A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
Reporting from an up-scale netbar (520数码天地) in Chaoyang, Beijing.
Here, seats are grouped into single-computer cocoons & round-table group-play canopies on top of the usual cluster-rows. The Saturday-afternoon clientele includes expatriate youth.
Below are the top 10 shows watched, all free once you pay the hourly computer usage fee:
They are, in order:
Continue reading520 Netbar, Beijing
Reporting from Zheng Zhou (a fast-growing second-tier city and the capital of the Henan province).
The entrance of one (seemingly disguised as semi-studious?):
The inside of another, filled with the usual crop of teenagers using IM, watching soaps, playing online games, and surfing the web:
And inside the same NetBar, posters of some…
Continue readingPhoto Report of NetBars in ZhengZhou
Lhamo Tsering is a young Tibetan woman who lives in a village with her family in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen. In 2003 I did anthropological research for my master’s thesis and Lhamo and her family graciously offered me to live with them. I stayed with them for seven months.
Most village houses have electricity for lighting, but…
Continue readingYoung Tibetans on the internet
Our Taiwanese contributor Nydia Chen points out that the famous “Asian Backstreet Boys,” aka the “Backdorm Boys” 后舍男生, have a lot going on these days. They’ve become celebrities in China with many videos beyond the original “As Long As I Love You.”
They have their own blog, with all of their…
Continue readingAsian Backdorm Boys 后舍男生 update
Check out the current issue of The Escapist, which explores Chinese gaming. Includes articles on Chinese piracy, transnational work relationships, and Chinese game design. Great stuff. I especially liked the article by Patrick Dugan on different approaches to cross-cultural textual communication in games. Excerpt:
A design I’m currently developing utilizes the Celtic…
Continue readingThe Escapist on Chinese gaming
Google has its “zeitgeist” feature which allows you to take the pulse of most popular search terms for the week, month, or even year; Baidu has a similar feature called “list of hottest Chinese searches” 中文搜索风云榜. Neither are particularly intuitive to me, frankly, since they both divide the search terms into strange categories–e.g., Google’s “spring break” list…
Continue readingBaidu’s “zeitgeist” rankings
