No Dignity, No Diggity

(I may be delivering the feedback lecture on the Prelim AQ using materials here, so stay tuned.)

“No diggity”, according to unreliable sources, means “no doubt”. It’s a slang and the title of a song, but this post isn’t about that.

Dignity, the sense of rights entitled to one, is sometimes the thorn in the flesh of some Singaporeans. Freedom of expression (or its limit) is one such right that can make one feel indignant about living in Singapore, although they have less to complain nowadays as it is obvious the rules are slowly being relaxed. Slowly but surely.

Of course, and ironically, the word “indignation” has also taken on a rather negative meaning in Singapore. IndigNation is a gay/lesbian-pride movement in Singapore and some of its activities have usually been barred by the authorities over the years. This community is feeling indignant about their status; to them, the rejection they face removes dignity from them. On the other hand, their existence has also been making some Singaporeans indignant. How dare they feel indignant over our indignation!

Singapore isn’t such a boring place after all.

Besides, we have exciting shows on TV or in cinema (be it indie documentaries or mainstream fare).

Aug 29, 2009
Bride-hunt in Vietnam
A documentary shines the spotlight on Singapore men who go to Vietnam in search of wives
By John Lui (Straits Times) 

Five years ago, Singaporean furniture salesman Ricky Yeow, then 38, went to Ho Chi Minh City in search of a wife.

He was one of thousands who go to Vietnam every year from Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and the West for this purpose.

But in his case, Singaporean documentary-maker Mirabelle Ang, 32, went along to capture the events. In five days, he had chosen and married 19-year-old Nguyen Thi Nhanh from the village of Dong Thap, four hours west of Ho Chi Minh.

A 48-minute account of that venture, Match Made, will screen at independent cinema Sinema Old School at Mount Sophia from next month.

Ang’s documentary was screened at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2007 and at festivals in Vienna, San Francisco, Budapest and Vietnam.

Sinema Old School programming manager Inez Maria says the theme of matchmaking was selected for next month’s screenings because with increased globalisation, there is a need to ‘understand what makes First World citizens seek soulmates in Third World countries’.

Sinema came into existence in late 2007 and missed the chance to screen the film earlier, she adds.

‘Even though we are a platform to screen local independent films, we do need time to research quality films and it took us a while to find a film as good as this,’ she says.

Ang, a Ngee Ann Polytechnic graduate, says she first got the idea to film the bride-hunt after reading in The Straits Times in 2002 about a matchmaking agency run by businessman Mark Lin.

She spoke to Life! by e-mail and telephone from Los Angeles, where she is now working as a documentary editor.

She says: ‘The article had a photo of a Chinese man with his docile wife, standing in the background in her pyjamas, smiling. I saw a larger issue behind the story and knew that I had to make a documentary about it.’

The then graduate student of the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) approached Mr Lin, who asked one of his clients, Mr Yeow, if he would take part.

Ang says: ‘Ricky was very kind to agree to participate in the film. �I told him I was a graduate student and that I was interested in learning about the matchmaking process and would like to follow him while he was in Vietnam. He agreed.’

People who saw the film when it screened in Singapore two years ago said the rapid and business-like bride interviewing process was an eye-opener.

Says Ang: ‘After we arrived, we were driven to our hotel and told to meet in 20 minutes at the lobby to drive to another location where Ricky would meet the girls.

‘Two hours later, we were crammed into a dingy hotel room and everything unfolded before us. It all happened very quickly.’

To make the film, her first feature documentary, Ang travelled to Vietnam with Ms Susan Kim, who was a fellow graduate student at the film/video programme at CalArts. Another CalArts graduate, Mr Tuan Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, helped with translation.

The self-funded project cost about $10,000 to make.

Ang, who graduated from CalArts with a master’s in film and video in 2006, says one of the hardest parts of the job was the language barrier.

‘I wanted to speak to the Vietnamese girls, who were mostly, if not all, younger than me. I wanted to hear their story, away from the watchful eyes of the men and women ‘taking care’ of them while they were in Ho Chi Minh waiting to be matched with potential grooms.’

The documentary includes an interview with Ms Nguyen in her home village and one with Mr Yeow in his four-room HDB flat in Singapore, where he is the oldest son living with ageing parents.

Ang hopes the film will ‘provoke questions’ from the audience about what people will do to obtain a better life and how economic imbalances between countries affect lives.

In such arrangements, the Singapore matchmaking agency is usually paid $8,000 or more, while the bride’s family receives a token amount. The bride hopes to get a husband who will provide her with a better life than the one she would get in her home country.

Ang says Mr Yeow has since refused to speak to her, for reasons which can be gleaned from watching the film, she says.

‘There’s a very delicate line between being a documentary film-maker, and being human and a witness to events. As documentary film-makers, we are constantly negotiating between that fine line,’ she says.

Do documentaries and similar expose risk the dignity of individuals especially in the context of a conservative society? It isn’t so much about the dignity of the objects that is lost but the dignity of the subject: the film(maker). That is the “very delicate line”. Is art supposed to mirror life without giving a definitive face to the image? Can art do that?

If art poses such uncertain terms in life, what about trashy shows that are mindless naturalism? I’m sure everyone has encountered the term “reality TV” many times before. The Truman Show should ring a bell too. (And of course, there is Banksy.)

Sep 5, 2009
Face it, the world is watching you
By Jonathan Holburt (ST)

The future just isn’t what it used to be. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, we thought we saw an accurate depiction: An omniscient dictator whose eyes were on everyone. At a time of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco, it resonated. But now, instead of “Big Brother”, we have lots of little brothers and sisters, mums and dads — in fact, everyone — looking at all of us all the time.

Take Jade Goody. The British TV star of reality show Big Brother died of cervical cancer earlier this year. She broadcast her dying days for everyone to see, making that most private and tragic of acts a public spectacle. “I’ve lived my whole life in front of the cameras,” she said. “And maybe I’ll die in front of them.”

But this new transparent world isn’t just for prurient types. China, for example, realises you can no longer control information by just controlling the press. The press, nowadays, is the people. Anyone with a camera phone is a journalist.

Protesters at riots in Shishou city in Hubei province took videos on their camera phones and put them online. Dr Yu Jianrong from the Chinese Academy of Social Science said of the June event that “it was like a live telecast”. This fact is not lost on media outlets like CNN, which often solicit images from people on the spot.

The case of Neda Agha Soltan, the Iranian student whose death was captured on camera phone, gave the Iranian election protesters a martyr to rally around.

The Chinese government’s response to all this has been multifaceted : a failed attempt to put web-filtering “Green Dam” software on all PCs, jamming mobile phone signals during moments of unrest and, on occasion, even disrupting the Internet.

But with some 750 million mobile phone users and now 322 million online users, it won’t work. In the never-ending battle between the sword and the shield — the sword being information, the shield being control of it — the sword always wins.The cheapest mobile prepaid is giving away free minutes. 
The future wasn’t always supposed to be this way. For example, in the science fiction film series The Matrix, what humans perceive as reality was actually a simulated world, created by machines to pacify and suppress human beings. It was an opaque universe where nothing was as it appeared to be. And based on what is happening today, that really was fiction.

Because now, more than ever, everything is visible to everyone. From Bloomberg to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social networking sites that tell you more about a person than you care to know, to Google Maps and geo-location devices that can pinpoint where you are at any time, you can’t escape being visible to all — at all times. What’s driving this change? Technology, plus politics, plus the universal desire of human beings to know more about more things.

When Jemaah Islamiah terrorist Mas Selamat Kastari escaped from custody in Singapore, his face was sent to 5.5 million cellphones as part of the manhunt to find him. The most wanted poster is now no longer stapled to a wall — it’s in your pocket.

New companies such as ReputationHAWK and ReputationDefender will help protect or blunt Internet attacks against ordinary people, especially as everyone who looks for a job nowadays is the subject of a Google search. Apparently, these companies do it by creating positive data about you, which crowd out the negative.

In his 1969 book, The Human Zoo, zoologist Desmond Morris articulated a vision of humanity suffering from unnatural relationships in civilised environments. What would he have written about the world today? Are we really in a new age of totalitarianism — let’s call it multitarianism — with 1984’s Big Brother morphing virus-like into curious stares from everyone?

There’s a saying, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. In this transparent age, the entire world is a glass house. And certainly that moderates behaviour — from countries to companies. Pariah-hood is more easily achieved today.

In 1928, public relations guru Edward Bernays, wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” In the near past, countries and companies controlled how their reputations and brands were received and perceived through carefully crafted communication. It was one-way communication: Companies spoke; consumers listened. Countries spoke; citizens obeyed.

Now, it’s two-way communication, even a dialogue, with people responding via the town halls and public squares of today: social networking and blog sites.

Which comes back to the way to thrive in this new world. Since it really is the age of transparency, everyone, including officials and managers, will have to truly understand the new rules: Whatever you do will potentially be watched and analysed by everyone.

The big world has become a small village again, where we are all watching our neighbours. As Allen Funk said on his long-running show: “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.”

Now we all are. Literally, all of us.

Dignity is also lost, some argue, with media piracy. You lose the sense of self-worth as it is expeected of you to respect the works of others.

Aug 29, 2009
Law to block Net pirates unlikely
By Andy Ho (ST)

SINGAPOREANS make 350,000 illegal movie downloads a month. On a per capita basis, we notch up some of the largest numbers of infringements in the region.

Thus, content owners are hoping for a new law to get Internet service providers (ISPs) to deny habitual infringers Web access. But Parliament is unlikely to pass such a law.

If the United States Congress passed such a law, Singapore would be obliged by its free trade agreement (FTA) to put in place reciprocal legal arrangements to protect US creations. (Some 80 per cent of our Internet traffic access US websites.)

However, the US is not likely to do so. Congress has, indeed, extended the term of copyright protection twice. In 1976, it was raised from a total of 56 years under an old law to the life of the author plus 50 years. Then, in 1998, it was increased to life plus 70 years. If an author lives for 50 years after he creates a work, he would have 120 years of copyright. (An inventor’s patent rights last for only 20 years.)

Thus, Congress has been increasingly protective of copyrights. Still, it is unlikely to pass a law to compel ISPs to deny habitual pirates access to the Internet.

Here’s why.

In the US, anyone may lobby Congress to pass legislation that serves his interests. But it is interest groups with the most resources that tend to have success. Hence, a firm like Disney would lobby hard for, say, an extension of copyright protection. Indeed, Disney actively lobbied for the 1998 extension and got it.

In that case, it was the classic situation that experts describe as ‘concentrated benefits, diffuse costs’. That is, small groups which have not simply the incentive but also the wherewithal to organise and lobby US lawmakers to pass legislation that benefits them will do so.

They tend to succeed where the costs which such a law imposes on others are borne by the public at large. This is because each individual will bear only a small part of the costs, so no one has the incentive to organise to fight the lobbying efforts of such corporations.

The 1998 extension would benefit a few large corporations – content owners like Disney – but the costs would fall on all consumers worldwide. In 1998, content holders got what they wanted with little ado because the congressmen arrayed on their side were fortuitously able to cast the proposed extension as harmonisation with European Union (EU) law.

Under EU law, which then offered longer copyright protection of life plus 70 years to European creations, foreign (read: US) works which had lost copyright protection under their own (read: US) laws – even if they were under life plus 70 – would not be protected in Europe.

A US film-maker stood to gain an extra 20 years of copyright protection if it used, say, a British director or a German composer. Given this, US jobs would go to Europeans. To prevent such job losses, it was argued, the extension was needed. Because the costs of the extension to individual consumers – in the US and the rest of the world – would be small, there was little organised opposition to it.

Notice, however, the law was passed before the Internet really took off. At the time, there was not really widespread distribution of copyrighted content by anonymous Internet users yet. Now there is.

To fight this piracy, content owners have tried consumer education. They have also hauled some infringers to court to make examples of them. Then they have tried to convince users that the genuine product (which comes with electronic locks) is of higher quality. However, users seem quite contented with the quality of music and movies they can illegally get for free on the Internet.

Because all these strategies have failed, content owners would like legislation to require electronic equipment makers to incorporate technology that identifies and tracks users. But hardware makers oppose this as it would increase their production costs, which cannot be passed on to consumers. People would not pay higher prices for a technology they do not like.

The problem here is that there are concentrated benefits to content owners but also concentrated costs to equipment makers. This scenario has interest groups with huge resources but opposing interests pitched against one another. In such cases, Congress is not likely to act.

In fact, a law proposed in 2002 (called Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act) was precisely this sort of legislation which failed to pass in Congress. The movie studios and music labels wanted equipment makers to build into their widgets copy-protection and user-tracking technologies. The manufacturers opposed the Bill, which just died.

Now content owners are considering another approach, the one being bandied around in Singapore. This is to get ISPs to police copyright infringement. Currently, under both US and Singapore law, ISPs do not bear any liability for any copyright infringements by their subscribers.

To track file sharing by their subscribers, ISPs would have to use a technology that places a unique tag on every file every time it gets transferred. Here again there are concentrated benefits to content owners but concentrated costs to ISPs. Given privacy concerns, this would enrage their subscribers as well.

In this instance, the lobbying power of the content owners is matched by that of the ISPs and also equipment makers. Hence, Congress is very unlikely to pass any Bill that puts the onus on one side to benefit the other. This being so, Singapore is unlikely to pass an analogous law under its FTA obligations any time soon. Indeed, the authorities here say now that no such law is being actively considered.

Seems like consumerism and capitalism have created problems: while consumerism affects the dignity of oneself–how low can you stoop?–capitalism ensures companies remain profit-driven at the expense of the dignity of individuals (illegal downloaders and even loyal customers). Here we see how piracy cuts both ways, dignity diced.