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Hello, everybody. Welcome
to the Open Translation lounge

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for the TED Found In Translation
sessions here at TEDGlobal in Scotland.

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Today, we have two speakers.
First for us this week,

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we have An Xiao Mina,
who just left the stage minutes ago.

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And Hetain Patel, who actually
delivered his talk several days ago.

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Also joining us here on the stage
is Coco from Hong Kong,

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Shadia from Mauritius Island,
and Jan from the Czech Republic.

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Joining us online, over here,
we have Matti from Hong Kong,

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Jason from Hong Kong as well,

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Anna from Italy and Anja from Slovenia.

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- Hi.

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- Welcome. I'm going
to start with you, An.

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Fantastic talk,
thank you so much for joining us.

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Your talk was all about memes
as a means of expression.

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And the examples were really highly
localised, but they're also universal.

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Everyone got them immediately.
Could you talk about that in the context

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of having all these people
from around the world?

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- Sure. I think what's really
interesting to me about Internet culture

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is if we think about Hollywood -
I grew up partially in the Philippines,

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my family is Filipino-Chinese -

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and I remember travelling around
and going to the most rural areas

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of the Philippines,
seeing people with Coke bottles

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or watching Hollywood movies.
There's always the sense of Hollywood

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or mass media providing
a global culture.

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What I'm interested in
is Internet culture.

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It's more like a ground up version of
that, it's coming from a local version.

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That's why I used the word 'street-art',
or hip-hop culture.

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I'm interested in how Internet culture
can become this bridge culture.

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Just like I can talk about
Arnold Schwarzenegger in rural Uganda,

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or in New York City.

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Just two days ago, I was talking
with an Italian, an Indian and then me -

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sounds like an intro to a joke,

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and it was because we were all
talking about how people in Italy, in India

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and in Uganda were all filming their
ministers of government falling asleep.

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That became an Internet meme.

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It suddenly became this bridge.

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"Oh, your ministers fall asleep, too!"

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And, so, I'm interested in how
this Internet culture can be

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a bridge culture
that's driven by people.

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It is incredibly local
and becomes a bridge for storytelling,

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and maybe even for global,
civic engagement,

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global understanding - now I know
a little bit more about

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what's going on in India,
in a way I can relate to.

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So, that's really what I hope
people really got from the talk.

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And kind of what I'm looking at with
my founding partner, Jason Li,

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with our new site,
called The Civic Beat, is can this be

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a bridge for storytelling, and then,
from there, active engagement online.

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And global understanding.

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- Great.

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Actually, I'd like to take
a question from the Skype crowd.

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Does anybody have a question
An to begin with?

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- I can start,
but I don't think I have a question.

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I'd like to comment on this
activism side of the argument

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because we recently had
some protests in Slovenia

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and it was quite a shock because a lot
of people said they would be coming,

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and not a lot of people came.

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So are memes just a form
of online activism

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that isn't translated into public space,

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and, therefore, lacks some kind of
political legitimacy

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for politicians and the government?

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- That's a really great question.

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It's something I've struggled with a lot

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because it does seem like
we're sharing pictures of cats.

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Like, what is this doing?

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You know, one phrase I use,
and the reason I brought in this

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essay from Havel, is this notion
of a ladder of engagement

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to civic expression.
It always starts with little steps.

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And, certainly, many times,

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you see instances where
people are talking a lot online.

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And it doesn't seem like
they're engaging offline.

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But, then, over time,

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and one of my favourite examples
is the sunglasses meme

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that I ended the talk on,

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where everyone was wearing
sunglasses for Chen Guangcheng.

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OK, it seems like
this is just empty expression,

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it's not going anywhere,
nothing's happening.

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But, again, if you think about
the context of China,

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where there's heavy suppression of any
kind of political-public assembly,

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there is actually reports of people
wearing sunglasses

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in a form of flash mob
in physical space.

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They actually went to the town where
Chen was being held,

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nearby where he was being held,

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and they assembled together,
and all wore sunglasses.

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That became a form of
physical public assembly.

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So, it's hard to imagine that happening
without first the meme popping up.

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So, it doesn't always happen that way,

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but there's so many cases where
we're seeing how a meme presages

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any kind of physical action or assembly
that it's really convinced me that

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it really is the beginning of
a larger engagement.

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And it might be discouraging
at the beginning to see people

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clicking and pointing, but I don't
want to see that as a dichotomy.

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If you go to a protest wearing a button,

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that meme is very much similar
to a button -

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it's a form of visual expression

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that we've seen in all kinds of
social movements in history.

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- I'd like to bring in Hetain.

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We were talking yesterday
about how, obviously,

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memes are a way
of expressing ourselves,

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and how language actually -
we express ourselves in different ways.

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The idea of do we have a different
identity in every language that we speak.

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- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons
why you might feel as though

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you have a different identity
when you speak a different language.

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It might be due to vocabulary.

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So, from my personal experience,
if I'm speaking Gujarati,

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an Indian language,
there's certain things

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I'm used to talking about
in that language

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with my grandmother,
domestic things.

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In English, I might talk about
a whole different kind of things.

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In French something else.

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So, it might be the kind of topic
you speak about,

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and, then, also, something
comes in in the vocabulary also,

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in how you think about things,
through different languages.

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And I actually think
it's not just language.

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Even with one language,
you kind of change who you are,

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depending who you talk to anyway.
I guess, every day,

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we're performing different
versions of ourselves, kind of thing.

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- One of the most popular things
I've seen

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is Photoshop remixes of police brutality.

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There's a meme in China
called The Fat Cop.

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And there was a protest
in Shifang about pollution,

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and there's this fat cop
that was hitting people.

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And, obviously, very frightening.

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People took that cop and started
putting him into other images,

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cos he looked like he was running, so
they put him into, like, movies

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where he looks like he's chasing after
Tom Cruise, they put him into

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all these weird images.

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And a really similar thing happened
in the United States where,

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I don't know who's from the US,

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but if you remember the pepper
spraying cop, the famous cop who

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was pepper spraying students who were
engaging in the Occupy movement.

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And he looked like he was
literally watering the plants.

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And, so, people took that image of him,
again, a terrifying image,

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and they took that terror away
by putting it into a quantitative humour

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and started Photoshopping him
into images of him, like,

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watering the roses,
or spray painting in a movie.

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So, those images, they break language.

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I know exactly what's going on in China,
I know exactly what is happening,

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even if I'm looking at
a meme that's coming from Egypt,

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and I don't speak the language,

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but I can see and understand it,
in a way, because it's a visual language,

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and that's really compelling to me.

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- I want to bring in someone from Skype.
Anna, I'd like to bring you.

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Do you have a question for either Hetain
or four An Xiao Mina?

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- Yes, hello.

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I was wondering if you think there's any
difference between memes in China

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and in the other countries,
just because China Internet is censored?

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- I think we see a lot of creativity
because of censorship.

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A lot of the talks this week were
talking about how creativity

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and innovation come out of necessity.

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And, so, China has two things... China's
Internet has two things going for it.

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It's one of the
world's largest Internets.

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I think it may have recently become
the world's largest Internet.

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The infrastructure is there to support
a lot of creativity and remixing.

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Then, on the other side, it's one
of the world's most censored Internets.

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So, you have these two factors.
A lot of people can be creative online,

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but then their voices
are stamped on more often.

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So, recently, there were images
of Tiananmen Square -

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I don't know if you remember
the infamous tank image, three tanks,

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and the man standing up to it -

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there were two images
that stuck out to me.

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One was someone had replaced
the tanks with a kitten

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looking at the person.

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And another one, they actually replaced
the tanks with rubber ducks,

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and rubber ducks had become
a meme earlier because

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there's a big rubber duck floating around
in Hong Kong, an art installation.

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And, so, that image is incredibly,
incredibly censored in China.

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But by creating these other ways,
putting in a cat,

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I mean, what goes more viral
on the Internet than a cat?

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It's a way to get the message
out there, really quickly.

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Of course, it got deleted pretty quickly,
but it also spread pretty quickly.

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So, I don't want to say that
creativity is different.

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Part of my talk is that there's actually
a lot of really similar creativity

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around the world, but, in China,
you do have this element

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of censorship that compels creativity
in more frequent cases, at least for now.

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- OK, thank you.
- I think, you know,

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I've only looked at three contexts -
at China, a little bit of Philippines,

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and Uganda,
and then United States.

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And there are some similar themes.

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Police brutality tends to be actually
a similar theme across all of these areas.

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And growing up in Los Angeles,
I understand why that is.

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I saw police brutality myself.

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It's a frightening situation.

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So, using humour diffuses that,

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so, it becomes a very common
way to express ourselves

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and often people, especially in areas
where there's limited free speech,

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people will remix images of their leaders,
so you see a lot of that.

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But, often, it's very local.

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Some of the more compelling memes
coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa,

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I showed one,
Tweet Like A Foreign Journalist,

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where the Spanish Prime Minister
had said...

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The Spanish economy was tanking,

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the Spanish Prime Minister sent a text
message to his finance minister

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and he said, "Don't worry -
Spain is not Uganda."

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Uganda's pounced on this. They started
saying, "Uganda is not Spain."

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And they started posting statistics
about how Uganda's economy is rising,

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all these kinds of issues.

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That's something really common
I've seen in Sub-Saharan Africa,

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because Sub-Saharan Africa in particular
is misrepresented in global media

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much more often than other places.

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So, yes, there are some themes,

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but you can find very local ones
that are really interesting.

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- We have a question from Hong Kong.
Actually, Matti.

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- Do you think is this a new
phenomenon,

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merged with the Internet,
or do you have

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any pre-Internet samples of remixing,
for example picture of leaders,

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and stuff like that?

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- Oh, yeah, absolutely.

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What's new about the Internet
is that it's faster.

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I haven't seen anything in history
that's filled with such weirdness.

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I haven't seen cats and llamas
and dogs and pigs.

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But I was just talking with someone,
since we're in the UK, this is appropriate,

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there's this British publisher,

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I forget the century,
but his name was John Wilkes.

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He was publishing
the North Briton newspaper.

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It was considered at the time
a very edgy newspaper.

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The 45th issue angered the government
so much that they destroyed

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all the printing presses
and they censored the magazine.

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And then they arrested John Wilkes.

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But, then, shortly after he's arrested,

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just like the sunflower seeds,
the number 45

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started popping up on walls and, again,

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this is why I bring that analogy
with street art,

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that there is a long history of people

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taking symbols and images
and putting them out

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as a way of speaking out, even when
that message is being suppressed.

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- I just want to bring in
some of our translator panellists.

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Do you have a question
for either Hetain or An?

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- Our president gets mocked a lot,
but, like, he never...

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I always thought if he can reply
with a humour,

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it would be really nice
to solve the situation,

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so I'm wondering, is there any example

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of how government can handle
this in a rather humorous way?

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- Humorous way,
yeah, that's a great question.

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I don't know if any
Americans here remember

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the Hillary Clinton texting meme
that popped up?

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That wasn't a political commentary.
It was just her looking really bad-ass.

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She was wearing sunglasses
and texting.

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And there are all kinds of joke texts
coming from her

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about how cool she was.

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And her Twitter account, she just opened
a Twitter account, and it's that photo.

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So, I think she's doing it well.

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Granted, it wasn't criticising her,

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but she did it well
in terms of embracing it.

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And I think, there's certainly
a culture gap, a generation gap,

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and I do hope that it opens up
a door for using humour

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because I think that would be great,

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if persons in power can use humour

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to help talk about
often very difficult issues.

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- We're going to have to wrap it,

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we have to head back
into session.

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Thank you, An Xiao Mina, and thank
you, Hetain Patel, for joining us.

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And thank you, all the translators.
Thank you very much.