangdi. These are physical world villages with a thriving public community life. And then I think about the rapid migration of people into cities and our increasingly mobile creative class. Travel, migration–it’s all alienating and difficult. It can’t be a coincidence that as we find ourselves moving around in the offline world, we’re integrating the online world into building a new type of hybrid digital/physical village. This new village leaps the bounds of physical geography and maintains all the sense of community of a traditional village.

And just like the arts community forms an integral part of urban villages the world over, so are they carving a niche and leading the way online. More from Preston’s article:

Ms. Taylor said her online Twitter relationships had helped smooth her recent move to New York. Before taking the job at MoMA PS1, she had worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles but was acquainted online with many people in the New York museum and art world because of Twitter….

When Ms. Taylor arrived [at the Metropolitan Musem of Art], she said she checked into FourSquare, the geo-location social tool, and soon discovered that she knew at least eight people at the exhibit as digital friends. “Then, the second I got here, I was bumping into them,” she said. “Four months later, those eight people have become some of my closest friends.”

Is #ArtsTech the only community to successfully blend online and offline? Of course not, but it’s definitely one of the best in the world. There are others I want to talk about, and there’s more I have to say about villages. But I’ll have to save that for another post (though here’s a hint: coworking spaces like Shanghai’s Xindanwei, Manila’s Colab and New York’s New Work City).

In other news, things are busy, busy, busy. Planning research trips to Chongqing, Wuhan and Shanghai, then I head to Manila. Will you be around? Let’s link up.

Two social media-related events these past few weeks in Beijing.

I’ve spoken about social media art and done social media art in a few countries now, but China always presents the most potent site for exploration. I gave a talk at the Maker’s Carnival, a festival of making in partnership with UNESCO, Qinghua University, Shanghai University, CAFA and others. Paris-based MakeSense invited me to talk about social media art to the students involved in the project, and we set up a presentation space on the grounds of the Beijing Institute of Petrochemical Technologies (a misleading name, as it’s more interdisciplinary and akin to what we would call in America an Institute of Technology).

I also led an experimental art piece, called Caochangdi 404. It looked at how we can connect the world. For Portal, curated by Janis Ferberg and Stephen Truax, I looked at how we access the Internet, the conversations we can have and can’t have, and how something as simple as a video conference between Beijing and Sydney can be complex and strained, because of the hurdles involved. I wrote a bit more about it for Hyperallergic, where I noted:

In Caochangdi, many residents don’t own their own computer and therefore rely on the local internet cafe for access. Those in China who do have personal Internet face additional technical challenges, like the Great Firewall and a faulty internet connection on the edges of the city. Caochangdi 404 was a performative experiment that used linguistic, cultural and technological barriers as a medium to question the role of technology in connecting the world.

How do we talk about social media in China? What is the social media environment like? So many people in other countries ask me this question, as they’ve heard stories about the Internet here but aren’t quite sure what to believe. Visitors are often surprised to see that, in fact, it is difficult if not impossible to access certain sites. When I spent a month in Korea and returned to China, I felt the same way. It just doesn’t seem real or possible. But it is.

One Chinese person I spoke to said that, often, when trying to access social media outside the country, the Internet is not very shunli. Shunli is a euphemism that means “smooth”, “without a hitch”. The Internet here can be mafan, or troublesome, at times. And at the same time, it can be a rich, potent space for social media. Witness the rise of hundreds of millions of people on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo and Douban and Renren and so many other social media sites. You don’t just hop on the Internet here; the Internet is a portal to a new way of life, a new pool of information outside state-controlled media.

I recently met the writer Brian Keith Jackson, who moved from New York to Beijing, where he currently lives. He’s one of the few New Yorkers I’ve met who made the decision to live in China’s capital and is happy about it for reasons similar to my own. In a recent interview, he very thoughtfully explained the way the Internet works:

People really read here. The amount of readers is amazing. As a writer that is just amazing to see, particularly in a culture that really depends on the internet. The internet is such a powerhouse here – much more than in the United States – because it’s how people have a sense of freedom and communicate with each other.

What’s the Internet like here in China? What’s social media like? After a year here, I better understand where Jackson is coming from, and where local Chinese are coming from. I see the space differently now, a mixture of shunli and mafan, a world of all information at your fingertips and no information at your fingertips. It’s yin and yang all in one, and perhaps that’s what makes it a fascinating social media space to work within.