Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Open Translation lounge
for the TED Found In Translation sessions here at TEDGlobal in Scotland.
Today, we have two speakers. First for us this week,
we have An Xiao Mina, who just left the stage minutes ago.
And Hetain Patel, who actually delivered his talk several days ago.
Also joining us here on the stage is Coco from Hong Kong,
Shadia from Mauritius Island, and Jan from the Czech Republic.
Joining us online, over here, we have Matti from Hong Kong,
Jason from Hong Kong as well,
Anna from Italy and Anja from Slovenia.
- Hi.
- Welcome. I'm going to start with you, An.
Fantastic talk, thank you so much for joining us.
Your talk was all about memes as a means of expression.
And the examples were really highly localised, but they're also universal.
Everyone got them immediately. Could you talk about that in the context
of having all these people from around the world?
- Sure. I think what's really interesting to me about Internet culture
is if we think about Hollywood - I grew up partially in the Philippines,
my family is Filipino-Chinese -
and I remember travelling around and going to the most rural areas
of the Philippines, seeing people with Coke bottles
or watching Hollywood movies. There's always the sense of Hollywood
or mass media providing a global culture.
What I'm interested in is Internet culture.
It's more like a ground up version of that, it's coming from a local version.
That's why I used the word 'street-art', or hip-hop culture.
I'm interested in how Internet culture can become this bridge culture.
Just like I can talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger in rural Uganda,
or in New York City.
Just two days ago, I was talking with an Italian, an Indian and then me -
sounds like an intro to a joke,
and it was because we were all talking about how people in Italy, in India
and in Uganda were all filming their ministers of government falling asleep.
That became an Internet meme.
It suddenly became this bridge.
"Oh, your ministers fall asleep, too!"
And, so, I'm interested in how this Internet culture can be
a bridge culture that's driven by people.
It is incredibly local and becomes a bridge for storytelling,
and maybe even for global, civic engagement,
global understanding - now I know a little bit more about
what's going on in India, in a way I can relate to.
So, that's really what I hope people really got from the talk.
And kind of what I'm looking at with my founding partner, Jason Li,
with our new site, called The Civic Beat, is can this be
a bridge for storytelling, and then, from there, active engagement online.
And global understanding.
- Great.
Actually, I'd like to take a question from the Skype crowd.
Does anybody have a question An to begin with?
- I can start, but I don't think I have a question.
I'd like to comment on this activism side of the argument
because we recently had some protests in Slovenia
and it was quite a shock because a lot of people said they would be coming,
and not a lot of people came.
So are memes just a form of online activism
that isn't translated into public space,
and, therefore, lacks some kind of political legitimacy
for politicians and the government?
- That's a really great question.
It's something I've struggled with a lot
because it does seem like we're sharing pictures of cats.
Like, what is this doing?
You know, one phrase I use, and the reason I brought in this
essay from Havel, is this notion of a ladder of engagement
to civic expression. It always starts with little steps.
And, certainly, many times,
you see instances where people are talking a lot online.
And it doesn't seem like they're engaging offline.
But, then, over time,
and one of my favourite examples is the sunglasses meme
that I ended the talk on,
where everyone was wearing sunglasses for Chen Guangcheng.
OK, it seems like this is just empty expression,
it's not going anywhere, nothing's happening.
But, again, if you think about the context of China,
where there's heavy suppression of any kind of political-public assembly,
there is actually reports of people wearing sunglasses
in a form of flash mob in physical space.
They actually went to the town where Chen was being held,
nearby where he was being held,
and they assembled together, and all wore sunglasses.
That became a form of physical public assembly.
So, it's hard to imagine that happening without first the meme popping up.
So, it doesn't always happen that way,
but there's so many cases where we're seeing how a meme presages
any kind of physical action or assembly that it's really convinced me that
it really is the beginning of a larger engagement.
And it might be discouraging at the beginning to see people
clicking and pointing, but I don't want to see that as a dichotomy.
If you go to a protest wearing a button,
that meme is very much similar to a button -
it's a form of visual expression
that we've seen in all kinds of social movements in history.
- I'd like to bring in Hetain.
We were talking yesterday about how, obviously,
memes are a way of expressing ourselves,
and how language actually - we express ourselves in different ways.
The idea of do we have a different identity in every language that we speak.
- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why you might feel as though
you have a different identity when you speak a different language.
It might be due to vocabulary.
So, from my personal experience, if I'm speaking Gujarati,
an Indian language, there's certain things
I'm used to talking about in that language
with my grandmother, domestic things.
In English, I might talk about a whole different kind of things.
In French something else.
So, it might be the kind of topic you speak about,
and, then, also, something comes in in the vocabulary also,
in how you think about things, through different languages.
And I actually think it's not just language.
Even with one language, you kind of change who you are,
depending who you talk to anyway. I guess, every day,
we're performing different versions of ourselves, kind of thing.
- One of the most popular things I've seen
is Photoshop remixes of police brutality.
There's a meme in China called The Fat Cop.
And there was a protest in Shifang about pollution,
and there's this fat cop that was hitting people.
And, obviously, very frightening.
People took that cop and started putting him into other images,
cos he looked like he was running, so they put him into, like, movies
where he looks like he's chasing after Tom Cruise, they put him into
all these weird images.
And a really similar thing happened in the United States where,
I don't know who's from the US,
but if you remember the pepper spraying cop, the famous cop who
was pepper spraying students who were engaging in the Occupy movement.
And he looked like he was literally watering the plants.
And, so, people took that image of him, again, a terrifying image,
and they took that terror away by putting it into a quantitative humour
and started Photoshopping him into images of him, like,
watering the roses, or spray painting in a movie.
So, those images, they break language.
I know exactly what's going on in China, I know exactly what is happening,
even if I'm looking at a meme that's coming from Egypt,
and I don't speak the language,
but I can see and understand it, in a way, because it's a visual language,
and that's really compelling to me.
- I want to bring in someone from Skype. Anna, I'd like to bring you.
Do you have a question for either Hetain or four An Xiao Mina?
- Yes, hello.
I was wondering if you think there's any difference between memes in China
and in the other countries, just because China Internet is censored?
- I think we see a lot of creativity because of censorship.
A lot of the talks this week were talking about how creativity
and innovation come out of necessity.
And, so, China has two things... China's Internet has two things going for it.
It's one of the world's largest Internets.
I think it may have recently become the world's largest Internet.
The infrastructure is there to support a lot of creativity and remixing.
Then, on the other side, it's one of the world's most censored Internets.
So, you have these two factors. A lot of people can be creative online,
but then their voices are stamped on more often.
So, recently, there were images of Tiananmen Square -
I don't know if you remember the infamous tank image, three tanks,
and the man standing up to it -
there were two images that stuck out to me.
One was someone had replaced the tanks with a kitten
looking at the person.
And another one, they actually replaced the tanks with rubber ducks,
and rubber ducks had become a meme earlier because
there's a big rubber duck floating around in Hong Kong, an art installation.
And, so, that image is incredibly, incredibly censored in China.
But by creating these other ways, putting in a cat,
I mean, what goes more viral on the Internet than a cat?
It's a way to get the message out there, really quickly.
Of course, it got deleted pretty quickly, but it also spread pretty quickly.
So, I don't want to say that creativity is different.
Part of my talk is that there's actually a lot of really similar creativity
around the world, but, in China, you do have this element
of censorship that compels creativity in more frequent cases, at least for now.
- OK, thank you. - I think, you know,
I've only looked at three contexts - at China, a little bit of Philippines,
and Uganda, and then United States.
And there are some similar themes.
Police brutality tends to be actually a similar theme across all of these areas.
And growing up in Los Angeles, I understand why that is.
I saw police brutality myself.
It's a frightening situation.
So, using humour diffuses that,
so, it becomes a very common way to express ourselves
and often people, especially in areas where there's limited free speech,
people will remix images of their leaders, so you see a lot of that.
But, often, it's very local.
Some of the more compelling memes coming out of Sub-Saharan Africa,
I showed one, Tweet Like A Foreign Journalist,
where the Spanish Prime Minister had said...
The Spanish economy was tanking,
the Spanish Prime Minister sent a text message to his finance minister
and he said, "Don't worry - Spain is not Uganda."
Uganda's pounced on this. They started saying, "Uganda is not Spain."
And they started posting statistics about how Uganda's economy is rising,
all these kinds of issues.
That's something really common I've seen in Sub-Saharan Africa,
because Sub-Saharan Africa in particular is misrepresented in global media
much more often than other places.
So, yes, there are some themes,
but you can find very local ones that are really interesting.
- We have a question from Hong Kong. Actually, Matti.
- Do you think is this a new phenomenon,
merged with the Internet, or do you have
any pre-Internet samples of remixing, for example picture of leaders,
and stuff like that?
- Oh, yeah, absolutely.
What's new about the Internet is that it's faster.
I haven't seen anything in history that's filled with such weirdness.
I haven't seen cats and llamas and dogs and pigs.
But I was just talking with someone, since we're in the UK, this is appropriate,
there's this British publisher,
I forget the century, but his name was John Wilkes.
He was publishing the North Briton newspaper.
It was considered at the time a very edgy newspaper.
The 45th issue angered the government so much that they destroyed
all the printing presses and they censored the magazine.
And then they arrested John Wilkes.
But, then, shortly after he's arrested,
just like the sunflower seeds, the number 45
started popping up on walls and, again,
this is why I bring that analogy with street art,
that there is a long history of people
taking symbols and images and putting them out
as a way of speaking out, even when that message is being suppressed.
- I just want to bring in some of our translator panellists.
Do you have a question for either Hetain or An?
- Our president gets mocked a lot, but, like, he never...
I always thought if he can reply with a humour,
it would be really nice to solve the situation,
so I'm wondering, is there any example
of how government can handle this in a rather humorous way?
- Humorous way, yeah, that's a great question.
I don't know if any Americans here remember
the Hillary Clinton texting meme that popped up?
That wasn't a political commentary. It was just her looking really bad-ass.
She was wearing sunglasses and texting.
And there are all kinds of joke texts coming from her
about how cool she was.
And her Twitter account, she just opened a Twitter account, and it's that photo.
So, I think she's doing it well.
Granted, it wasn't criticising her,
but she did it well in terms of embracing it.
And I think, there's certainly a culture gap, a generation gap,
and I do hope that it opens up a door for using humour
because I think that would be great,
if persons in power can use humour
to help talk about often very difficult issues.
- We're going to have to wrap it,
we have to head back into session.
Thank you, An Xiao Mina, and thank you, Hetain Patel, for joining us.
And thank you, all the translators. Thank you very much.