Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema studies, Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Continuing from my last posting, here are the final four of the auspicious take-aways from my Nanyang Technological University colleagues, in no particular order of importance. These are practices and ways of doing intellectual life that unhinged my global north/US centric bias/East coast interventionist assumptions (even though, like most intellectuals,  I thought I didn’t have them)

5. Lunch. A big part of my work life at NTU featured lunches and coffees with a myriad of colleagues, collaborators, and contacts.

One of my long-term colleagues in Information Science in the School of Communication, Christopher Khoo, an internationally recognized researcher of knowledge systems and an organizer of lunch expeditions, once told me that interdisciplinary research happens at round tables in restaurants. A wise observation.

Food is a central feature of Singaporean cultural identity. Some might call it an obsession. I dug in.

Usually spontaneous, the narrative of lunch featured the build up of what kind of food to eat—Hokkien, Teochow, Hakka, South Indian, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Peranakan, dim sum, western—and then where to eat--- hawker stalls, on campus hawker stalls, on campus restaurants, the faculty club, off campus restaurants.

The next part of narrative build-up entailed who would come—I rarely had a lunch with only one other person. Usually, we’d lunch in a group. The group usually included senior and junior faculty, although I don’t think this was deliberate as much as it is just ingrained in NTUs culture of inclusiveness and mentoring.

Lunch was leisurely, usually long (never less than 90 minutes), never hurried, crowded with questions about cultural differences, research, comparisons of academic life in different countries. I probably learned the most about Asia at these lunches. Analysis of the food we were eating was expected,  which I slowly came to realize was a subtle way to discuss the histories, economies, cultures , media systems of Southeast Asia in a way that gently disguised what an American film and new media theorist/historian like me didn’t know.

In some foodie circles, Singapore holds the distinctive title of "Paris of the East" for its staggering, overwhelmingly complex cuisines.

But my Singaporean colleagues made jokes that a more post-colonialist way of considering this accolades was that Paris was trying, desperately, to be Singapore, but had the ultimate disadvantage of being located at a latitude and in a climate where kang kong, kai lan, durian, limes, and chilli could not grow.

Coda: About a month before I repatriated, I received a couple of emails from academic friends in Ithaca who wanted to set up lunch dates.  They provided the list of their constraints—no time, needing to organize far in advance, feeling pressed by many obligations, tight calendars (even in summer with no teaching), needing one on one interaction, needing a firm booking weeks in advance for a date. I had a strong and weird reaction, reading these emails in the heat and humidity of SE Asia (I think I was in Thailand at the time)

I resolved to bring a little bit of NTU back into my life in Ithaca, with spontaneity, collegiality, and leisurely interactions at the core.

6. A Collaborative Ethic. The School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University transmits a sense of collegiality and collaboration that is nothing short of energizing for the alliances it creates, the new research ideas it generates, and the interactions it spurs.

Perhaps this collaborative zeitgeist emanates from the group ethic that is part of Asian culture in general. Perhaps it is because NTU is a high-end, prestigious engineering school where team work and problem solving is part of the profession. Perhaps it is the legacy of the heads of the school like Eddie Kuo, Ang Peng Hwa and Ben Detenber.

Perhaps it is because humility is a major value of Buddhist and Asian cultures, with excessive egotism a negative trait where one could lose face.

I am not sure I can explain why collaboration seems so central to SCI. But it served as a powerful antidote to the isolationism, individualism, self-centeredness, negativity, and competitiveness that cuts through American and European academic life.

I didn’t meet one faculty member who worked alone on research, teaching, administrative work.

Of course, faculty had research and writing they did on their own. Most seemed to be working all the time on their projects, with books and print outs piled high on their desks. But it seemed like almost everyone I met did some sort of project with others, or, if not that,  they engaged in endless benchmarking and discussion and debate with others other lunch, coffee, drinks.  Courses were team taught. Many faculty were mobilized to help mount the International Communication Conference. I deeply admired their team spirit and lack of grousing.

Part of my position as the Shaw Professor of New Media at NTU was to curate a new media exhibition to represent SCI at the International Communication Association (ICA) meeting—and the first step I took was to assemble an interdisciplinary team:  Nikki Draper from SCI, Sharon Lin Tay from the School of Art, Design and Media and Wenjie Zhang from the National Museum of Singapore. And then, I mobilized a lot of lunches with the team and with new media artists and labs we were interested in.

It would have been impossible to curate and mount an exhibition of new media works in Southeast Asia alone. New media in the region is exploding , the platforms are multiplying, the context of each country complex, and, significantly, I am an outsider.

Plus, it was a lot more fun to have long lunches thinking through Indonesian social media after Reformasi, Cambodian digital archives tracking Khmer Rouge historiography, the Malaysian New Wave of online shorts, and the CUTE Center’s radical robotics of the sensorial.

7. Unsettling and complicating "independent media." After my time at NTU and in Southeast Asia, I have a new view about independent media—one filled with more questions than answers. My vectors have been rerouted--- completely.

In the countries of what activists often dub the "Global North", the term "independent media" usually refers to media practices outside corporate media combines, dedicated to exposing voices, practices, and ideas the so-called "mainstream" marginalizes.

In Southeast Asia and India, new media practices and infrastructures are exploding, in different ways in different countries, dependent on political changes, economic global flows, complicated histories,  and where spaces are available. They don’t follow the pattern of the center of "mainstream"  corporate media and the periphery of "independent media." Spaces exist for new media and other forms of media that wind between the two. 

For example, Malaysiakini, an online news site that developed in opposition to the Malaysian government, emerged in the context of hard copy press censorship in Malaysia and a loosening of restrictions on the internet to foster growth in the IT sector in light of the multimedia supercorridor there. I attended a conference of "mainstream" journalists from Asia where the editors of Malaysiakini where featured speakers. The site has successfully monetized: it has more readers than many of what westerners would call "mainstream" media (but what is that, exactly, when there are both government regulated media and then international media, like the International Herald Tribune and Al Jazeera?).

A significant take-away from my time in Southeast Asia and India, as well as my curatorial work for NTU, is that we make a strategic and conceptual error if we do not broaden our horizons to understand the emerging formations of new media and cinema in other parts of the world. They might look similar to our "westernized" conceptual models, but we can learn a lot more if we situate their distinctions and differences contextually.

The urgency of rethinking independent media within a more nuanced, complex, global point of view was underscored for me at a session I attended at the ICA conference on "alternative media."

I heard two presentations by white male scholars, one from the US and one from Europe, who were analyzing "independent media" and "alternative media" in Southeast Asia, one a quantitative social scientist, the other a more humanities oriented analyst.

They both marshalled similar language and theoretical models of the counter public sphere, the public sphere, speaking truth to power, making the invisible visible, giving voices,  mainstream media, commercial media, censorship, freedom of expression, independence, independent media, alternative media—terms derived from German critical theory and American media scholarship—to analyze blogs, video and some journalistic practices from Southeast Asia.

It troubled me to hear these invocations of terms from 1970s German critical studies and 1980s American independent media and independent journalism applied to Southeast Asian examples, with no attention paid at all to how even these terms, according to many of the artists, activists and academics I encountered, have a distinctly western, global north bias that ignored the differences in media, histories and politics in Southeast Asia.

These talks felt like colonialism camouflaged in critical theory to me. They also felt very ahistorical. They were importing a US/European conceptual model to a region of the world that didn’t share this same history.

I will be posting more about specific examples of emerging media practices in analog and new media from other parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, in future blogs.

I’m not an expert at all, just an interested observer. It’s my way of countering these two scholars. (Full disclosure: I confronted them at the session about their unexamined definitions and models of independent media, emboldened, I think, because Enrico Anditjondro from Engage Media in Indonesia, a group we had curated for Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia, was sitting next to me).

8. Harmony. I thought I might end my reflections on NTU with this idea.

I don’t invoke it in any new age, go-to-the spa-to-fight-stress kind of way, but as an meme that traversed through NTU, SCI, and the new media and cinema worlds I encountered across Southeast Asia and India.

I heard and read a lot about "Asian Values."

I am not sure I ever fully—after two different stints teaching and researching in Asia—understood it.

Some analysts argue that Buddhism infuses cultural values in Southeast Asia, stressing a non-confrontational way that emphasizes social harmony. It's a survival strategy: without social harmony, people in poor communities would not thrive. They needed each other.   

Other analysts have pointed out that Southeast Asian culture (if one can generalize, given the enormous economic and cultural differences in the region, where some countries like Vietnam and Laos are communist, some like Singapore global capitalist, some like Thailand and Malaysia emerging economies, etc) is not direct, but indirect, finding ways to suggest critique that do not feel assaultive. It is a high context, rather than low context, culture.

Another book interpreted the term as an ideological and postcolonial countermove to the so-called west that saw Asian communications systems as less than open, more prone to state censorship and regulatory controls. "Asian values" signified the differences in interpretation of terms like censorship, freedom of expression, free press, to emphasize distinctions in Asia, and Asia’s need to self-define media and communications practices. It was a subtle way to refuse the imposition of western values of individualism, free expression, etc.

But the definitions I liked (and understood) the best were offered by one of my SCI colleagues, who explained Asian values with two metaphors, Zen koans that are major take-aways for me.

The first was an expression: stroke the neck of the tiger when it attacks you.

The second: If you want to understand Asian values,  just look at all the round tables in any dim sum restaurant.

Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema studies at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

8 is a lucky number in Singapore, especially at Chinese New Year.  During Lucky Draws at parties, a sort of raffle with a generous collective ambience where small gifts are dispensed (I won a bunch of neon highlighters!), any number drawn that has an 8 in it elicits hurrahs.  8 is auspicious:  good luck, good fortune, good health, good cheer.  My time at NTU was auspicious indeed, blessed with all four.

My six month appointment as the Shaw Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore  bloomed with many 8’s. 
 
Below is Part 1 of my list of my take-aways from my wonderfully engaged colleagues at SCI, in no particular order of importance, with my first four in this posting. They are highlights but also useful metaphors and maybe even benchmarks or conversations for US  colleges and universities, now grappling with precipitious cutbacks and reorganizations from the GEC (the acronym Singaporeans bestowed on the Global Economic Collapse, barely felt in Asia):

1. The SCI Weekly Research Seminar.   Organized by my colleague Marko Skoric, an intensely clear-thinking quantitative communication scholar from Serbia , the weekly seminar featured scholars from both SCI and across campus.  20-30 minutes of presentation, then discussion. 

After the ferocious “let me make an intervention” battle calls of Northeastern US intellectual life, I appreciated the more collegial and less combative style.  Maybe it was the round table we all sat around. Maybe it was the fact that the room was filled with faculty from so many disciplines and methodological schools in communications.  Maybe it was the Asian value of harmony. Who knows?  

I heard about remittance cultures in Asia and new media, about global Asian cities marketing themselves as new media and IT promised lands,  IT access for development in Nepal and Indonesia, the problems of Asian communications schools teaching courses from a US perspective, the SARS epidemic and representation, internet law in Malaysia, social media and news in Germany.
 
I learned so much from these presentations because they exceeded my own discipline  of film/media studies and historiography and pushed me beyond my comfort zone.  It didn’t matter if there were 5 or 35 faculty in attendance.  The ideas and research popped with freshness.  The research seminar changed a lot of my ideas. And it was a great way to meet people for future lunches of dim sum or laksa.

2. The SCI  Book Exchange.  On the fourth floor of the SCI building, a faculty lounge offered coffee, tea (always my favorite, the stronger brew of Lipton Yellow Label, hard to procure in the US), snacks, a continuous news feed from Channel News Asia, and, my favorite, a book exchange. 

Across Asia, you’ll see these book exchanges in hotels and hostels. Books are heavy to carry, and, very expensive in Asia.  The book exchange at SCI struck me as both practical—books are expensive so why not share ?—and symbolic—ideas circulated and were shared.  

Spy, thriller, suspense, historical, and literary novels, travel guides to countries in Southeast Asia and communication books, jammed the shelves. There was also plenty of trash reading, although as an former English lit major, trash is not to my taste.

I borrowed quite a few literary novels—Marguerite Duras (who wrote feminist novels about sexuality and Vietnam), Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, John Burdett (who writes detective novels set in Thailand), Jhumpa Lahiri.  And I left books there as well. 

I liked how the book exchange idea was pirated from backpackers and then adapted.  I wondered why more US based departments don’t adopt this practice. In a  puritanical and individualistic culture, maybe we can’t admit we read novels --or anything--for fun and relaxation. They remain secret pleasures.

3. Continuous Discussions about Pedagogy. By US  Carnegie criteria, NTU would be considered a Research institution in Tier 1. 

In the US, an ideology persists that only four year student-centered  institutions care about teaching, with those student-remote research one schools focused exclusively on publication. 

What I discovered at NTU was that a lot of these schools in the US claiming to focus on teaching actually focus on catering to students,  student evaluations, student centered learning and the potential market for future students—a big difference from pedagogy. Students in the US often are figured as simultaneously customers, a market, and clients. I wish we could think of students as burgeoning intellectuals.  My former dean, Thomas Bohn, once told me when I was a young assistant professor that our job as faculty is to invite students into a larger disciplinary based conversation. Quite a different idea from a service-centered pedagogy....

Not a day passed at NTU without a substantive and deeeply intellectual discussion about pedagogical issues, whether it was with colleagues or administrators: how to deliver an effective curriculum, how to update courses with new research, how to structure courses around ideas and their development, how to build intellectual critique and good writing skills. Research and teaching were always intertwined, like the yin and yang symbol so prevalent across Asia. 

A continuing topic of discussion was the question of laptops and various electronics infiltrating the classroom, with some students doing continuous Facebook updating during class! My colleagues Mark Cenite and  Nikki Draper confronted this menace to engagement as an intellectual conundrum that needed careful deconstruction culturally, socially, economically, ethically.They were not dismissive of these students, but wanted to understand what was happening in the cultural shift towards ubiquitous social media in order to structure their classroom time to maximize engagement.

In cinema studies at IC, we have suffered through this same problem given extensive campus WiFI and a requirement for laptops in the School of Communications, and instituted a Laptop and Electronic Device Policy that effectively bars all devices during classtime. It’s on our syllabi, and gives us the right to ask students to suspend their social media practices.  SCI Faculy were interested in this policy, and wanted to instituted something similar. I felt quite useful sharing our cinema studies laptop policy. Big thanks to my colleague Matt Fee who popped the current version over to me.

4. International Faculty: The Real Deal.  Over the last ten years, the word “international” works like a barnacle attaching itself to the boats of higher education. 

It appears in so many mission statements, strategic plans, assessments, and facilitated brainstorming sessions that no one ever seems to ask how it is defined and actualized—at least in the US.

Most US faculty I know figure these incantations of "internationalism" present a contradictory moment.

On the one hand, in the shifting  and increasingly volatile terrain of transnational corporate life, graduates (and institutions) no longer have the luxury of isolationism and English-only.  On the other hand, with twenty years of globalization, post-colonial, cosmopolitan, critical race, and other theories of the periphery,  research and teaching are much  more carefully situated within global flows and power relations, so new faculty are pushing curricula away from its American-centeredness.

At NTU, I experienced a different way of considering “international.”  Faculty in SCI came from 18 different countries, including England, Burma, India, Malaysia, the US, Singapore,Serbia, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Mexico.  I didn’t find one course based on a single country.  Courses seemed to be structured around salient issues and important trajectories. And I rarely heard a research presentation on a single country. 

Maybe it is because Singapore is so small, with only 5 million residents.  Maybe it is because Singapore has always been an entrepot, a port in global flows reaching back a thousand years. 

Whatever the reason,  working in an environment that was this international rerouted my vectors, my teaching, my curatorial work, my writing, my ideas, my reading, my theoretical orientations, and what I read in the Singapore Straits Times and the International Herald Tribune.  It was exciting. And, it was intellectually invigorating, like going to a spa for one's mind, getting the kinks kneaded out and the toxins flushed.

I looked forward to going into my SCI office everyday, wondering who I would talk to and what we would talk about.  My days were filled with questions, rather than answers.  And maybe, in the end, it reconnected me to why we all became academics in the first place.

Stay tuned for Part II, and more auspicious take-aways.

Blog written by Patricia R. Zimmermann, Shaw Foundation Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and  professor of cinema and codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca College

WAN IFRA

I’m sitting in the back row of the banquet room on the tenth floor of the upscale M Hotel in downtown Singapore.

I’m freezing—the air conditioning is so crisp and cold it’s almost an electro-shock after the 93 degree heat and humidity of walking through the business district in Tanjong Pagar. 

I’m listening to speakers from Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Germany, the United States and Malaysia describe the changing topography of journalism in Asia.

Summary:  the future of journalism is…business and marketing on  24/7 social media platforms.

This gathering is an intense two day working conference for news organizations and news professionals called The Future of Journalism and News Media, sponsored by the World Association of Newspaper and News Publishers (WAN IFRA), Nanyang Technological University and the Asian Journalism Fellowship. 

Go to Where the People Are

“Media are no longer about a brand and people coming to you,” asserted Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York graduate school of journalism . “Now you have to go where the people are—media are more distributed than centralized.” On vacation in Florida, Jarvis was skyped into the conference.

Over 100 journalists from Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bhutan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, France, Germany and the United States crowd the round tables.  I talked to a lot of them at the cocktail party, which featured copious amounts of satay and sashimi. I  really liked and admired the people I met.

The  q and a sessions after each session feel more like press conferences where journalists drill into undeveloped points for clarification and exposure. It’s a long way from academics in the US who often start their questions with “let me make an intervention” or “I’d like to problematize your position a bit.” 

I like their agility in cutting to the bone of ideas. A spirit of harmony and collegiality pervades this conference.

Malaysiakini, Passion and the Internet

Malaysiakini.com is a website that pushed the boundaries of press freedom in Malaysia, explained Premesh Chandran, one of its founders. The Malaysian government loosened press censorship on the internet in the late 1990s when it was pushing its multimedia corridor—Malaysiakini took advantage of this opening and launched in 1999.  

With passion and commitment to breaking stories on government and business scandals, Malaysiakini focused on fast news underrepresented in the mainstream and offered diverse viewpoints. 

Chandran contends that where you publish is irrelevant now. Brand name and credibility are Malaysiakini’s number one asset.  By 2004, the website was profitable.  By 2008, it was ranked #1 for news in Malaysia.

A lot of the questions volleyed here seem to pivot around how news organizations in Thailand or Indonesia can steer through the  swift-moving rapids of multiplatformed social media. J

Journalists here wonder out loud how their jobs will change from doing stories to branding themselves as specialists across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. 

Old Dead Tree Journalism and New Social Media Journalism

I’m jamming my notebook with percentages on everything from who reads newspapers (older people) to who uses Twitter (younger people), aphorisms about social media engagement strategies (twitter and blog and post 24/7) and exhortations to invent a new business model for journalism (make money by branding and sponsoring meet ups and trainings).

The old journalism (what some here call dead tree journalism) of a daily newspaper, loyal readers,  and highly trained journalists with authority is extinct. 

The new journalism (an endlessly swirling concoction of citizen journalism, blogs, Twitter, engagement strategies, branding, mobile interfaces and aggregation) is in Darwinian ascendance. But  it doesn’t yet have a viable business model for what many speakers call “monetization.”

Some Facts and Observations on the New Landscape

Consider the following facts and arguments offered at this conference about the future of journalism:

* Journalism is not a product but a process, and journalists must adopt an “entrepreneurial spirit” to capitalize on low cost platforms,  according to Jeff Jarvis

* The South China Morning Post, a major high prestige Asian newspaper, is now competing with blogs, contends Reginald Chua, editor in chief of the Hong Kong-based paper. Large organizations may, as a result, be handicapped in this new landscape.

* In Singapore, 1 out of 2 people trust blogs. Chew Ming, editor of the Singapore-based, user-generated site Stomp, pointed out that citizen journalism captures news as it is happening—a much different timeline than traditional journalism.  But it’s better at who , what, when, and where, than why and how.

* Creation is aggregation—use people as our agents to spread our brand, claimed Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review.

* Listen, plan, engage, amplify, optimize, urged Thomas Crampton, a former New York Times and International Herald Tribune journalist now Asia Pacific director fo 360 Digital Influence, Ogilvy, Hong Kong.  Journalism is a “three legged stool” of online, in person, and in print.

* People will pay for quality journalism, argued Premesh Chandran from Malaysiakini.com

* “Leisurization” is a growing market for online news. 91% of people in a recent survey think the internet is the most effective way to get leisure information. People want and need to escape, and these desires can be “monetized” online, according to Jerome Doncieux, co-CEO of AFP Relaxnews in France.

Where do nonprofit news/public affairs organizations fit in?

Walter Lim, who helped launch the imaginative, compelling  and useful Singapore heritage project Yesterday.sg, and I are the only speakers from the nonprofit realm. His user-generated historical archive--which had several fans and users in this esteemed audience--is funded by the National Heritage Board of Singapore. 

I guess I represented what we in the US call “public media,” that range of works that open up concerns and debates about civil society.  I asked the audience to consider shifting from considering business models to the conceptual, philosophical and ethical models of this new social media landscape—all of which are unresolved and thorny issues despite the euphoria over twittering in Iran. 

My colleague Cherian George, himself a former Singapore Straits Times journalist who is now a professor at NTU with a Ph.D., invited me to speak about an on-going research and theoretical project I am collaborating on with filmmaker , writer and non profit arts administrator Helen de Michiel called the Open Space Project, a theoretical model of collaborative, participatory relational practice that pulls in community rather than pushes out ideas.

I must admit, I wasn’t quite sure how this model for nonprofit social media mobilization might mesh with the rhetorics of business models, entrepreneurialism, branding, and pushing out ideas to capture eyeballs for advertizers.  

I didn't want to alienate the audience, but to invite them into a slightly different conversation. Open Space media, in our model, is where technology meets people meets places.

Social Media in Asia and the US: Similiar and Different

In the end, I’m struck by how the pumped-up-pitch-man rhetoric, the engagement strategies,  the euphoria about new media, the multiplatforming, the evangelism that the old forms are dead and the new forms need our embrace,  and even the adoption of the “indie rock model” to commoditize ancillary products at live events, is almost identical to what I heard  from the nonprofit social media pundits at the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture Commonwealth Conference last August in Boston. 

The only difference was that the nonprofit NAMAC crowd shuffled around the term sustainability, while the for-profit WAN IFRA group lobbed the term monetization.  An uncritical optimism about social media  coupled with horror-film like warnings about ignoring it pervaded both the WAN IFRA and NAMAC gatherings.

At NAMAC after hours, at the hotel bar, nonprofit administrators described how they spent most of their time chained to laptops sending out Tweets and  being clever on Facebook updates and  pumping out e-blasts and building dynamic websites. They shared they were exhausted by it all and missed the days of engaging audiences  and ideas more directly. 

At a WAN IFRA luncheon where I ate lamb laksa and fish curry, I listened to seasoned journalists from four different countries in southeast Asia worry that younger journalists never leave the newsroom or make phone calls—they google and surf the internet and then remix what they find.  They have not done the “death knock”—where someone dies and you interview their family or friends.

The Future Needs Restructuring

Both conversations give me pause. 

It seems like social media is actually not social—in the Habermasian sense—at all.

Perhaps it has created a cordon sanitaire around ideas and news that matter, trapping nonprofits, for-profits, and entrepreneurial freelancers from both sectors in a digital quarantine. As a result, the traumas, pain, messiness, and conflicts of the powerful and the powerless--defining features of journalism, public affairs, documentary, and nonprofit public media around the globe for at least two centuries--are cordoned off, outside, far away, unnecessary, neutralized.

So maybe the future of journalism and nonprofit media in Asia and the United States are the same:  a tectonic restructuring of the relationships between producers, users, institutions, technological platforms, labor, and business models . 

And maybe the future of journalism and nonprofit media everywhere should also include some vigorous discussion of the whys and hows of ethics.

And what it means to get away from your iPhone and into the streets again, interacting with, uh, that old platform which is always new, called real people.