Well I am not about to give you a recipe, but lets consider what happens to technologies in order for them to become indispensable. That is, these technologies must be integrated into the process of daily living - the everyday routines of getting things done, getting through the day and making self. The goal of much research in the HCI community is not just on developing innovating concepts or understanding the role of technology in everyday life, we are also aiming at changing everyday behavior or weaving technologies into the part of the everyday. Admit it, who wouldn't want to design the beginnings of the next ipod, invent the next twitter, skype or sms service, design a better facebook that is just as popular worldwide.
Sometimes technologies take over our lives, becoming indispensable to everyday functioning - imagine loosing access to you mobile phone or never again having access to the Internet? The world would radically change for you, wouldn't it?
There are other technologies though that we like to use, and find them certainly entertaining or even at times useful, but if tomorrow we were to wake up and find them missing, it wouldn't be the end of the world. In fact, we wouldn't do much more than shrug and move on. So far when we talk about technology being indispensable - we make the assumption that this is the case for all users. Logically though, it would seem to be obvious that there are differences between people when they say that technology is indispensable and when they don't much care whether it might vanish tomorrow. In my data I have three technological constructs - mobile phones, the internet and social network sites. I have asked people how they would feel if they were to wake up tomorrow and find each of these missing. The answers were as surprising as they were predictable. Would you be shocked to find out that most people could not imagine their world without mobile phones (though some could), about two thirds felt the world would go back to the dark ages if they were to loose access to the Internet (though a third couldn't care less) and that the vast majority felt they wouldn't be loosing all that much if SNSs were to vanish.
Ok, the first two were predictable. The people that didn't care for these never really "took" to them in the first place. The last one though, the SNSs, was a bit of a shocker because even the people who used the services frequently, those that had just talked my ear off about the wonders of reconnecting with former classmates or long lost friends, weren't bothered much. They shrugged and many even said they might then have more time to do
other things - like meet people in person instead. There were a few that
said their lives would have to be altered because they would loose an
important daily tool, but these were few. What was the difference? How can this be if we take all of Facebook research at face value? SNS use is seen as positive and useful and increasing social capital and all that, and yet when asked to consider a sudden loss of the service, most users I've spoken you just shrug it off?????
Caveat of course - my research was conducted in places outside the Western world and my respondents were on average a decade or two older than the college students most research has considered so far (although Burke et al. work looks at random selections of FB users, if the age-range is slanted toward younger users and the sample is constrained by US-based users, the sample would nevertheless have a prevalence of users between 20 and 35).
Yet I think the things I am finding are useful for thinking what it is that seems to accompany integration into daily life and a particular technology becoming "indispensable" and when technologies remain on the periphery of life despite fulfilling useful functions. I can't really answer this definitively, but I can do a good start on that... we shall see, time to go ask the data what IT thinks on the topic.
10 September, 2011
20 October, 2010
Virtual transnationalism?
In this world of digital objects and mediated conversations we can call just about anything "virtual" but when it comes to ideas of relating and concepts that have never been concrete - like transnationalism - adding the term "virtual" creates its own problems.
The notion of transnationalism started out in the early 20th century as a way to contest the idea of immigrant integration and moved into the ground of privilege, defined as an increase in the ability for the people of certain means and aspirations to communicate, interact and conduct business regardless of national boundaries whose significance is seen as receding due to globalization.
Transnationalism as a notion got a similar treatment in academia as anthropologists such as Peggy Levitt and later post-modern media theorists such as Arjun Appadurai theorized the concept into a new existence. Levitt and colleagues saw the idea of transnationalism rooted in migrant practices of establishing and maintaining links between the countries of their origin and settlement, often infused and relying on large amounts of energy, financial considerations and emotional investments. In this conceptualization, transnationalism was about local communities and distant spaces tied to each other by virtue of particular human links, technological means and ways of navigating geopolitical conditions. Scholars saw these as spaces of resistance to state impositions, spaces of, often inadvertent, political oppositions to the established order, hierarchy and attempts at cultural homogeneity. It was the dispossessed creating their own worlds of survival that extended beyond national boundaries and encompassed distant places affecting each other and producing hybrid cultural forms.
Appadurai, Ong and other theorists saw transnationalism also manifesting in that earlier privileged space of globe trotting academics and cosmopolitan refusal of settled belonging in favor of broadly defined non-culturally specific world-identities, where past and culture and nation were occasional reminders of pre-existing conditions once could transcend, while fighting to realize a new kind of transnational identity - where culture was a process not a thing, and where all existing definitions of belonging and self fell short.
In between these two extremes of the world, lies my research, my subjects and the odd notion of virtual transnationalism, where travel is rare and the purview of the privileged, where economic connections are profoundly local and removed from the relationships dubbed transnational, where the concept of emigration had at a point in time implied a permanent physical absence with little promise of future visits and where social network sites suddenly offered a promise of reconnection that brought about deeply emotional experiences of nostalgic remembrance and intimate exchanges of current status, but where the idea of transnationalism does not quite fit despite the ties spanning national boundaries and temporal differences - reconnecting not only with each other but also with a kind of past that is long gone.
So in my view, virtual transnationalism is nostalgic connections with ties who now reside across the world - where these connections are about the past and about the nostalgia of past relationships and yet the current locations situate and contextualize both the reminiscences and the discussions of where life is now. These are connections that are necessarily technologically mediated - they have to be because they are not sustainable when the costs of communication are too high. Yet these are also connections whose attractive accessibility through technology motivates said technology use. These are lapsed ties - where reconnections are not about reviving relationships but about catching up, dusting off, exchanging current news, reminiscing about the past, exchanging a bit of gossip and then laying them back to rest, only slightly less inaccessible now.
The notion of transnationalism started out in the early 20th century as a way to contest the idea of immigrant integration and moved into the ground of privilege, defined as an increase in the ability for the people of certain means and aspirations to communicate, interact and conduct business regardless of national boundaries whose significance is seen as receding due to globalization.
Transnationalism as a notion got a similar treatment in academia as anthropologists such as Peggy Levitt and later post-modern media theorists such as Arjun Appadurai theorized the concept into a new existence. Levitt and colleagues saw the idea of transnationalism rooted in migrant practices of establishing and maintaining links between the countries of their origin and settlement, often infused and relying on large amounts of energy, financial considerations and emotional investments. In this conceptualization, transnationalism was about local communities and distant spaces tied to each other by virtue of particular human links, technological means and ways of navigating geopolitical conditions. Scholars saw these as spaces of resistance to state impositions, spaces of, often inadvertent, political oppositions to the established order, hierarchy and attempts at cultural homogeneity. It was the dispossessed creating their own worlds of survival that extended beyond national boundaries and encompassed distant places affecting each other and producing hybrid cultural forms.
Appadurai, Ong and other theorists saw transnationalism also manifesting in that earlier privileged space of globe trotting academics and cosmopolitan refusal of settled belonging in favor of broadly defined non-culturally specific world-identities, where past and culture and nation were occasional reminders of pre-existing conditions once could transcend, while fighting to realize a new kind of transnational identity - where culture was a process not a thing, and where all existing definitions of belonging and self fell short.
In between these two extremes of the world, lies my research, my subjects and the odd notion of virtual transnationalism, where travel is rare and the purview of the privileged, where economic connections are profoundly local and removed from the relationships dubbed transnational, where the concept of emigration had at a point in time implied a permanent physical absence with little promise of future visits and where social network sites suddenly offered a promise of reconnection that brought about deeply emotional experiences of nostalgic remembrance and intimate exchanges of current status, but where the idea of transnationalism does not quite fit despite the ties spanning national boundaries and temporal differences - reconnecting not only with each other but also with a kind of past that is long gone.
So in my view, virtual transnationalism is nostalgic connections with ties who now reside across the world - where these connections are about the past and about the nostalgia of past relationships and yet the current locations situate and contextualize both the reminiscences and the discussions of where life is now. These are connections that are necessarily technologically mediated - they have to be because they are not sustainable when the costs of communication are too high. Yet these are also connections whose attractive accessibility through technology motivates said technology use. These are lapsed ties - where reconnections are not about reviving relationships but about catching up, dusting off, exchanging current news, reminiscing about the past, exchanging a bit of gossip and then laying them back to rest, only slightly less inaccessible now.
Greateness at what cost?
I have been trying to decide which smartphone to buy in order to join the smartphone crowd somewhat belatedly I suppose. Certainly there is the obvious response - buy an iphone, but I refuse to. I must admit, I am occasionally tempted by the easy user-interface and the ecstatic reports from friends. Yet I have a small problem with Apple and it's products. I think that Apple conducts some of the worst offenses and it's business practices are horrid. The enfant terrible of the tech world produces eye-candy technology of very high quality, but at what price to the people that work for it, the people that revolve in the world directly connected to the design and production of this technology and to the rest of us in this crazy world? So you might say I have principles... not very strong ones (I do use Apple products for a variety of purposes and I do admit their technology is in many ways superior to competitors), but they do exist. I limit my consumption of Apple products out of principle.
Apple is the darling child of the tech community that seems to be able to forgive and forget it's missteps and little crimes in favor of consumption of its brilliance. Some very long time ago, an art history teacher of mine in a class on Russian art told us how one of the brilliant well known artists of the last century was also implicated in occasionally having sex with very young peasant girls (of the pre-pubescent age) and then painting their portraits. He asked us then, whether these crimes had any impact on how we perceived the frankly brilliant paintings now that we knew that the majority of the subjects were also molested by the author. I was horrified, but at the same time, there was a part of me that readily excused the brilliance for having to get inspiration in such a horrific way. As I look on at the enfant terribles of this world - I wonder, why DO we excuse the brilliance for its occasional (or not so occasional) missteps? Why are some vicitimizations and little crimes overlooked when our gains, intellectual or technological, are seen as worthwhile? Is it because the product of that brilliance, no matter its source, is a source of pride and that is important to our little human minds that feel so much smaller in the presence thereof? Is it because the cost-benefit analysis somehow tips in favor of the product no matter its source? I am not sure, but the Apple cultish cabal is sometimes too much conceptually to really buy in to the all-apple product line. Then again, I did just buy an ipad.
Apple is the darling child of the tech community that seems to be able to forgive and forget it's missteps and little crimes in favor of consumption of its brilliance. Some very long time ago, an art history teacher of mine in a class on Russian art told us how one of the brilliant well known artists of the last century was also implicated in occasionally having sex with very young peasant girls (of the pre-pubescent age) and then painting their portraits. He asked us then, whether these crimes had any impact on how we perceived the frankly brilliant paintings now that we knew that the majority of the subjects were also molested by the author. I was horrified, but at the same time, there was a part of me that readily excused the brilliance for having to get inspiration in such a horrific way. As I look on at the enfant terribles of this world - I wonder, why DO we excuse the brilliance for its occasional (or not so occasional) missteps? Why are some vicitimizations and little crimes overlooked when our gains, intellectual or technological, are seen as worthwhile? Is it because the product of that brilliance, no matter its source, is a source of pride and that is important to our little human minds that feel so much smaller in the presence thereof? Is it because the cost-benefit analysis somehow tips in favor of the product no matter its source? I am not sure, but the Apple cultish cabal is sometimes too much conceptually to really buy in to the all-apple product line. Then again, I did just buy an ipad.
14 June, 2010
Russian gaming
Gaming is always present but it is elusive to some extent and different people engage in different kinds of games, often oblivious to other potential forms of entertainment available just a click or two away. In Russia gaming appears in all its forms from game-playing computer clubs that promote within and between club tournaments and serve food alongside use to the complex hybrid reality "night games" to the run of the mill farmville in social network sites. These "toys" as Russians call them, are mostly seen as inconsequential time-waster entertainment, available for relaxation or forms of socializing and mostly by no means a serious past-time. In fact, much of the language around these games uses terms of drug use, addiction and sickness only half in jest.
I first started hearing about Farmville and other Zynga knock-offs that had appeared on Russian social network sites when I was in Kazakhstan. In Moscow the story took on a slightly different turn. Initially, I was intrigued not so much by gaming, but by a somewhat startling increase in the use of Facebook as the favorite social network site for young, technically advanced and relatively financially well off respondents. Where last year Facebook only came up in conversation as a site for use with foreign friends or contacts that explicitly did not speak Russian, this year Facebook came up as one of a number of site where people hung out with their local friends. In fact, Facebook was more common specifically for hanging out with other young moscovites. I was intrigued and my respondents confidently explained that Facebook had become "cool" among a certain "kind of person" in Moscow just in the last six to eight months when suddenly everyone who was in any way interesting was using it incessantly... apparently in order to play Farmville and other assorted Zynga games. After getting into the games, they then got all of their friends to sign up and play as well, devising various methods of getting their friends to join in the madness, often terming this as "getting them hooked" in words specifically used to indicate introduction to intravenous drug use.
Where Farmville, although social because it is often played with friends (sort of), happens to be a slow and individual game, the very technically advanced users of smartphones are playing location-based games like four-square and Gowalla. Here the excitement is in the instant feedback of friends involved in the game and feeling of being perpetually connected and present. "If you are not using social media and if you are not on top of the buzz in Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook and all the rest, then you do not exist!" was the statement I had heard several times from the diehard fans of all things social media. They insisted on existing in their respective favorite social media realms (seemingly as many as possible at the same time) yet they insisted on meeting in person and frequently hanging out as well.
Neither the Farmville players nor the location-based Gowalla-gamers however, were particularly interested in a third kind of game playing that I frequently encountered in the interstices between IT professionals and the less sophisticated users of social network sites. These players of what they themselves termed "night games" were of a different kind - often technologically proficient but not IT professionals, calling the game an "alternative form of entertainment" - the players here were dedicated to the idea of being different and engaging in a kind of activity that might not be understood by the mainstream but that was ultimately an intense bonding experience. Every player that I had spoken to expressed one particular idea about the game that seemed an important reason for their attraction to the whole idea. It was the notion that real life stopped outside the realm of the game and inside the game space, whether on the online discussion boards or during the game itself, the rank, file and social standing of each player played zero difference. Young teenage kids reprimanded men and women in their 40s and got agreement and acquiescence. The game to them was an ultimate expression of democracy and equality where external and commonly culturally accepted markers of status did not count.
The game had spread like wildfire throughout eastern Europe and FSU countries, mostly depending on the extensive russian speaking diaspora. There had been attempts to bring the game to Western Europe and the US as well, but law enforcement in those countries did not look quite so positively on random groups of people running around abandoned urban areas at night with flashlights. There was a lot of location-based technology and mobile internet use in game, but once again purely in service of the game at hand and not for gathering of status or points of any other kind. The game was about extending yourself and going outside safe boundary zones both socially and physically and people involved cherished both kinds of experience. The most intriguing aspect of the conversation about the game with one of the ardent promoters of the game was his story about their attempts to spread the game out to China. They had tried to run similar games there both in Russian and in Chinese, but got few takers and little traction. They hadn't been able to really figure out why but had given up for now.
I've been trying to think where these games are in the scheme of the everyday life and why they are both really important to some people and utterly incomprehensibly silly and unnecessary to most others. Where some games are there to feel minor achievements in the haze of everyday busy life and other games are all-night efforts of pushing yourself beyond your limits and running around basements with a team of others competing for some odd codes written in dusty corners, where members of teams often playing together in the same town may not even know each others' names, only game-handles and never find that particularly limited by a complete lack of knowledge of each others' background. In fact, for many that's exactly the point of the game... and the only way the could play it. Is it escapism? Is it a way to increase social capital without making it all about conscious calculation? Is it just entertainment? Or is this entertainment of a specific, post-soviet flavor? I don't yet know...
I first started hearing about Farmville and other Zynga knock-offs that had appeared on Russian social network sites when I was in Kazakhstan. In Moscow the story took on a slightly different turn. Initially, I was intrigued not so much by gaming, but by a somewhat startling increase in the use of Facebook as the favorite social network site for young, technically advanced and relatively financially well off respondents. Where last year Facebook only came up in conversation as a site for use with foreign friends or contacts that explicitly did not speak Russian, this year Facebook came up as one of a number of site where people hung out with their local friends. In fact, Facebook was more common specifically for hanging out with other young moscovites. I was intrigued and my respondents confidently explained that Facebook had become "cool" among a certain "kind of person" in Moscow just in the last six to eight months when suddenly everyone who was in any way interesting was using it incessantly... apparently in order to play Farmville and other assorted Zynga games. After getting into the games, they then got all of their friends to sign up and play as well, devising various methods of getting their friends to join in the madness, often terming this as "getting them hooked" in words specifically used to indicate introduction to intravenous drug use.
Where Farmville, although social because it is often played with friends (sort of), happens to be a slow and individual game, the very technically advanced users of smartphones are playing location-based games like four-square and Gowalla. Here the excitement is in the instant feedback of friends involved in the game and feeling of being perpetually connected and present. "If you are not using social media and if you are not on top of the buzz in Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook and all the rest, then you do not exist!" was the statement I had heard several times from the diehard fans of all things social media. They insisted on existing in their respective favorite social media realms (seemingly as many as possible at the same time) yet they insisted on meeting in person and frequently hanging out as well.
Neither the Farmville players nor the location-based Gowalla-gamers however, were particularly interested in a third kind of game playing that I frequently encountered in the interstices between IT professionals and the less sophisticated users of social network sites. These players of what they themselves termed "night games" were of a different kind - often technologically proficient but not IT professionals, calling the game an "alternative form of entertainment" - the players here were dedicated to the idea of being different and engaging in a kind of activity that might not be understood by the mainstream but that was ultimately an intense bonding experience. Every player that I had spoken to expressed one particular idea about the game that seemed an important reason for their attraction to the whole idea. It was the notion that real life stopped outside the realm of the game and inside the game space, whether on the online discussion boards or during the game itself, the rank, file and social standing of each player played zero difference. Young teenage kids reprimanded men and women in their 40s and got agreement and acquiescence. The game to them was an ultimate expression of democracy and equality where external and commonly culturally accepted markers of status did not count.
The game had spread like wildfire throughout eastern Europe and FSU countries, mostly depending on the extensive russian speaking diaspora. There had been attempts to bring the game to Western Europe and the US as well, but law enforcement in those countries did not look quite so positively on random groups of people running around abandoned urban areas at night with flashlights. There was a lot of location-based technology and mobile internet use in game, but once again purely in service of the game at hand and not for gathering of status or points of any other kind. The game was about extending yourself and going outside safe boundary zones both socially and physically and people involved cherished both kinds of experience. The most intriguing aspect of the conversation about the game with one of the ardent promoters of the game was his story about their attempts to spread the game out to China. They had tried to run similar games there both in Russian and in Chinese, but got few takers and little traction. They hadn't been able to really figure out why but had given up for now.
I've been trying to think where these games are in the scheme of the everyday life and why they are both really important to some people and utterly incomprehensibly silly and unnecessary to most others. Where some games are there to feel minor achievements in the haze of everyday busy life and other games are all-night efforts of pushing yourself beyond your limits and running around basements with a team of others competing for some odd codes written in dusty corners, where members of teams often playing together in the same town may not even know each others' names, only game-handles and never find that particularly limited by a complete lack of knowledge of each others' background. In fact, for many that's exactly the point of the game... and the only way the could play it. Is it escapism? Is it a way to increase social capital without making it all about conscious calculation? Is it just entertainment? Or is this entertainment of a specific, post-soviet flavor? I don't yet know...
02 June, 2010
The Russian IT Community
The Russian IT community is far more mature than its Kazakh counterpart and they see the Kazakh community as several years if not half a decade behind in expertise, ability and financial solvency to ensure production of data that is necessary for the industry to go forward - real, well collected data about Internet use. There are large and public IT powerhouses such as the search engine Yandex or the mail system Mail.ru as well as smaller but no less agile and financially solvent systems for businesses and IT development companies that are less visible to the public. There are many investors with money, interested and willing to invest substantial amounts into start up IT businesses than there are actual good ideas for said start ups to move things forward. An IT professional I had met over tea mentioned that he had heard not one but two ideas that week that might be worth a million rubles each (30 rubles = 1$) and that might actually know how to spend that money wisely. He excitedly repeated that fact to me several times throughout our conversation.
Both the IT giants and the smaller companies haven't yet quite figured out the value of user experience engineering, but they are learning very quickly. I met someone who for all intents and purposes does the function of a user experience engineer at Yandex although she does not quite perceive herself as such. The IT market here is moving and they actually make real money (unlike Kazakhstan where not a single Internet-based business makes over $500K a year in revenue so far except of course for the providers, but that's a story best told with reflections over pirated content traffic). Most of the money is made in the capital (Moscow) and its northern counterpart of St. Petersburg but the regional centers are important as well.
Curiously, regional internet use patterns differ in fairly specific ways according to data collected by Yandex and several other independent data sources (see infact.ru). Where Yandex with its mail services, news, search, maps and games dominates main population centers, regionally, mail.ru is more popular for nearly everything except for search. For search Google and Yandex compete far more closely in the regions than in large population centers where Yandex rules. For most intents and purposes however, Google (if you don't count Youtube) and Facebook do not present competition to their Russian counterparts. The explanations that people at Yandex gave me for the regional vs. population center differences were fascinating and profoundly culturally based with an emphasis on levels of sophistication and recognition for quality as the main culprits.
Another regional difference that seems to be important at the very least for people who live either in St. Petersburg or Moscow is the prominence of one or another social network site as the main hangout place for its residents. Vkontakte is perceived in Moscow as THE St. Petersburg site. Everyone in St. Pete is on Vkontakte regardless of age or anything else. "It's a St. Pete local thing, 'cause Durov (the founder of vkontakte) is from there" one of my respondents confided. Many people in Moscow have a profile there as well, but this is very much age and social class dependent. Older people still hang out on odnoklassniki despite the fact that the site now requires pay for many types of uses including initial registration. Younger people are mostly on vkontakte, although the upper to upper-middle class 25 to 35 contingent of Moscovites is now suddenly hanging out on Facebook (and I am told this has to do with gaming of Farmville type where descriptions of such forms of gaming are always presented using a very specific vocabulary of drug addiction). The people from infact.ru however tell me that this increase is insignificant still, because Facebook hasn't even surpassed Twitter in Moscow yet (and Twitter use is minor though on the rise). Facebook of course has to compete with vkontakte here that happens to have what they themselves call 'an unfair advantage'. Vkontakte is the largest database of pirated music and video in Russia at the moment, all contributed by its users. So far, it has been able to do so with impunity, however, just the other day it has received its' first legal challenge from a local content-distribution entrepreneur.
The IT community in Russia and generally the technical elite is heavily using Twitter, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, FaceBook and other networking, self-presentation social software all at the same time. It is also a fairly small and interconnected community. Small enough that apparently my short visit had generated enough generally positive noise on Twitter to even get back to me as weird sort of third-party feedback that hopefully will pave the way to more productive meetings in St. Petersburg.
Both the IT giants and the smaller companies haven't yet quite figured out the value of user experience engineering, but they are learning very quickly. I met someone who for all intents and purposes does the function of a user experience engineer at Yandex although she does not quite perceive herself as such. The IT market here is moving and they actually make real money (unlike Kazakhstan where not a single Internet-based business makes over $500K a year in revenue so far except of course for the providers, but that's a story best told with reflections over pirated content traffic). Most of the money is made in the capital (Moscow) and its northern counterpart of St. Petersburg but the regional centers are important as well.
Curiously, regional internet use patterns differ in fairly specific ways according to data collected by Yandex and several other independent data sources (see infact.ru). Where Yandex with its mail services, news, search, maps and games dominates main population centers, regionally, mail.ru is more popular for nearly everything except for search. For search Google and Yandex compete far more closely in the regions than in large population centers where Yandex rules. For most intents and purposes however, Google (if you don't count Youtube) and Facebook do not present competition to their Russian counterparts. The explanations that people at Yandex gave me for the regional vs. population center differences were fascinating and profoundly culturally based with an emphasis on levels of sophistication and recognition for quality as the main culprits.
Another regional difference that seems to be important at the very least for people who live either in St. Petersburg or Moscow is the prominence of one or another social network site as the main hangout place for its residents. Vkontakte is perceived in Moscow as THE St. Petersburg site. Everyone in St. Pete is on Vkontakte regardless of age or anything else. "It's a St. Pete local thing, 'cause Durov (the founder of vkontakte) is from there" one of my respondents confided. Many people in Moscow have a profile there as well, but this is very much age and social class dependent. Older people still hang out on odnoklassniki despite the fact that the site now requires pay for many types of uses including initial registration. Younger people are mostly on vkontakte, although the upper to upper-middle class 25 to 35 contingent of Moscovites is now suddenly hanging out on Facebook (and I am told this has to do with gaming of Farmville type where descriptions of such forms of gaming are always presented using a very specific vocabulary of drug addiction). The people from infact.ru however tell me that this increase is insignificant still, because Facebook hasn't even surpassed Twitter in Moscow yet (and Twitter use is minor though on the rise). Facebook of course has to compete with vkontakte here that happens to have what they themselves call 'an unfair advantage'. Vkontakte is the largest database of pirated music and video in Russia at the moment, all contributed by its users. So far, it has been able to do so with impunity, however, just the other day it has received its' first legal challenge from a local content-distribution entrepreneur.
The IT community in Russia and generally the technical elite is heavily using Twitter, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, FaceBook and other networking, self-presentation social software all at the same time. It is also a fairly small and interconnected community. Small enough that apparently my short visit had generated enough generally positive noise on Twitter to even get back to me as weird sort of third-party feedback that hopefully will pave the way to more productive meetings in St. Petersburg.
30 May, 2010
Moscow colors and specificities
First impressions are often most striking and at the same time most faulty, sensitive as they are to the random collection of momentary images. Moscow greeted me with long lines at the border, taxi hawkers, a very nice airport to city train and rush hour in the metro where trains arrive every 20 to 30 seconds, all of them full to bursting with a mass of people that pretty much carries you in and out of the stations. Moscow is modern, it has a sense of Europe, there is a coffee house on every block (sometime several in a row), internet cafe's nearby with a reasonable rich city frequency nestling inside hip galleries and public libraries, expensive stores, lots of street food and old grandmothers selling flowers and greenery on the corners. The metro is one of the most efficient transport systems in the world but it does not quite manage the flow of people despite the effort. The traffic is frightening and the tourist guide suggests using ONLY cross-walks and underground crossings if one were to desire to remain unharmed by the crazy driving patterns.
For the last decade Moscow has had blue-siren cars of the very important people that have the right to break all the rules, drive against traffic pass on the sidewalks, etc, in order to get around traffic with impunity. In the last few months, after futile attempts of the Moscow government to remove these privileges, citizens took matters into their own hands, making fun of the important people by attaching blue plastic buckets onto the roofs of their cars or putting them on their heads.
http://rutube.ru/tracks/3254325.html?v=24063637140b9b1b4be96cc28018a9ae
http://www.rferl.org/video/7064.html
I am looking for people to interview and I am starting with house cleaning ladies, young IT professionals and Encounter players (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_%28game%29) along with my usual collection of young and well to do professionals and occasionally their parents. Odnoklassniki still rules and so does vkontakte, Facebook is for foreign contacts and now it is also for hip Moscovites and all of St. Pete is on vkontakte just because. Things have changed and they have stayed the same as I walked along Tretyakovskaya Gallery with A. Voiskonski who has been studying mediated communication in Russia for the last 15 years and knows all of the big HCI names in the business. The internet is pushing, pulling, creating opportunities and I hear a lot of mentions of odnoklassniki and vkontakte as I walk along the streets and I sit in cafe's. These usually come in the context of talking about finding people and about being found... being found seems to be a more uncomfortable experience because being found is usually by those classmate and contacts that are less welcome. The contact with the past is still very important but little of it actually moves toward creating new ties or new experiences or opportunities. It is about the past, the pictures, the catching up and the experience of being similar back then. It is still important....
Moscow is all colors and gorgeous people and ugly moments, as when I watched the paramedics roughly throw in and zip up a corpse of a middle-aged tattooed man in a sailor shirt and dirty rolled up khakis into a black plastic bag before loading him into an ambulance. This in the center of a gorgeous green boulevard, just down the street from a photo exhibit with many drunk youth hanging out just feet away and laughing at the silent horror of the moment. A man in a tight biking outfit on an expensive bike held out his phone, recording the whole thing on video, likely to show up later some place on youtube. The cops just looked on and the medics moved quickly, roughly but efficiently. We walked on, along with crowds of other people, off toward the historic Arbat street, discussing the latest atrocities of Moscow, the frivolities of police - http://abcnews.go.com/International/human-shield-tactic-latest-moscow-police-scandal/story?id=10083153 and the general firm knowledge that the only thing that protects anyone from anything in this place is money and a lot of it. And yet in the story of the human shield and the blue buckets, the Internet had played an important and interesting role of making it less possible to simply ignore what is happening and making it possible to at least question if not actually affect change...
For the last decade Moscow has had blue-siren cars of the very important people that have the right to break all the rules, drive against traffic pass on the sidewalks, etc, in order to get around traffic with impunity. In the last few months, after futile attempts of the Moscow government to remove these privileges, citizens took matters into their own hands, making fun of the important people by attaching blue plastic buckets onto the roofs of their cars or putting them on their heads.
http://rutube.ru/tracks/3254325.html?v=24063637140b9b1b4be96cc28018a9ae
http://www.rferl.org/video/7064.html
I am looking for people to interview and I am starting with house cleaning ladies, young IT professionals and Encounter players (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_%28game%29) along with my usual collection of young and well to do professionals and occasionally their parents. Odnoklassniki still rules and so does vkontakte, Facebook is for foreign contacts and now it is also for hip Moscovites and all of St. Pete is on vkontakte just because. Things have changed and they have stayed the same as I walked along Tretyakovskaya Gallery with A. Voiskonski who has been studying mediated communication in Russia for the last 15 years and knows all of the big HCI names in the business. The internet is pushing, pulling, creating opportunities and I hear a lot of mentions of odnoklassniki and vkontakte as I walk along the streets and I sit in cafe's. These usually come in the context of talking about finding people and about being found... being found seems to be a more uncomfortable experience because being found is usually by those classmate and contacts that are less welcome. The contact with the past is still very important but little of it actually moves toward creating new ties or new experiences or opportunities. It is about the past, the pictures, the catching up and the experience of being similar back then. It is still important....
Moscow is all colors and gorgeous people and ugly moments, as when I watched the paramedics roughly throw in and zip up a corpse of a middle-aged tattooed man in a sailor shirt and dirty rolled up khakis into a black plastic bag before loading him into an ambulance. This in the center of a gorgeous green boulevard, just down the street from a photo exhibit with many drunk youth hanging out just feet away and laughing at the silent horror of the moment. A man in a tight biking outfit on an expensive bike held out his phone, recording the whole thing on video, likely to show up later some place on youtube. The cops just looked on and the medics moved quickly, roughly but efficiently. We walked on, along with crowds of other people, off toward the historic Arbat street, discussing the latest atrocities of Moscow, the frivolities of police - http://abcnews.go.com/International/human-shield-tactic-latest-moscow-police-scandal/story?id=10083153 and the general firm knowledge that the only thing that protects anyone from anything in this place is money and a lot of it. And yet in the story of the human shield and the blue buckets, the Internet had played an important and interesting role of making it less possible to simply ignore what is happening and making it possible to at least question if not actually affect change...
29 May, 2010
Moscow, here we go again...
I am heading to Moscow today to start another two weeks of fieldwork in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg. I am not treating these trips as intended to actually collect a lot of user data, but as set up trips for more contacts for the future. I am meeting more with academics and IT professionals than doing interviews, because the bulk of interviews, I am hoping to get in Novosibirsk and Tumen' in July. Moscow and St. Pete are not Russia, they are beasts onto themselves that are completely different experiences of Russianness than anywhere else. Nevertheless, these are important because they are central both for money and for education.
Russia greeted me with the usual collection of issues of getting in - the visa was ridiculously expensive and the organization that apparently is inviting me to do business happens to be the Olympic committee of Russia (which incidentally issues lots of invitations to a wide range of people and is the most common invite source). I am guessing this is how someone in the Olympic committee makes money while they do not need to invite lots of athletes - the down-times activity. Russia is a place where everything can be solved with money and I occasionally catch myself for starting to think that this is a normal way of doing things in the world... At least I will feel right at home in China then later on in the year...
Russia greeted me with the usual collection of issues of getting in - the visa was ridiculously expensive and the organization that apparently is inviting me to do business happens to be the Olympic committee of Russia (which incidentally issues lots of invitations to a wide range of people and is the most common invite source). I am guessing this is how someone in the Olympic committee makes money while they do not need to invite lots of athletes - the down-times activity. Russia is a place where everything can be solved with money and I occasionally catch myself for starting to think that this is a normal way of doing things in the world... At least I will feel right at home in China then later on in the year...
18 April, 2010
BarCamp 2010 Almaty
I am at BarCamp this weekend, flew here straight from Aktau and it feels so good to be surrounded by a huge number of geeks! Here they are, dragging around laptops, wires and charges, video cameras and AV equipment and it's really familiar and refreshing. BarCamp this year is tending toward more commercial, with a lot of new projects presenting their wearz, and lots of glitter from sponsors. There was little actual talk of policy, politics and issues was rare and mainly showed up in intimate little circles around the tables in the break room.
Finally, on the second day the Soros foundation sponsored a panel where they invited a government and a civic representative of the organizations responsible or somehow positioned in charge of controlling and developing kaznet. The politics is boiling underneath and it came out immediately boiling and unordered... There are a lot of opinions and a lot of arguing and the conversation immediately reminded me the kind of non-conversation that shows up whenever things like DRM is discussed in the US... The main thing is - regulating the Internet is very very difficult and basically impossible and it is all about politics and political leanings and ideas. The tempers run high but the majority of the audience is bored... the girl next to me is playing sudoku on her phone.
There is a lot of criticism, but there is little concrete suggestion, there are many fairly myopic statements and the professional commentators point out the issues with the commentary. They talk about the reality of central asia where users are powerless and regulating is a hard question. The most disconcerting thing about this panel is that it is very short (only an hour) and includes five very smart people from all over FSU, but only two are giving presentations and accepting questions from the audience. It was a space to vent and people vented but as the only time to vent it was not very constructive.
In general, however, barcamp was a lot of fun despite my general allergy to all easy net-based money-making schemes and pronouncements on the account of the brilliant future of the Internet. The energy of IT guys was really infectious and the fact that some people managed to smuggle kyrgyz bloggers across the very much closed border to participate was impressive. There were bloggers and IT developers from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, Armenia and of course Kazakhstan. These appear to be the most active countries on the Internet from the FSU space if you don't count the baltic region (who have a wholly different relationship to the FSU in general). What was curious was that there weren't many actual IT developers and many bloggers freely admitted they had very little IT knowledge. There was little overt and official political discussion, but politics was everywhere, in the very presence of the Kyrgyz, in the occasional snippets of personal conversations around various tables, in the very groupings of people (who they sat with and who they talked with). There was little discussion of social impact and even less discussion of the political potential of the Internet, but the subtext was obvious...
Overall, there was an impressive amount of energy and the startups were interesting because many were not only about advertisement money but also developed as real attempts to change the physical environment through new media and to do it both on the level of the government and on the level of the average user, interested in where they live. These people really cared not only about developing great successful resources that might make them money, but in some cases the kinds of resources that actually might change their world.
There were other interesting moments, however. At some point, one of the biggest Kazakh bloggers who had won a bunch of awards for his blog, pointed something really important out to me. The kazakh language bloggers were not mixing with everyone else. They talked to the Kyrgyz a bit and to the Uzbeks but generally they were hanging out by themselves. He pointed out one particular ethnically Kazakh blogger who blogged in both languages (kazakh and russian) but because he was hanging out a lot with the russians, the kazakh tended to shun him and to ignore his posts. 'You just can't win and this is really dangerous', my guide told me and fretted, 'it's just starting and it is already really evident and we just can't afford this kind of splitting, we won't be able to accomplish anything then!' For their part, the Russian language bloggers simply dismissed these worries, although occasionally acknowledging the presence and the influence of the kazakh language bloggers. I heard a lot of straight out racist - 'the kazakh are just lazy and besides they don't have a diaspora, who do they need to talk to' kinds of statements even from people who are deeply aware of the politics and generally tend to be very much of a liberal bend. It was startling and at the same time kind of expected - these ethnic tensions have been in place here (and everywhere else in FSU) for eons, there is no reason for them to change and there is every reason for them to become glaringly obvious as they get reflected on the Internet.
After Barcamp was over, I kept running into various participants all over town. Almaty is a small city and the wireless hotspots are well known it appears.
Finally, on the second day the Soros foundation sponsored a panel where they invited a government and a civic representative of the organizations responsible or somehow positioned in charge of controlling and developing kaznet. The politics is boiling underneath and it came out immediately boiling and unordered... There are a lot of opinions and a lot of arguing and the conversation immediately reminded me the kind of non-conversation that shows up whenever things like DRM is discussed in the US... The main thing is - regulating the Internet is very very difficult and basically impossible and it is all about politics and political leanings and ideas. The tempers run high but the majority of the audience is bored... the girl next to me is playing sudoku on her phone.
There is a lot of criticism, but there is little concrete suggestion, there are many fairly myopic statements and the professional commentators point out the issues with the commentary. They talk about the reality of central asia where users are powerless and regulating is a hard question. The most disconcerting thing about this panel is that it is very short (only an hour) and includes five very smart people from all over FSU, but only two are giving presentations and accepting questions from the audience. It was a space to vent and people vented but as the only time to vent it was not very constructive.
In general, however, barcamp was a lot of fun despite my general allergy to all easy net-based money-making schemes and pronouncements on the account of the brilliant future of the Internet. The energy of IT guys was really infectious and the fact that some people managed to smuggle kyrgyz bloggers across the very much closed border to participate was impressive. There were bloggers and IT developers from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, Armenia and of course Kazakhstan. These appear to be the most active countries on the Internet from the FSU space if you don't count the baltic region (who have a wholly different relationship to the FSU in general). What was curious was that there weren't many actual IT developers and many bloggers freely admitted they had very little IT knowledge. There was little overt and official political discussion, but politics was everywhere, in the very presence of the Kyrgyz, in the occasional snippets of personal conversations around various tables, in the very groupings of people (who they sat with and who they talked with). There was little discussion of social impact and even less discussion of the political potential of the Internet, but the subtext was obvious...
Overall, there was an impressive amount of energy and the startups were interesting because many were not only about advertisement money but also developed as real attempts to change the physical environment through new media and to do it both on the level of the government and on the level of the average user, interested in where they live. These people really cared not only about developing great successful resources that might make them money, but in some cases the kinds of resources that actually might change their world.
There were other interesting moments, however. At some point, one of the biggest Kazakh bloggers who had won a bunch of awards for his blog, pointed something really important out to me. The kazakh language bloggers were not mixing with everyone else. They talked to the Kyrgyz a bit and to the Uzbeks but generally they were hanging out by themselves. He pointed out one particular ethnically Kazakh blogger who blogged in both languages (kazakh and russian) but because he was hanging out a lot with the russians, the kazakh tended to shun him and to ignore his posts. 'You just can't win and this is really dangerous', my guide told me and fretted, 'it's just starting and it is already really evident and we just can't afford this kind of splitting, we won't be able to accomplish anything then!' For their part, the Russian language bloggers simply dismissed these worries, although occasionally acknowledging the presence and the influence of the kazakh language bloggers. I heard a lot of straight out racist - 'the kazakh are just lazy and besides they don't have a diaspora, who do they need to talk to' kinds of statements even from people who are deeply aware of the politics and generally tend to be very much of a liberal bend. It was startling and at the same time kind of expected - these ethnic tensions have been in place here (and everywhere else in FSU) for eons, there is no reason for them to change and there is every reason for them to become glaringly obvious as they get reflected on the Internet.
After Barcamp was over, I kept running into various participants all over town. Almaty is a small city and the wireless hotspots are well known it appears.
16 April, 2010
laws, politics and the everyday
I've been looking for explanations of how people who run Internet resources here in Kazakhstan deal with government control. Today, I got a story complete with details of each move and what happened and how things are managed. I wanted to post it here and suddenly realized that I can not because even if there is that vanishingly small possibility of this post being seen and read and figured out by someone from here that might do damage, I simply can not afford that chance. So I will simply contain my observations to generalized commentary and some stories of some less controversial that I had today. I guess like everyone who has done research in areas like this, at some point you encounter stories that explain a lot about what is going on, but turn out to be ethically untellable, unless in intimate company with a lot of drink, safely out of the way of any public forums. This place is complicated, the Internet IS politics and the people that talk to me end up trusting me if they tell me stories like this. I am lucky because I have what they call here 'a light hand' - that is in the course of hanging out with me people find that things, random events, seem to come out the right way and luck generally comes together. So people tend to trust me, they tell me that I am so American in being so open, but they enjoy it and somehow tell me things with little prodding and with minimal convincing that their stories are safe with me... But they are safe...
Aktau is in many ways unique because they are not one of the two main cities, they are a small town but they are fueled by oil money and a steady number of foreigners hang out here on that account. That means that there is a reason for developing the Internet and making it available and there is a steady base for internet-based businesses or at least one of them to develop and make money. The particular business in question is focused on providing a business directory to the local consumer and they have done well enough to generate a separate business (now owned by someone else) that includes a forum for discussions (because people desperately wanted to talk). The most interesting thing about the business directory is that it includes a system of comments by the users, where the owner spent a lot of time cultivating a culture of cogent, smart commentary, often even deleting comments that were within the rule boundaries but were basically nonsensical. After installing a rating system for comments, he finally got the space to the level the majority of commentary is of very intelligent level that is useful to others. Of course he constantly moderates comments and tells me that he basically does not sleep because a lot of commentary is made at night. He also drives around the town every couple of days because a lot of his business partners and clients require in-person TLC for the extraction of money owed for the services. This is an Internet-business with an intense in-person aspect which is typical of Kazakhstan in general but is probably even more important in areas outside Almaty and Astana.
Generally, in my conversations with average Internet users in Aktau, this particular site shows up among people interested in local events and in the goings on in the country in general. It was telling when the 20-year old I interviewed yesterday brought up the site and the most important, but then expanded on how she self-educated and is interested in the local developments in the country on the account of her chosen profession of international relations. The bunch of 20-year olds that I spoke to today, did not look at anything that did not initially smell and act like a major search engine (yandex.ru or google.kz) or a social network site (moimir.ru). Whereas their a bit older boss immediately brought up not only the local site but also several other very much kazakhstan-related news sites like nomad.su or zonakz.net and even admitted to occasionally checking respublika-kz.info (and given here bashful admission of occasionally checking this oppositional site I did not start pressing whether she might have checked the comments section to, since that section is actually normally blocked in Kazakhstan in most places although not in Aktau, but that is where the sharpest and the most oppositional opinions are discussed).
As she sat there, in her office, underneath the portrait of the president, I did not have the heart to press her about her political curiosities, given the amount of time that she had devoted to me. Instead we talked lightly about how the youth was less interested in the local and found the global connections so much attractive, how they are not yet interested in the place where they actually live. I wondered why that may be the case and when I asked the group what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the Internet for good, they all gasped in horror. But when I asked what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the SNSs and other socialization tools, the reaction was one of resignation- well then some of those connections will get lost... and that's not so good, but not so bad either, because the people you care about, you already have their phone number. Besides, everyone needs a break from SNSs from time to time anyway because they get boring, so that's ok.
The most fascinating thing about today though, was to realize just how scared people here are, especially people in business of the 'big guys' and how powerless they feel. All of the youngsters were talking about either Russian or Western sites like Yandex, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Mail.ru, Facebook or Google as their main sources of social contact or information. Even if their eventual destination is some place inside the kaznet space, they start with the search engine anyway and it is always either yandex or google, where they normally get their news as well. The business owners are simply waiting for Google, Ebay etc to come into the market and take over, and they hope that they will be the logical choice for the local representative. I can no longer count how many times I heard the statement - we have no chance, we just have to hope we don't remain in the stone age for too long. I must admit the fear it logical because Kazakhstan has few resources and even fewer sources of knowledge and brilliance, given that education is for sale and the particulars of power make sales, contacts and immediate gain far more important than longer range planning. The fear, the desperation and the resignation is palpable... and then this morning I got woken up by a phone call telling me that the largest forum in Kazakhstan has been shut down... what gives?
Aktau is in many ways unique because they are not one of the two main cities, they are a small town but they are fueled by oil money and a steady number of foreigners hang out here on that account. That means that there is a reason for developing the Internet and making it available and there is a steady base for internet-based businesses or at least one of them to develop and make money. The particular business in question is focused on providing a business directory to the local consumer and they have done well enough to generate a separate business (now owned by someone else) that includes a forum for discussions (because people desperately wanted to talk). The most interesting thing about the business directory is that it includes a system of comments by the users, where the owner spent a lot of time cultivating a culture of cogent, smart commentary, often even deleting comments that were within the rule boundaries but were basically nonsensical. After installing a rating system for comments, he finally got the space to the level the majority of commentary is of very intelligent level that is useful to others. Of course he constantly moderates comments and tells me that he basically does not sleep because a lot of commentary is made at night. He also drives around the town every couple of days because a lot of his business partners and clients require in-person TLC for the extraction of money owed for the services. This is an Internet-business with an intense in-person aspect which is typical of Kazakhstan in general but is probably even more important in areas outside Almaty and Astana.
Generally, in my conversations with average Internet users in Aktau, this particular site shows up among people interested in local events and in the goings on in the country in general. It was telling when the 20-year old I interviewed yesterday brought up the site and the most important, but then expanded on how she self-educated and is interested in the local developments in the country on the account of her chosen profession of international relations. The bunch of 20-year olds that I spoke to today, did not look at anything that did not initially smell and act like a major search engine (yandex.ru or google.kz) or a social network site (moimir.ru). Whereas their a bit older boss immediately brought up not only the local site but also several other very much kazakhstan-related news sites like nomad.su or zonakz.net and even admitted to occasionally checking respublika-kz.info (and given here bashful admission of occasionally checking this oppositional site I did not start pressing whether she might have checked the comments section to, since that section is actually normally blocked in Kazakhstan in most places although not in Aktau, but that is where the sharpest and the most oppositional opinions are discussed).
As she sat there, in her office, underneath the portrait of the president, I did not have the heart to press her about her political curiosities, given the amount of time that she had devoted to me. Instead we talked lightly about how the youth was less interested in the local and found the global connections so much attractive, how they are not yet interested in the place where they actually live. I wondered why that may be the case and when I asked the group what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the Internet for good, they all gasped in horror. But when I asked what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the SNSs and other socialization tools, the reaction was one of resignation- well then some of those connections will get lost... and that's not so good, but not so bad either, because the people you care about, you already have their phone number. Besides, everyone needs a break from SNSs from time to time anyway because they get boring, so that's ok.
The most fascinating thing about today though, was to realize just how scared people here are, especially people in business of the 'big guys' and how powerless they feel. All of the youngsters were talking about either Russian or Western sites like Yandex, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Mail.ru, Facebook or Google as their main sources of social contact or information. Even if their eventual destination is some place inside the kaznet space, they start with the search engine anyway and it is always either yandex or google, where they normally get their news as well. The business owners are simply waiting for Google, Ebay etc to come into the market and take over, and they hope that they will be the logical choice for the local representative. I can no longer count how many times I heard the statement - we have no chance, we just have to hope we don't remain in the stone age for too long. I must admit the fear it logical because Kazakhstan has few resources and even fewer sources of knowledge and brilliance, given that education is for sale and the particulars of power make sales, contacts and immediate gain far more important than longer range planning. The fear, the desperation and the resignation is palpable... and then this morning I got woken up by a phone call telling me that the largest forum in Kazakhstan has been shut down... what gives?
15 April, 2010
Aktau and the Caspian sea
I made it to Aktau this morning and I am fascinated. The city is a combination of oil development and pure old soviet aesthetic. The Caspian is pure emerald in the distance but turns into an odd boiling brown soup of algae right by the shore in the city. People fish and kids catch shrimp among the sea rocks - the whole thing is oddly serene and beautiful in a very run-down falling-apart kind of way. The people are really open and nice, nothing like those in Almaty and Astana.
There are two interesting things about Aktau. One is that because it is an oil town, there is quite a bit of money to go around so the town is considered rather wealthy despite the appearances of it being rusty and run-down (although the rumors of it being extremely expensive did not turn out to be true). This means that many people have access to the Internet, even those living in the little villages surrounding the city (or so my taxi driver from one such village claimed as he complained about the Internet being very slow). The second is that Megaline, the Kazakhstan main provider does not offer much of the Internet service here. This is left to one of the smaller providers here who is using the Azery hardware and happens to kind of forget about that whole blocking thing. So there basically is no blocking here in Aktau - LJ, Blogger and everything else is available. I was at first taken aback when my first interviewee told me that she had HEARD about blocking but never actually experienced it... now it makes sense why that is so.
The hotel where I am staying is one of the old legacy soviet hotels, which means there is no Internet there. However, there is a bar next door that offers free wifi with the purchase of a beer and I am one of the three laptop equipped customers here at the moment (the only three really). Every single one of my four cabbies so far has Internet at home, complains about its slowness and tells me how really, the Internet is very important these days. Mostly.... it's important for skype... with relatives. In fact, Skype remains the winner in just about every conversation - the all-important equivalent of the phone but free or very cheap and when free, it comes with the added benefit of being able to see the interlocutor. Even when people explain their use of SNSs, there comes a moment where they explain that the most important moment was getting everyone's phone numbers and skype id's, but now they just go see the updates and really it's a lot less important. Russia and Kazakhstan took to cellphones like wildfire as it somehow fit into the specific cultural needs of relational maintenance and live interaction. They talk about the emotions they experience when hearing each others voices.
In one story, a girl told me how one of the russian websites was running a free calling promotion where it was possible to call home phones in Russia from anywhere in the world for free during the International Women's day via the skype setup of the site. She called one of her best friends who now lives in Russia but the connection was so bad, the best friend couldn't hear her at all. She texted the best friend and said - I can hear you fine, just talk to me - and the best friend talked, telling her about everything happening in her life. She was near tears by the end with emotion and still unable to say anything in return. She still talks about this incident with a lot of passion - because hearing someone's voice and their intonation is important if you can't see them.
Generally, Aktau seems much more relaxed and genial. There are two young people sitting at a table near me, in the sports bar where I am using the Internet and incidentally eating some of the best shashlik of the trip so far. The both showed up with laptops. She has been hanging out on vkontakte from the beginning while he put on headphones and turned on skype for the first half hour, talking to a friend until his laptop died. Now he is waiting for the laptop to charge as she is typing away on her laptop across the table from him. Maybe it's time to barge in and see if they are as nice as everyone else that I had met in Aktau so far...
There are two interesting things about Aktau. One is that because it is an oil town, there is quite a bit of money to go around so the town is considered rather wealthy despite the appearances of it being rusty and run-down (although the rumors of it being extremely expensive did not turn out to be true). This means that many people have access to the Internet, even those living in the little villages surrounding the city (or so my taxi driver from one such village claimed as he complained about the Internet being very slow). The second is that Megaline, the Kazakhstan main provider does not offer much of the Internet service here. This is left to one of the smaller providers here who is using the Azery hardware and happens to kind of forget about that whole blocking thing. So there basically is no blocking here in Aktau - LJ, Blogger and everything else is available. I was at first taken aback when my first interviewee told me that she had HEARD about blocking but never actually experienced it... now it makes sense why that is so.
The hotel where I am staying is one of the old legacy soviet hotels, which means there is no Internet there. However, there is a bar next door that offers free wifi with the purchase of a beer and I am one of the three laptop equipped customers here at the moment (the only three really). Every single one of my four cabbies so far has Internet at home, complains about its slowness and tells me how really, the Internet is very important these days. Mostly.... it's important for skype... with relatives. In fact, Skype remains the winner in just about every conversation - the all-important equivalent of the phone but free or very cheap and when free, it comes with the added benefit of being able to see the interlocutor. Even when people explain their use of SNSs, there comes a moment where they explain that the most important moment was getting everyone's phone numbers and skype id's, but now they just go see the updates and really it's a lot less important. Russia and Kazakhstan took to cellphones like wildfire as it somehow fit into the specific cultural needs of relational maintenance and live interaction. They talk about the emotions they experience when hearing each others voices.
In one story, a girl told me how one of the russian websites was running a free calling promotion where it was possible to call home phones in Russia from anywhere in the world for free during the International Women's day via the skype setup of the site. She called one of her best friends who now lives in Russia but the connection was so bad, the best friend couldn't hear her at all. She texted the best friend and said - I can hear you fine, just talk to me - and the best friend talked, telling her about everything happening in her life. She was near tears by the end with emotion and still unable to say anything in return. She still talks about this incident with a lot of passion - because hearing someone's voice and their intonation is important if you can't see them.
Generally, Aktau seems much more relaxed and genial. There are two young people sitting at a table near me, in the sports bar where I am using the Internet and incidentally eating some of the best shashlik of the trip so far. The both showed up with laptops. She has been hanging out on vkontakte from the beginning while he put on headphones and turned on skype for the first half hour, talking to a friend until his laptop died. Now he is waiting for the laptop to charge as she is typing away on her laptop across the table from him. Maybe it's time to barge in and see if they are as nice as everyone else that I had met in Aktau so far...
14 April, 2010
Mobiles, Internet and forms of control
I am inside a small cafe on the Left bank of the river in Astana where all of the new government buildings have been built. The cafe is empty as I strategically arrived here just after the lunch rush. There is one table occupied besides mine, where three people are hanging out with their iphones on the table in front of them. They periodically pick up the iphones and check on a point in conversation, usually in jest. There is wifi here so they are freely browsing the Internet, talking about googling (googlit' in Russian) and the particulars of Russian and Kazakh languages and how transliterations return really funny results.
These kinds of moments are common both here in Astana and in Almaty. A lot of people carry more than one phone and many carry a regular phone and what they call a "communicator" - usually an iphone or some form of smart phone. They use these devices to access the Internet extensively. In fact accessing the Internet through the phone is common, even for people who do not own a computer or really have much access to the Internet outside limited access at work or through an Internet cafe. Even regular phones with small screens are often used to read and respond to email and check status updates from any one of the three popular social network sites. I once spent an evening hanging out with five young Astana professionals. It turned out that between the five of them, they carried 13 phones of various kinds. At least four were 'communicators'. These weren't very rich 'professionals', but people who thought long and hard whether to spend about the equivalent of $8-10 on a meal and usually refrained. Young and only a few years out of college, they considered the Internet an integral part of their life so data costs were important and food could be bought cheaper elsewhere. Phone calls and data are NOT cheap here and many cut costs by having several phone numbers one on each provider because they are usually deals for within-network calling, but this isn't case all the time. Sometimes an old simcard is used to call just three or four phone numbers exclusively because that's the number that's always been used. Sometimes a phone is used because data costs on that simcard are cheaper and calls are cheaper on another one, both from the same provider. The practice is so common that there are special pouches for sale that accommodate more than one phone. There are now phones that can take two or more simcards and switch between them with a click of a button.
Mobile Internet is an important part of life and it is used here far more frequently than I have seen it used in Europe or US especially by non-iphone users. Many times I've heard the statement to the tune of 'we don't have the money for a laptop, but you can access the internet with your phone and check email, so you don't really need anything else." Once again, this is a case of Internet is for finding people and talking with them rather than for information seeking. The majority of information seeking seems to be more work-related for people who do not use the Internet extensively. Some of it has to do with showing off the websites of relatives to co-workers but these are rare occasions. Moreover, workers know that their IT managers watch their Internet use closely, sometimes clamping down with severe sanctions. In one story a young man was using a social network site that he usually left on in the background while he worked. After a few months of this he got a notice that indicated that he had used the Internet improperly and that as a sanction, his access to the Internet was going to be cut off for two months, which happened the same day. This almost sounds like a parent grounding their child and indeed at first he was distraught, but now he is used to it, although he is really looking forward to next week when his Internet will finally get turned back on. No, he won't be accessing SNSs anymore... but there are other things to do on the Internet.
The two most common jokes that I had heard about the Internet so far have been: you get on the internet for 10 minutes and 3 hours rushes by; and... if you are in the internet.. there is nothing but you don't want to leave anyway, that's why farmville is so popular (yes farmville is here and LOTS of people play it). In general though, the Internet is still peripheral to some extent - an opportunity, a way to maintain relationships, but the real maintenance happens through phone calls and visits anyway. Yes there are instances of reconnection with long lost friends or relatives, but these are exciting and at the same time uncertain and vaguely unsettling. There are stories of activating remote social ties in work situations, when a quick translation or advice is needed, but with many companies blocking SNSs this doesn't happen very often anymore. Certainly there are stories of finding life partners on the Internet, but it is seen as just another place to meet at first... the real test comes in physical encounters. In many ways, it is almost as if the Internet adds to the background noise of possibilities but the gray reality of the everyday takes over, especially here in Astana, where people work inordinate amounts, usually get paid very little if they work on government jobs, and feel exposed because they know they are constantly watched.
These kinds of moments are common both here in Astana and in Almaty. A lot of people carry more than one phone and many carry a regular phone and what they call a "communicator" - usually an iphone or some form of smart phone. They use these devices to access the Internet extensively. In fact accessing the Internet through the phone is common, even for people who do not own a computer or really have much access to the Internet outside limited access at work or through an Internet cafe. Even regular phones with small screens are often used to read and respond to email and check status updates from any one of the three popular social network sites. I once spent an evening hanging out with five young Astana professionals. It turned out that between the five of them, they carried 13 phones of various kinds. At least four were 'communicators'. These weren't very rich 'professionals', but people who thought long and hard whether to spend about the equivalent of $8-10 on a meal and usually refrained. Young and only a few years out of college, they considered the Internet an integral part of their life so data costs were important and food could be bought cheaper elsewhere. Phone calls and data are NOT cheap here and many cut costs by having several phone numbers one on each provider because they are usually deals for within-network calling, but this isn't case all the time. Sometimes an old simcard is used to call just three or four phone numbers exclusively because that's the number that's always been used. Sometimes a phone is used because data costs on that simcard are cheaper and calls are cheaper on another one, both from the same provider. The practice is so common that there are special pouches for sale that accommodate more than one phone. There are now phones that can take two or more simcards and switch between them with a click of a button.
Mobile Internet is an important part of life and it is used here far more frequently than I have seen it used in Europe or US especially by non-iphone users. Many times I've heard the statement to the tune of 'we don't have the money for a laptop, but you can access the internet with your phone and check email, so you don't really need anything else." Once again, this is a case of Internet is for finding people and talking with them rather than for information seeking. The majority of information seeking seems to be more work-related for people who do not use the Internet extensively. Some of it has to do with showing off the websites of relatives to co-workers but these are rare occasions. Moreover, workers know that their IT managers watch their Internet use closely, sometimes clamping down with severe sanctions. In one story a young man was using a social network site that he usually left on in the background while he worked. After a few months of this he got a notice that indicated that he had used the Internet improperly and that as a sanction, his access to the Internet was going to be cut off for two months, which happened the same day. This almost sounds like a parent grounding their child and indeed at first he was distraught, but now he is used to it, although he is really looking forward to next week when his Internet will finally get turned back on. No, he won't be accessing SNSs anymore... but there are other things to do on the Internet.
The two most common jokes that I had heard about the Internet so far have been: you get on the internet for 10 minutes and 3 hours rushes by; and... if you are in the internet.. there is nothing but you don't want to leave anyway, that's why farmville is so popular (yes farmville is here and LOTS of people play it). In general though, the Internet is still peripheral to some extent - an opportunity, a way to maintain relationships, but the real maintenance happens through phone calls and visits anyway. Yes there are instances of reconnection with long lost friends or relatives, but these are exciting and at the same time uncertain and vaguely unsettling. There are stories of activating remote social ties in work situations, when a quick translation or advice is needed, but with many companies blocking SNSs this doesn't happen very often anymore. Certainly there are stories of finding life partners on the Internet, but it is seen as just another place to meet at first... the real test comes in physical encounters. In many ways, it is almost as if the Internet adds to the background noise of possibilities but the gray reality of the everyday takes over, especially here in Astana, where people work inordinate amounts, usually get paid very little if they work on government jobs, and feel exposed because they know they are constantly watched.
Internet and gaming - virtual and real
I was never particularly interested in games even if it was MUDs that got me into this whole HCI business in the first place eons ago in a galaxy far far away, called undergrad. After undergrad I did not want to have anything to do with games. Not that I found games uninteresting, I just knew that if I were to start studying games I would never graduate - I am addictive like that. So I never looked for games and gaming really, here in Kazakhstan... gaming however, had other plans. When I was in Almaty, gaming showed up a little bit here and there... some old classmates told me how playing counter-strike was the big motivator to upgrade both their computing hardware and internet connection exclusively for this purpose (for everything else the very old comp with a very slow connection, apparently was just fine). Some people mentioned getting addicted to farmville or several other SNS-based games. During one meeting, one of the people in the room simply couldn't stop playing a silly little game on her smartphone even as she explained how she really didn't have any time for the Internet. Every now and then I would come across a large internet-cafe directed exclusively at multiplayer games. In one such space I was blatantly told 'sorry lady, we don't have JUST internet here' as the kids around the room made excited noises while playing WOW. Most of the time though, games did not make appearances in conversations, did not play a significant role in observations and generally were not all that visible.
Astana, however, was a different story and games seem to be waiting for me nearly at every corner, rearing their heads in random conversations, appearing out of nowhere. Games and chatting... games and a way to make friends in a new place... games and a way to find like minds... games and a way to disconnect from the everyday... games and business ventures... in short, games everywhere. There of course is the striking proliferation of Internet cafes here with mostly gaming contingent present (this may have to do with the fact that there are more bored and moneyless youth here since work is harder to come by). So the young boys play WOW and Counterstrike and some russian games nearly everywhere. Even in very small internet cafes with really bad equipment some gaming is going on, but mostly there are the dedicated clubs with relatively cheap access. There are, also, references to SNS-based games and the kind of addiction these games breed, motivating players to wake up early in the morning to check in at Farmville or to plant strategically so that they can limit the need to have to check on their crops.
But there are also chat-based games, where there are whole chatrooms devoted for example exclusively to playing Mafia or Word and Question games. These chatrooms are old and some have been around since 04-05, based on very rudimentary clients. These are still in circulation although I am starting to get the sense that the players are there now mostly out of some nostalgic sense of things past. And then... there is encounter and the hybrid reality nature of it. They call it 'alternative entertainment' here. At this point I have spoken to about a half dozen various participants and players who all agree on at least one thing - playing encounter enables them to grow their social network. By building connections through very very silly activities (like racing child-tricycles) and by meeting in random basements of abandoned buildings in the course of solving a puzzle, they get to know people from pretty much every walk of life. These are like-minded people and so they become a sort of distributed yet local community, situated and connected through the physical exploration of the city while following internet-based clues.
Why is it that such games are so popular here, in Russia, in various other countries of the FSU, in China... what is it about this hybrid of physical, local and technological that pushes together strangers and makes them into what some would call friends, others would call guanxi relationships? Is there something specific to the historical, social, political and economic factors mixed with cultural peculiarities that makes such game more attractive, or am I just not aware of similar games in the West (or maybe they do mean something different here)?
One late evening, I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs several of whom were just starting a media company producing TV soaps. We talked about the Internet and media possibilities for the new venture although they were tepid on that account. One thing there were willing to discuss, however, was the idea of creating an entertainment-gaming space to accompany the soap opera. Is it possible? Can something innovative be created here in Kazakhstan, or do we have to go outside Kazakhstan for talent? I had to remind these gentlemen that for example Skype (which they ALL use) was developed by Estonians and Chatroulette was an after-school project of a Moscow teen. The notion of games is attractive for business but it is also oddly seen as not serious enough, as an unlikely source of income, as somehow a foreign notion.
Astana, however, was a different story and games seem to be waiting for me nearly at every corner, rearing their heads in random conversations, appearing out of nowhere. Games and chatting... games and a way to make friends in a new place... games and a way to find like minds... games and a way to disconnect from the everyday... games and business ventures... in short, games everywhere. There of course is the striking proliferation of Internet cafes here with mostly gaming contingent present (this may have to do with the fact that there are more bored and moneyless youth here since work is harder to come by). So the young boys play WOW and Counterstrike and some russian games nearly everywhere. Even in very small internet cafes with really bad equipment some gaming is going on, but mostly there are the dedicated clubs with relatively cheap access. There are, also, references to SNS-based games and the kind of addiction these games breed, motivating players to wake up early in the morning to check in at Farmville or to plant strategically so that they can limit the need to have to check on their crops.
But there are also chat-based games, where there are whole chatrooms devoted for example exclusively to playing Mafia or Word and Question games. These chatrooms are old and some have been around since 04-05, based on very rudimentary clients. These are still in circulation although I am starting to get the sense that the players are there now mostly out of some nostalgic sense of things past. And then... there is encounter and the hybrid reality nature of it. They call it 'alternative entertainment' here. At this point I have spoken to about a half dozen various participants and players who all agree on at least one thing - playing encounter enables them to grow their social network. By building connections through very very silly activities (like racing child-tricycles) and by meeting in random basements of abandoned buildings in the course of solving a puzzle, they get to know people from pretty much every walk of life. These are like-minded people and so they become a sort of distributed yet local community, situated and connected through the physical exploration of the city while following internet-based clues.
Why is it that such games are so popular here, in Russia, in various other countries of the FSU, in China... what is it about this hybrid of physical, local and technological that pushes together strangers and makes them into what some would call friends, others would call guanxi relationships? Is there something specific to the historical, social, political and economic factors mixed with cultural peculiarities that makes such game more attractive, or am I just not aware of similar games in the West (or maybe they do mean something different here)?
One late evening, I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs several of whom were just starting a media company producing TV soaps. We talked about the Internet and media possibilities for the new venture although they were tepid on that account. One thing there were willing to discuss, however, was the idea of creating an entertainment-gaming space to accompany the soap opera. Is it possible? Can something innovative be created here in Kazakhstan, or do we have to go outside Kazakhstan for talent? I had to remind these gentlemen that for example Skype (which they ALL use) was developed by Estonians and Chatroulette was an after-school project of a Moscow teen. The notion of games is attractive for business but it is also oddly seen as not serious enough, as an unlikely source of income, as somehow a foreign notion.
13 April, 2010
Internet and politics in KZ
By some odd stroke of luck, the hotel where I am staying in Astana was the site of a KazMedia event the first evening I was there. By another stroke of luck, the people I was meeting at my hotel for an interview, knew several people involved in the event. This event was notable for two specific reasons. First, this was the birthday of 'KazContent' which turned one year old and second, this event marked the launch of several local kazakh resources - social network (ilive.kz), a blogging platform, and most notably, a legal music and movie distributor (urta.kz).
A little bit of history to explain why this is actually notable. Several years ago, the venerable father has ordered that KazNet is physically created (that is the Kazakh infrastructure for Internet - the fiberoptic lines, the cables, the servers, dialup connections and eventually broadly accessible broadband, etc). Kazakhtelecom dutifully created the infrastructure (although the reports of its extensiveness are difficult to verify, given the amount of money actually spent on building is hard to identify). At the time, there was little actual content that was specifically Kazakhstan-related so the majority of internet traffic went outside the country to Russian and International resources. There is a tendency in every post-soviet country to think in terms of 'our' and 'theirs' and to see connections outside the country as unpatriotic. In order to remedy this situation, Kazakhtelecom created 'kaztorka.kz' - a membership torrent site for downloading movies and music. Within a few months several other torrent sites joined the official one and the internal Internet traffic in Kazakhstan soon overtook external connections and they could proudly report this fact to the government. In Kazakhstan, nearly every user accesses the Internet more for downloading movies and music than for anything else (of course this has more to do with the speed of downloads that often takes days of dedicated attempts). In my conversations with a range of people I repeatedly heard that yes, there is a lot of internal traffic but KazNet is still empty (i.e. there are few useful and interesting .kz local sites to visit) and Kazakhtelecom is not particularly happy that nearly all of the internal traffic is torrents because they overload the network but there is no money to be made on that.
About a year ago, the venerable father discovered the fact that KazNet is empty (there are many stories of exactly how this happened but none seem even remotely plausible). He was incensed at the fact and ordered concerted development of KazContent which resulted in the creation of a company by such name (which of course took seed money and then money for their project) and in the creation of a company called KazNetMedia to do the design and development of base sources that can motivate the populace to create their own content. Both companies are for-profit but heavily government funded (otherwise, why would anyone do any of this) and there has been an inordinate amount of money promised for the projects.
Six months ago, the minister in charge of Internet development was told he was not doing a good enough job because well... KazNet was still empty, so he was replaced with the head of KazakhTelecom who actually is an engineer and an IT professional rather than simply a manager. In fact the two were swapped in their positions so the effect might be interesting given that KazakhTelecom will have to undergo changes in its practices as well. At about the same time, Beeline, a Russian telecom company, entered the market not only as a cellphone provider but also as an eventual Internet provider as they were putting in a fiberoptic line connecting to their Russian network, rather than renting the KazakhTelecom hardware. The internet offering is just about to start and Kazakhtelecom companies are feeling the pressure and lowering their tariffs. What is interesting about the whole system that there is a law on the books that everyone must follow, that states that telecom operators and Internet providers are equated to infrastructure projects and thus can not charge differential tariffs based on population density. So Almaty residents get the same tariff as the residents of the tiny villages around Taldy Kurgan (in those areas where there actually is coverage, although theoretically there is supposed to be coverage everywhere). So the lowering of tariffs has to happen everywhere, not just in areas where Beeline is available. So Beeline's presence in Astana and Almata and it's presences as an Internet provider only in Almata is actually likely to result in price-cuts everywhere in the country.
Beeline's presence has another small implication - Beeline has very little incentive to block any internet sites that Kazakhtelecom blocks. The government has no official policy on the matter and Kazakhtelecom prefers to act as if no actual blocking is occurring on any of the resources except for LJ since there actually is a court-order for that one. Nevertheless, none of the blocking is official and to continue blocking and to compel providers like Beeline to block, the government would have to develop an official policy that then can be officially attacked. A quick note about blocking - Opera Turbo servers are inaccessible here in Astana and became inaccessible just a few days ago (according to my informants) along with several other well known proxy servers. Either the blocking in Astana is simply more earnest, or something else is going on.
Now let's go back to the launch that I accidentally got to attend upon arrival here in Astana. The most remarkable thing about all of the presentations was the emphasis on production of local, Kazakhstan based content that would be about life in the country as well as the lives of its people. It was about both professionally producing interesting content and about creating platforms that would encourage citizens to produce their own content. The platforms were a crazy hodgepodge of everything that is already out there, apparently built on the idea that it is possible to take all of the best features, put them together and the result would be something everyone would want to use. Moreover, the social network resource was to attempt bringing the content from all of the social network sites where users are already involved together into one place, thus motivating users not just to switch social network platforms, but to consolidate everything they have on one. Attractive notion, don't you think?
Then there was urta.kz - a site that was committed to changing the illegal pirating practices of Kazakhstan citizens and finally paying royalties on content, thus becoming a law abiding internet space. I spoke to the owners of urta.kz and asked them how they planned on changing the prevailing culture of free that kazakhtelecom in fact built up. They told me that they were committed to the changes and they are in fact financially committed because as soon as they are launched they start to pay royalties on the content so they have to make sure they advertise and educate in a way that makes them money eventually. At the end of the conversation though, as I kept pushing about that culture thing, the guy simply said - look, we just make getting it for free very difficult, we can do that, we have a very good relationship with kazakhtelecom and besides they are already doing that in Russia so we just do the same in Kazakhstan and people will simply have to buy. There was no mention of Beeline... and their servers and their access and the fact that the only place in Russia where there is any movement to really curb pirating is some posturing in Moscow in the last few months with some seizure of servers. So there really isn't any attention to them 'people' but the traditional brute-force approach of getting things to pay... eventually... when government coffers run out.
A little bit of history to explain why this is actually notable. Several years ago, the venerable father has ordered that KazNet is physically created (that is the Kazakh infrastructure for Internet - the fiberoptic lines, the cables, the servers, dialup connections and eventually broadly accessible broadband, etc). Kazakhtelecom dutifully created the infrastructure (although the reports of its extensiveness are difficult to verify, given the amount of money actually spent on building is hard to identify). At the time, there was little actual content that was specifically Kazakhstan-related so the majority of internet traffic went outside the country to Russian and International resources. There is a tendency in every post-soviet country to think in terms of 'our' and 'theirs' and to see connections outside the country as unpatriotic. In order to remedy this situation, Kazakhtelecom created 'kaztorka.kz' - a membership torrent site for downloading movies and music. Within a few months several other torrent sites joined the official one and the internal Internet traffic in Kazakhstan soon overtook external connections and they could proudly report this fact to the government. In Kazakhstan, nearly every user accesses the Internet more for downloading movies and music than for anything else (of course this has more to do with the speed of downloads that often takes days of dedicated attempts). In my conversations with a range of people I repeatedly heard that yes, there is a lot of internal traffic but KazNet is still empty (i.e. there are few useful and interesting .kz local sites to visit) and Kazakhtelecom is not particularly happy that nearly all of the internal traffic is torrents because they overload the network but there is no money to be made on that.
About a year ago, the venerable father discovered the fact that KazNet is empty (there are many stories of exactly how this happened but none seem even remotely plausible). He was incensed at the fact and ordered concerted development of KazContent which resulted in the creation of a company by such name (which of course took seed money and then money for their project) and in the creation of a company called KazNetMedia to do the design and development of base sources that can motivate the populace to create their own content. Both companies are for-profit but heavily government funded (otherwise, why would anyone do any of this) and there has been an inordinate amount of money promised for the projects.
Six months ago, the minister in charge of Internet development was told he was not doing a good enough job because well... KazNet was still empty, so he was replaced with the head of KazakhTelecom who actually is an engineer and an IT professional rather than simply a manager. In fact the two were swapped in their positions so the effect might be interesting given that KazakhTelecom will have to undergo changes in its practices as well. At about the same time, Beeline, a Russian telecom company, entered the market not only as a cellphone provider but also as an eventual Internet provider as they were putting in a fiberoptic line connecting to their Russian network, rather than renting the KazakhTelecom hardware. The internet offering is just about to start and Kazakhtelecom companies are feeling the pressure and lowering their tariffs. What is interesting about the whole system that there is a law on the books that everyone must follow, that states that telecom operators and Internet providers are equated to infrastructure projects and thus can not charge differential tariffs based on population density. So Almaty residents get the same tariff as the residents of the tiny villages around Taldy Kurgan (in those areas where there actually is coverage, although theoretically there is supposed to be coverage everywhere). So the lowering of tariffs has to happen everywhere, not just in areas where Beeline is available. So Beeline's presence in Astana and Almata and it's presences as an Internet provider only in Almata is actually likely to result in price-cuts everywhere in the country.
Beeline's presence has another small implication - Beeline has very little incentive to block any internet sites that Kazakhtelecom blocks. The government has no official policy on the matter and Kazakhtelecom prefers to act as if no actual blocking is occurring on any of the resources except for LJ since there actually is a court-order for that one. Nevertheless, none of the blocking is official and to continue blocking and to compel providers like Beeline to block, the government would have to develop an official policy that then can be officially attacked. A quick note about blocking - Opera Turbo servers are inaccessible here in Astana and became inaccessible just a few days ago (according to my informants) along with several other well known proxy servers. Either the blocking in Astana is simply more earnest, or something else is going on.
Now let's go back to the launch that I accidentally got to attend upon arrival here in Astana. The most remarkable thing about all of the presentations was the emphasis on production of local, Kazakhstan based content that would be about life in the country as well as the lives of its people. It was about both professionally producing interesting content and about creating platforms that would encourage citizens to produce their own content. The platforms were a crazy hodgepodge of everything that is already out there, apparently built on the idea that it is possible to take all of the best features, put them together and the result would be something everyone would want to use. Moreover, the social network resource was to attempt bringing the content from all of the social network sites where users are already involved together into one place, thus motivating users not just to switch social network platforms, but to consolidate everything they have on one. Attractive notion, don't you think?
Then there was urta.kz - a site that was committed to changing the illegal pirating practices of Kazakhstan citizens and finally paying royalties on content, thus becoming a law abiding internet space. I spoke to the owners of urta.kz and asked them how they planned on changing the prevailing culture of free that kazakhtelecom in fact built up. They told me that they were committed to the changes and they are in fact financially committed because as soon as they are launched they start to pay royalties on the content so they have to make sure they advertise and educate in a way that makes them money eventually. At the end of the conversation though, as I kept pushing about that culture thing, the guy simply said - look, we just make getting it for free very difficult, we can do that, we have a very good relationship with kazakhtelecom and besides they are already doing that in Russia so we just do the same in Kazakhstan and people will simply have to buy. There was no mention of Beeline... and their servers and their access and the fact that the only place in Russia where there is any movement to really curb pirating is some posturing in Moscow in the last few months with some seizure of servers. So there really isn't any attention to them 'people' but the traditional brute-force approach of getting things to pay... eventually... when government coffers run out.
12 April, 2010
The Potemkin Village
The glorious capital of Kazakhstan greeted me with its perpetual cold winds and towers of glass in a frozen steppe. I got an unofficial taxi driver to take me to my hotel. He was a local, born and bred in Tselinograd that eventually became Astana. Extremely proud of the city, he showed off the local sites and did not stop talking until we got to the hotel. The city looked very impressive from inside the car, with towers of glass and intricate architecture. On closer inspection though, things didn't look so glorious. Although there are many buildings that look beautiful the majority stand empty. There aren't enough people here to buy apartments and certainly not enough to afford the new pretty buildings.
The height of the buildings does not do them any favors either. The wind here is so strong that anything higher than about 30 or so stories starts swaying. Besides, the wind rips off paneling and wall decorations from the outside as well. Even the most expensive hotel, the Radisson (that is apparently the most expensive Radisson in the world), looks like portions of it are missing. What's more, the odd thing about being here is that it feels like I am in a suburb with very tall buildings. There is no charm to this place and everything is too new to really look interesting.
This place has pretty fronts but every time I walk inside these pretty buildings they turn out to be half built and already falling apart. Unlike Almaty, however, there is an internet cafe here on every corner. Most are very empty, save for a few young men here and there, always playing computer games. Even the people at the front desk are playing. There are also groups here playing hybrid reality games, like the Encounter - en.cx There is more playing here than I saw in Almaty and I wonder whether it has something to do with the general weird emptyness of the place. I have the eerie sense that I am trapped in an odd version of the Potemkin village.
The height of the buildings does not do them any favors either. The wind here is so strong that anything higher than about 30 or so stories starts swaying. Besides, the wind rips off paneling and wall decorations from the outside as well. Even the most expensive hotel, the Radisson (that is apparently the most expensive Radisson in the world), looks like portions of it are missing. What's more, the odd thing about being here is that it feels like I am in a suburb with very tall buildings. There is no charm to this place and everything is too new to really look interesting.
This place has pretty fronts but every time I walk inside these pretty buildings they turn out to be half built and already falling apart. Unlike Almaty, however, there is an internet cafe here on every corner. Most are very empty, save for a few young men here and there, always playing computer games. Even the people at the front desk are playing. There are also groups here playing hybrid reality games, like the Encounter - en.cx There is more playing here than I saw in Almaty and I wonder whether it has something to do with the general weird emptyness of the place. I have the eerie sense that I am trapped in an odd version of the Potemkin village.
11 April, 2010
About the neighbors
It's raining and the weather has been crazy this week, going from sun to rain to snow and then back to sun in a matter of hours. People huddle in coffee shops or under their umbrellas as they go about their days. It's calm and quite in the streets of Almaty... impossible to guess that less than 200 kilometers away people are getting shot as they go about deposing their government. The media has of course reported the events, but not in a particularly forthcoming manner. Within hours of the beginning of the events in Kyrgyzstan, the Kyrgyz government shut down access to the Internet, locking down Twitter, Youtube and all social networking sites. Twitter still functioned because it could be used via sms, but most activists had more important things to do than send too many Twitter updates. Several LJ bloggers posted minute-by-minute updates that they had received from friends or family or via Twitter. Neweurasia.net and Globalvoices posted several articles and updates, but the majority of the updates were very similar. Youtube videos and grizzly photographs got posted in various locations and then reposted and linked. None of this activity seemed to be of much use to people actually in Bishkek, but was used to calm down and inform the onlookers who cared for personal, professional or simply curiosity reasons. As one of the Kazakh activists in charge of the upcoming BarCampKZ had mentioned to me - organizing in protests of this kind via social media can be very dangerous for your health and only those that feel relatively safe have the luxury of updating the world on the local situation. There is more here, but I do not have the data and speculation is for later... I do think social media use is far from straight forward or clearly beneficial in the case of uprisings or revolutions. This revolution, by the way, still doesn't have a color... I guess the West has lost its taste for color assignments.
There is a headline in one of the 'lightly oppositional' newspapers today. It reads: 'The Kyrgyz have sorted out who is the head of the household!' With a subtitle reading: 'The neighbors got their freedom and citizens of Kazazakhstan got Internet blocking.' Indeed several sites, including youtube and respublika-kz.info (this last one by the way is a curious site, where the content is generally available from Kazakhstan but the comments area is always blocked), got blocked about a day after the events in Bishkek started. The reaction was generally fairly tepid - certainly people commented and sighed, but with an expectation. Everyone had the explanation - the government is scared we might do something similar - and had a good laugh on that account. Some LJ bloggers complained that running youtube through a proxy slows down already slow access to the site and several others pointed out that maybe this will motivate finally, the development of kaztube instead? In general, however, most people responded by pounding Kazakhtelecom with confused phone calls. less than 48 hours later, both sites were accessible again and there had been no official statement from any of the agencies. It is tempting to think that the citizen response and the media stories had an effect, but I've been here in Kazakhstan long enough to come up with a cynical and oddly somewhat more believable story - likely some high ranking official wanted to watch something on youtube and found it blocked, got annoyed and called kazakhtelecom with a complaint... when the NECESSARY people complain, policies get changed very quickly.
There is a headline in one of the 'lightly oppositional' newspapers today. It reads: 'The Kyrgyz have sorted out who is the head of the household!' With a subtitle reading: 'The neighbors got their freedom and citizens of Kazazakhstan got Internet blocking.' Indeed several sites, including youtube and respublika-kz.info (this last one by the way is a curious site, where the content is generally available from Kazakhstan but the comments area is always blocked), got blocked about a day after the events in Bishkek started. The reaction was generally fairly tepid - certainly people commented and sighed, but with an expectation. Everyone had the explanation - the government is scared we might do something similar - and had a good laugh on that account. Some LJ bloggers complained that running youtube through a proxy slows down already slow access to the site and several others pointed out that maybe this will motivate finally, the development of kaztube instead? In general, however, most people responded by pounding Kazakhtelecom with confused phone calls. less than 48 hours later, both sites were accessible again and there had been no official statement from any of the agencies. It is tempting to think that the citizen response and the media stories had an effect, but I've been here in Kazakhstan long enough to come up with a cynical and oddly somewhat more believable story - likely some high ranking official wanted to watch something on youtube and found it blocked, got annoyed and called kazakhtelecom with a complaint... when the NECESSARY people complain, policies get changed very quickly.
10 April, 2010
Center of Mass - ct.kz - one year later
It makes complete sense that people are what people seek on the Internet. There are many manifestations of this kind of search and the most viable online businesses have involved a very social angle. ct.kz for example, is the largest kazakhstan forum and the only homegrown purely online business that is making substantial amounts of money. I've been following this forum fairly closely since I found out about it last year in Kazakhstan.
CT= center of mass, is a forum that hasn't really changed it's appearance since its inception and has been around for 10 years (in fact this year is their 10 year anniversary). Despite the pronouncements of occasional bloggers that the forum format is dead, ct.kz seems on track to remain viable for years to come. The forum is steadily growing, with over 200 thousand registered users to date. For a country with just 3 million users, this is a substantial share of the market.
When people I speak to bring up ct, it is usually in the context of "you can find everything there.... just everything!" If the Internet is about searching for people, then ct provides access to a very large and diverse number of them. The discussions cover every conceivable topic from charity, financial questions, law and order, emigration, and technical questions to sports, cars, beauty and love. There are three main things that the forum does not cover: ethnic and nationalist tensions, politics and the president. The forum is heavily moderated with two goals in mind: to keep the conversation off the forbidden topics and to manage "downers"- people who turn every conversation into a flame war. Moderators are unpaid volunteers who put in untold numbers of hours doing their 'job'.
The majority of the CT users live in Almaty with Astana a distant second. Heavy users of CT speak of a particular culture of getting things done and helping each other that has grown up on the forum. For example people who hang out in the discussion thread of everything related to Auto maintain what they call an 'emergency list' - a list of phone numbers in locations around the country that are willing to help if another CT user is in trouble. People literally print these pages out and keep them in their cars just in case. There are many stories of people breaking down in the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan (not a difficult thing to do given that population density and the quality of roads around here is very low) and getting help first from other CT users and then from the equivalent of road-side assistance. CT users have stickers they put on cars that serve as identifiers. Within Almaty, if a car with such a sticker breaks down, others are likely to stop and help.
CT users also have discount cards where business owners who also hang out on CT give discounts to other users. Getting such stickers and cards is a point of pride and requires substantial participation in the community. The community itself is not just online, with meet ups and events scheduled often for various subgroups that discuss various topics. Just recently there was a big meet up of koreans from Kyzylorda who now live in Almaty.
In the course of 10 years of its development, ct.kz has grown from a small bunch of enthusiasts to a huge confluence of people. The enthusiasts have perpetually complained that the newcomers never really understand the 'culture' in ways probably similar to what had happened during the invasion of usenet by the 'unwashed masses' of aol users. The moderators have done a lot to maintain the pre-existing rules and agreed upon ways of behavior, which had resulted in pages upon pages of rules and regulations. When people are warned about breaking rules, the moderators actually quote the particular rule number and paragraph that they may have broken.
Despite this meticulous maintenance of the community, the audience of the site has changed over the years. There are many more teenagers and young people now and the topics they discuss have changed. What is more, the level at which things, for example cars, are discussed has changed. For example, where half a decade ago it was expected that people would post asking about buying relatively cheap cars, the average asking price has now increased nearly 10-fold and people seeking older and cheaper cars are looked down upon. Basically, the conversation is similar, but the conversationists are trying to exude a lot more 'cool' in what they discuss.
No matter the changes, ct.kz is a collection of diverse and very strong communities. In my conversations with one of the moderators, she told me a story of one of the auto-thread participants ending up in a horribly disfiguring accident. Medical care in Kazakhstan is very expensive and he couldn't afford some types of re-constructive surgery. A friend had posted the news on ct.kz and within 4 days they had amassed enough money for surgery and subsequent medical and in-home care for nearly 6 months. People simply handed money without even leaving their names and the sums ranged from a few dollars to thousands. Stories of such expressions of kindness and support are common, but what is remarkable here is that people who spent a lot of time on ct.kz and who mentioned the site to me talked of it as a space and a community they could depend upon despite a lot of crabby growling about the rules and the 'downers' and the flamers...
Amid all of these feel-good stories hides one particular aspect of this forum that distinguishes it from the old usenet type forums of yore. ct.kz is profoundly local - with Almaty being the strongest and most populous community. Even for those that do not normally post on ct.kz, it appears to be a good source for very local information - that kind where advice from other people and word-of-mouth are really important. It's sort of a yelp.com on steroids where nearly every single business in Almaty, from surma shops to high end clothing and auto sales, is discussed at length. In fact, some businesses, such as car insurance sales people, several prominent banks, telecom operators, actually have people hanging out on ct.kz and answering questions or addressing concerns. CT.kz is very strict about attempts at getting free advertisement however, so all of this communication with actual businesses is closely watched.
Ct.kz is not a neutral space, it is most certainly a political space, where politics, government monopolies, the pitfalls of official policies or issues of ethnicity and language are pointedly not discussed. Sometimes however, such discussions happen anyway, and there are stories of people making formal announcements that they did not mean a word they said. The forums are watched by members of internal security (FSB) and ct.kz openly hands over ip-addresses of the people in question. ct.kz is not in the business of freedom here... to be frank, if they were, they would not have survived this long and they would certainly have not been a business.
09 April, 2010
The Internet is where you find people
"The Internet, that's where you find people" my grandmother's 80-year-old friend told me once conspiratorially. At the time I thought it quaint, but to my surprise this was by far not the only time I had heard it... What IS the Internet for anyway, have you ever thought of it? I suppose now that it is so integrated into daily life, it is hard to name a single purpose, although if I had to, I suppose that would be 'to find information.' The fact that in Kazakhstan for a particular social strata of people it is about very specific kinds of socializing I think is quite important. I heard similar statements from a young woman who works 12 hours a day intermittently selling and painting cars, from a young man who maintains the IT infrastructure of a travel bureau, from a middle-aged taxi driver whose car was so old he had to turn if off when standing at traffic lights, the list goes on. For the most part these people tended to be relatively poor, less educated, less involved in the technical sphere, but this was not true for everyone who expressed these statements.
The promise of socializing has been one of the main drivers for starting to use the Internet. The most popular sites in Kazakhstan (as well as in Russia and most other FSU countries) are social network sites and search engines, but I wonder whether the search engines are used for a similar purpose - to find people. Maybe this has something to do with the role and meaning of social ties here in Kazakhstan. As I sit at a coffee shop here writing this, people around me are hanging out, chatting, sometimes trying to solve problems.... the problem solutions always involve people - family, relatives, friends. One of the most popular expressions here is - "I have a person there" when discussing some organization or need. A friend's son had badly broken his arm and she showed up at a small classmate gathering straight from the hospital. The first thing the rest of the people at the table asked was whether she knew anyone at that hospital and whether she needed some contacts. She did not so another classmate dug up the phone number of one of the heads of the hospital in question. The worthyness of the hospital was evaluated based on the number of people known and their reputation.
People then are the main sources of information, ways of getting things done and solving problems.
The promise of socializing has been one of the main drivers for starting to use the Internet. The most popular sites in Kazakhstan (as well as in Russia and most other FSU countries) are social network sites and search engines, but I wonder whether the search engines are used for a similar purpose - to find people. Maybe this has something to do with the role and meaning of social ties here in Kazakhstan. As I sit at a coffee shop here writing this, people around me are hanging out, chatting, sometimes trying to solve problems.... the problem solutions always involve people - family, relatives, friends. One of the most popular expressions here is - "I have a person there" when discussing some organization or need. A friend's son had badly broken his arm and she showed up at a small classmate gathering straight from the hospital. The first thing the rest of the people at the table asked was whether she knew anyone at that hospital and whether she needed some contacts. She did not so another classmate dug up the phone number of one of the heads of the hospital in question. The worthyness of the hospital was evaluated based on the number of people known and their reputation.
People then are the main sources of information, ways of getting things done and solving problems.
08 April, 2010
Content, monetization, development
"Everyone is only interested in money" announced the dean of the International IT University of Kazakhstan in the course of our conversation as we discussed potential trajectories of development of Kaznet. The needing to fill Kaznet was his big spiel and he was extensively talking about monetization, opportunities, commercial development and the oodles of money that the Kazakh government is about to dump into Kaznet. Then he tried to offer me a teaching job...
The issue of what KazNet and internet in general might bring to Kazakhstan and what might make money through the Internet, how might something like Facebook originate in Kazakhstan is on the minds of many business people, politicians and regulators right now. "Do you think something big can actually be born in Kazakhstan or is that the prerogative of the West and North America and we just can't manage, our minds are too closed and not enough?" asked me a business man who runs all of SAP implementation in Kazakhstan right now and is developing a professional information exchange forum as a form of public service (from his point of view).
KazNet is empty but the current buzz is that despite its emptiness more than 3.16 million users actively access it on at least a bi-weekly basis and nearly 5 million are passive users (those that have their friends or family access the Internet for them). The active number so far has been confirmed from several sources - this is over 20% of the population on the internet. The passive number is an odd one because it is not clear to me how that was actually calculated but the policy guys really like throwing it out there in conversations. Over the course of the last three years, the Internet has become more affordable, and, surprisingly, more users are coming through mobile connections. This of course, generates some expectation of monetization potential.
There is no real way yet to accept payment over the Internet for local businesses but that is coming (and the person developing that service told me that it is coming this summer. He was expecting a huge jump in usage from the development of local commerce and of local content. Of course, this was also the person who asked why I bothered researching Kazakhstan since by all general markers, the Kazakh market looks exactly like everywhere else - we all access search engines and social network sites more often than anything else, so that must really mean we are all the same.
The local content point is real and important - there is little local content produced inside kaznet (the most read blogger sites are blocked, many alternative news sources are blocked, and the kind of local that is allowed to develop is no more interesting than the regular local newspaper). How such local content might be developed and be more interesting than extensive discussions of everything local on the ct.kz forum nobody knows and the ct.kz originators scoff at the notion, but there indeed is a push to localize KazNet because it is seen as the only way to really get it off the ground. For now, the internal traffic on KazNet is people downloading pirated movies and music and nearly everything else is external. What is even more curious is that none of the internet developers that I have talked to, the dean of the IITU included, know much about how people actually use the Internet... aside from the traffic patterns they see from KazakhTelecom. When I explain that many people see the Internet as a place to find other people, they are surprised and then come up with their own explanations for why this is an unimportant insight, not useful to the overall thinking of how to monetize the Internet... after all, everyone is interested in money.
The issue of what KazNet and internet in general might bring to Kazakhstan and what might make money through the Internet, how might something like Facebook originate in Kazakhstan is on the minds of many business people, politicians and regulators right now. "Do you think something big can actually be born in Kazakhstan or is that the prerogative of the West and North America and we just can't manage, our minds are too closed and not enough?" asked me a business man who runs all of SAP implementation in Kazakhstan right now and is developing a professional information exchange forum as a form of public service (from his point of view).
KazNet is empty but the current buzz is that despite its emptiness more than 3.16 million users actively access it on at least a bi-weekly basis and nearly 5 million are passive users (those that have their friends or family access the Internet for them). The active number so far has been confirmed from several sources - this is over 20% of the population on the internet. The passive number is an odd one because it is not clear to me how that was actually calculated but the policy guys really like throwing it out there in conversations. Over the course of the last three years, the Internet has become more affordable, and, surprisingly, more users are coming through mobile connections. This of course, generates some expectation of monetization potential.
There is no real way yet to accept payment over the Internet for local businesses but that is coming (and the person developing that service told me that it is coming this summer. He was expecting a huge jump in usage from the development of local commerce and of local content. Of course, this was also the person who asked why I bothered researching Kazakhstan since by all general markers, the Kazakh market looks exactly like everywhere else - we all access search engines and social network sites more often than anything else, so that must really mean we are all the same.
The local content point is real and important - there is little local content produced inside kaznet (the most read blogger sites are blocked, many alternative news sources are blocked, and the kind of local that is allowed to develop is no more interesting than the regular local newspaper). How such local content might be developed and be more interesting than extensive discussions of everything local on the ct.kz forum nobody knows and the ct.kz originators scoff at the notion, but there indeed is a push to localize KazNet because it is seen as the only way to really get it off the ground. For now, the internal traffic on KazNet is people downloading pirated movies and music and nearly everything else is external. What is even more curious is that none of the internet developers that I have talked to, the dean of the IITU included, know much about how people actually use the Internet... aside from the traffic patterns they see from KazakhTelecom. When I explain that many people see the Internet as a place to find other people, they are surprised and then come up with their own explanations for why this is an unimportant insight, not useful to the overall thinking of how to monetize the Internet... after all, everyone is interested in money.
06 April, 2010
That language question
The issues of language come up in many conversations here in Kazakhstan and that is not surprising of course given the historical context of the area. Officially, there has been a concerted effort by the government to both promote the language and to increase the number of people speaking it. Kazakh is the official language of the country which means that all of the government and every legal document has to be in Kazakh. Talking about kazakh language in general and kazakh language on the Internet generates different reactions. Where the official line was that kazakh language kaznet is developing and although there are few kazakh-only resources yet, they are increasing in number and range of offerings. The less official line is that while the Internet offers a way to provide learning materials in Kazakh and a space for self-expression of national identity, very little actual kazakh content is online and the leading companies, such as Yandex for example, are not yet providing morphological search and the main Russian-language social network sites such as vkontakte and odnoklassniki have not yet been translated into Kazakh. Google and Facebook on the other hand are available in Kazakh and this means quite a lot to the young kazakh-speakers.
These kinds of pronouncements make sense, although why kazakh youth would prefer for example to use Wordpress instead of KZ's own Yvision has fewer and weaker explanations (based on several Google searches, it is certainly evident that Yvision gets indexed just as well as Wordpress). In the course of subsequent conversations it becomes clear that in fact Yandex provides morphological search in Kazakh as well and their search quality may even rival Google's and odnoklassniki and moimir are translated in Kazakh as well. These changes are recent however.
Amid the confusion it is hard to say what role Kazakh language, nationalist leanings or post-colonial sentiments might play in the kinds of resources produced, available and utilized on Kaznet. Kazakh has a somewhat tortured history as a language - stunted in its development for 70 years because of the Soviet policies, it remained the language of villages and remote areas where modern life rarely made its presence known. The Kazakh spoken in larger cities was augmented by Russian words to add the vocabulary of modern life. Such english-based words as 'airport' and even more common words such as 'coat' made its way into Kazakh language in Russian, sometimes with Kazakh endings. Since the nationalization and Kazakh becoming an official language, many such words have been converted to Kazakh words that seem to appear somehow out of nowhere. This of course continues to create problems as government and technical documents need to be translated into Kazakh that not only does not have the vocabulary, but where there is a strong movement to ensure non-Kazakh words do not become the standard. This is not a new policy, the Quebecois for example have a system that they use in order to preserve their version of French without untoward influences. The problem in this context is that there is no real system so documents translated and written by one person then become unreadable by someone else because there was never an official process or even a record of created words. How much of this story is true and how much is something made up to deal with the general madness of the Kazakh government I do not know, but the language issues seem to be cloaked in a number of stories that in some ways devalue the language itself and make it seem impossible for the language to become usable any time soon.
Yet examples of language policy and language development failure abound regardless of the ethnic background of my interviewees and interlocutors. There are many language learning systems (one of them was handed to me as a present the other day) which cost a lot and the production value is relatively low. There have been ideas to create integrated language learning systems online with existing physical language learning systems for sale, but none of these ideas have generated much traction despite the funding for these ideas being available. Kaznet is empty because there is so little local content produced in both languages - Russian and Kazakh and also because the kinds of language, ethnic and national identity issues as well as post-colonial tensions are evidenced not only in the patterns of use but also in the patterns of financial support and technical development here in Kazakhstan.
These kinds of pronouncements make sense, although why kazakh youth would prefer for example to use Wordpress instead of KZ's own Yvision has fewer and weaker explanations (based on several Google searches, it is certainly evident that Yvision gets indexed just as well as Wordpress). In the course of subsequent conversations it becomes clear that in fact Yandex provides morphological search in Kazakh as well and their search quality may even rival Google's and odnoklassniki and moimir are translated in Kazakh as well. These changes are recent however.
Amid the confusion it is hard to say what role Kazakh language, nationalist leanings or post-colonial sentiments might play in the kinds of resources produced, available and utilized on Kaznet. Kazakh has a somewhat tortured history as a language - stunted in its development for 70 years because of the Soviet policies, it remained the language of villages and remote areas where modern life rarely made its presence known. The Kazakh spoken in larger cities was augmented by Russian words to add the vocabulary of modern life. Such english-based words as 'airport' and even more common words such as 'coat' made its way into Kazakh language in Russian, sometimes with Kazakh endings. Since the nationalization and Kazakh becoming an official language, many such words have been converted to Kazakh words that seem to appear somehow out of nowhere. This of course continues to create problems as government and technical documents need to be translated into Kazakh that not only does not have the vocabulary, but where there is a strong movement to ensure non-Kazakh words do not become the standard. This is not a new policy, the Quebecois for example have a system that they use in order to preserve their version of French without untoward influences. The problem in this context is that there is no real system so documents translated and written by one person then become unreadable by someone else because there was never an official process or even a record of created words. How much of this story is true and how much is something made up to deal with the general madness of the Kazakh government I do not know, but the language issues seem to be cloaked in a number of stories that in some ways devalue the language itself and make it seem impossible for the language to become usable any time soon.
Yet examples of language policy and language development failure abound regardless of the ethnic background of my interviewees and interlocutors. There are many language learning systems (one of them was handed to me as a present the other day) which cost a lot and the production value is relatively low. There have been ideas to create integrated language learning systems online with existing physical language learning systems for sale, but none of these ideas have generated much traction despite the funding for these ideas being available. Kaznet is empty because there is so little local content produced in both languages - Russian and Kazakh and also because the kinds of language, ethnic and national identity issues as well as post-colonial tensions are evidenced not only in the patterns of use but also in the patterns of financial support and technical development here in Kazakhstan.
Uncertainties of youth and language games
My work here in Kazakhstan is largely opportunistic, dependent on the kinds of contacts I have and the kinds of contacts they might have for me. As I traverse the city, it is becoming clear that this research project is taking on the shape of something much larger than a tempered one-person thing... I am trying to put together a micro-sociology from below with an assessment of structural factors from above and all of this is happening at random. One thing I have tried to do much more this time, is have more conversations with the kazakh-speaking population. Note I don't mean 'ethnically kazakh' because those are two different things. As someone told me last night, there are two types of kazakh people here in Kazakhstan - Shala Kazakhs and Naryz Kazakhs. The former are those that are ethnically kazakh but do not speak the language and are generally russified, while the latter are what Sarah Palin might term 'real'. There is most certainly a tension between the two kinds and confusion about ethnic and national identity development is that much more intensified especially as the government makes pronouncements about the importance of kazakh language but then nothing is done to ensure its development.
To figure out what the kazakh-language Internet use and production of kazakh-language resources look like on KazNet, I started tracking down both kazakh-language bloggers and kazah-speaking Internet users. Turns out language is very important... and it is a sore point and most people have a hard time really speaking about these issues openly. However, language is also a way to delineate borders and to some extent to divide spaces on the Internet. Basically, KazNet is split into two parts right now, the kazakh and the russian-language parts. This split of course is only evident to the russian speakers since kazakh-speaking internet users all speak russian as well and many also speak english, chinese or turkish. The kazakh-language blogosphere and internet is nascent and is barely now developing. As the russian speaking blogosphere is trying to rise up against internet filtering and the blocking of LJ under the banner of freedom of the Internet, the Kazakh internet has different goals - they want the freedom to write and to explore the potential of the Internet for self-expression. In that sense they seem to feel that the russian-speaking sphere is working against them to some extent by creating a more dangerous situation and by attracting the attention of the authorities.
Prominent russian-language bloggers, writers, movers and shakers generally seem to dismiss the kazakh language content production as very little interesting that is not worth the time. The kazakh-language bloggers know this but they also acknowledge that the kinds of people writing in kazakh are different. Where the average russian blogger seems to be an educated IT professional in his or her 30s writing about political, economic or social ills of the country, the average kazakh blogger is a young woman in her 20s that writes about kazakh culture and poetry. The kazakh speaking audience is younger and more extreme... they are writing about language and language politics in kazakh, but mostly their posts are discussed within very small circles of readers. What is even more interesting that most of these blogs are sitting not in the kz space but on wordpress (which worries many of them because the government can block access to a blogging platform with little cause and no announcements). I asked why they are on wordpress and on one of the kazakh blogging platforms like yvision.kz or odin.kz. The answer essentially came down to whether Google is going to index these sites if they move over to the KZNet space. Most were convinced that wasn't going to happen and since Google (according to them) is the only search engine at the moment that does morphological search in Kazakh (although this is contested by the more technical people), it seemed imperative to have kazakh-language blogs on wordpress.
Wordpress was also perceived as far more technically superior to kazakh blogging platforms and a lot more social in creating an immediate sense of presence by showing all of the new kazakh language posts recently posted by other users on the start pages at login. Kazakh youth were excited about blogging as one of the ways that could potentially express their ethnic and national identity - something that is seen as impossible to do 'in real life' because it is politically inexpedient and somewhat persecuted by the government. Kazakh college students are looking for ways to express themselves and for potential directions beyond the static business and state journalism options that have known until now. Whether new media can in fact become both a space for self-expression and an avenue for a different career is certainly an open question, but they are excited to explore it now.
To figure out what the kazakh-language Internet use and production of kazakh-language resources look like on KazNet, I started tracking down both kazakh-language bloggers and kazah-speaking Internet users. Turns out language is very important... and it is a sore point and most people have a hard time really speaking about these issues openly. However, language is also a way to delineate borders and to some extent to divide spaces on the Internet. Basically, KazNet is split into two parts right now, the kazakh and the russian-language parts. This split of course is only evident to the russian speakers since kazakh-speaking internet users all speak russian as well and many also speak english, chinese or turkish. The kazakh-language blogosphere and internet is nascent and is barely now developing. As the russian speaking blogosphere is trying to rise up against internet filtering and the blocking of LJ under the banner of freedom of the Internet, the Kazakh internet has different goals - they want the freedom to write and to explore the potential of the Internet for self-expression. In that sense they seem to feel that the russian-speaking sphere is working against them to some extent by creating a more dangerous situation and by attracting the attention of the authorities.
Prominent russian-language bloggers, writers, movers and shakers generally seem to dismiss the kazakh language content production as very little interesting that is not worth the time. The kazakh-language bloggers know this but they also acknowledge that the kinds of people writing in kazakh are different. Where the average russian blogger seems to be an educated IT professional in his or her 30s writing about political, economic or social ills of the country, the average kazakh blogger is a young woman in her 20s that writes about kazakh culture and poetry. The kazakh speaking audience is younger and more extreme... they are writing about language and language politics in kazakh, but mostly their posts are discussed within very small circles of readers. What is even more interesting that most of these blogs are sitting not in the kz space but on wordpress (which worries many of them because the government can block access to a blogging platform with little cause and no announcements). I asked why they are on wordpress and on one of the kazakh blogging platforms like yvision.kz or odin.kz. The answer essentially came down to whether Google is going to index these sites if they move over to the KZNet space. Most were convinced that wasn't going to happen and since Google (according to them) is the only search engine at the moment that does morphological search in Kazakh (although this is contested by the more technical people), it seemed imperative to have kazakh-language blogs on wordpress.
Wordpress was also perceived as far more technically superior to kazakh blogging platforms and a lot more social in creating an immediate sense of presence by showing all of the new kazakh language posts recently posted by other users on the start pages at login. Kazakh youth were excited about blogging as one of the ways that could potentially express their ethnic and national identity - something that is seen as impossible to do 'in real life' because it is politically inexpedient and somewhat persecuted by the government. Kazakh college students are looking for ways to express themselves and for potential directions beyond the static business and state journalism options that have known until now. Whether new media can in fact become both a space for self-expression and an avenue for a different career is certainly an open question, but they are excited to explore it now.
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