the distress caused by the lived experience of the transformation of one’s home and sense of belonging and is experienced through the feeling of desolation about its change.
Apparently, the term was coined by one Dr Glenn Albrecht; the definition is continued with:
The diagnosis of solastalgia is based on the recognition of the distress within an individual or a community about the loss of ‘endemic sense of place’ and the loss of a sense of control of its destiny.
I think this could explain a lot about modern Singapore…
The saying goes “the elephant in the room…” when there’s something that needs to be discussed, but it’s so large and obvious and obviously incongruent that no-one can bring themselves to mention it.
Singapore isn’t an elephant, it’s a “red dot” – but nevertheless, I’ve read a couple of articles recently that were obviously relevant to Singapore, and yet this island wasn’t mentioned.
The most recent is this article in the Times about Dubai, and its rise as a financial capital. I’ve mentioned Dubai as a rival to Singapore before, if you’ll pardon the rhyme. Obviously, it sees the need to diversify away from dependence on oil, and is choosing to go down the road of developing as a financial centre. Key quote:
Dubai has another incentive to succeed in what may be a winner-takes-all game to become the Gulf’s financial capital. Unlike Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, it has scant reserves of oil and gas. To be assured of success, it must be financially clean, and accept principles of accountability, transparency and regulatory rigour. Its development in the past decade has been extraordinary and proves that the Middle East is not, by definition, a basket case. To continue to be a model for the region and the world, it must continue to invest in integrity.
No natural resources, just people; a reputation for integrity, incorruptibility, and the rule of law. Where have we heard that before..?
So if Singapore now has a rival competing on its own turf, it needs to be making the most of its only resource, namely people. Another article that made me think of this regards China, in The China Vortex: Where’s the Fantasy, Creativity and Imagination In China?I know, it’s just about gaming. Yes, I know it’s about China, not Singapore. I know, Singapore is throwing lots of money at developing its creative industries. And yes, I know, Singapore is also trying to attract world-class industry leaders to set up shop here. And yet, and yet… I’m not convinced yet. I hope it will work, I really do. I know for sure that there are lots of bright and talented young people here… but there are so many obstacles in their way, in the shape of ‘B-Arkers‘, the middle managers who don’t contribute much and can’t see beyond “the way things are done”, who fear change and resist it, who try to stifle anything that changes or challenges the rules… These people exist worldwide, of course, but the type seems firmly entrenched here….
A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was prettyhappy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.
Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now – especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.
Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:
a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything
I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work – constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy – are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinkingaboutquite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasymodus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were – to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!
So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…
Yes, another title to tease you into reading, promising more than it can deliver. I’m at that head-shaking point where I can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen.
In an interview about his latest novel, novelist William Gibson points out that writing science fiction is getting harder, because:
we can’t culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don’t have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, “oh, the future, it’s over there and it looks like this.”
Here’s the perfect example:
Neurosky, a company that will let us interact with games (and tools, and machinery, and robots, and cellphones…) just by controlling our mental state, blinking, and so on through a device that will be on the market next year – and should only add $15 to the price… Incredible… who thought it would come so soon? And look at how portable the device is! Combine this with the kind of augmented reality I was talking about the other day, and we will soon be seeing some wild stuff happening out there on the streets! Are we ready for this, I wonder…? I also wonder: when will they go to IPO….?
Here’s that augmented reality clip again: watch this back-to-back with the above, and imagine the possibilities when they’re combined….
Update:
My word, and those 3-d avatars of yourself that I mentioned in that earlier post… hehehe, I should have known: they’re going to be on the market later this year!
The UK’s Daily Telegraph wasn’t my favourite newspaper while I was still living in Britain; it doesn’t exactly fit my political sympathies.
Having said that, I read it faithfully for a few years, for the simple reason that it was the first to see the potential of the Web and to go online. I don’t read it even there any more, but I am being won over by their China correspondent, Richard Spencer, whose blog is here.
He’s written this piece, which refers this article; it seems that the attempt by China’s leadership to protect the environment through publication of a green GDP is failing, due to opposition at the provincial and county level.
I first heard about this policy while I was doing my MBA, and was naturally enthusiastic: it seemed to be a very progressive viewpoint. That it’s not working out isn’t a huge surprise, I guess; in the same way that the leadership is having difficulty in stamping out corruption, it’s almost inevitable that they wouldn’t find it easy to implement a policy that damages profits by forcing business and officials to account for externalities such as pollution and health issues.
I hope that this isn’t the end of it – and in fact, I don’t think it can be. The stakes are just too high – and, although I don’t know how this is going to work out – the Chinese people now control too many means of communication, through mobile phones and the internet. Although the government is filtering and monitoring these, the genie is easing its way out of the bottle.
I’m not talking here about the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, let’s be clear. I don’t want to get into that argument. I do actually think that Hu Jintao and Wen Jiaobao are serious about the ‘harmonious society’ vision, and do wish to see the environment protected, and social equity grow. They must know that if they don’t do this, the consequences of desertification, pollution, and corruption could be catastrophic.
If this is right, then the aims of the highest and lowest in China are in accord. There’s an ancient Chinese saying that “the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away”, indicating the difficulty that the ordinary Chinese has had in communicating grievances to higher authority about the abuse of power by local officialdom. I hope that communications technology will give an opportunity to lower the mountain, and bring the ‘emperor’ closer – to weed out corruption, and help protect the environment in China.
I’ve been singing the praises of IBM recently, from a social technologies point of view, because of the way they’re using tools like Second Life and Xing. A lot of this is aimed at their growing workforce in China, and I guess India isn’t far behind.
Of course, there’s a downside: this is the migration of those jobs from the West, especially, the US, to cheaper developing economies. In IBM’s case, this has become very controversial following Bob Cringely’s series of articles on IBM’s LEAN process. I took the time yesterday to read the comment thread on his previous article on the topic, and it’s very interesting from an MBA point of view.
Naturally, businesses seek to cut costs; this is natural. However, of course, you don’t do this if you have a good reason to go the other way and charge a premium. IBM seems to have been in the latter category: the huge amount of experience, domain-specific knowledge, and talent that the company could draw on gave excellent value for money even if the price was higher. If these comments are representative, however, it seems that the current IBM management are cutting their most knowledgable (and most expensive) employees in order to cut costs, and replacing them with cheaper – because inexperienced – hires in developing economies such as Argentina, South Africa, and of course Asia.
This seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater: employee costs are reduced, but customer satisfaction is also plummeting, because the exit of specialised knowledge leads to longer problem resolution times. It seems many customers won’t be renewing their contracts – and at the same time, the remaining talent at IBM is overworked, demoralised, and looking for an exit. IF those comments are representative. If they are, then the future doesn’t look so rosy for Big Blue.
On a broader scope, though, this outsourcing of white-collar jobs is still gathering steam. A common complaint, and one that relates to the IBM comments, is that the Asian employees getting the new jobs are unable to think creatively, and can only do exactly what they are told to do – even if there are errors that they are expected to detect. It’s something I’ve referred to before, and certainly applies even here in Singapore.
I’m talking about this because I’ve just been looking at old posts, and see that even in 2003 I was looking at this trend and wondering where I would fit in – and how I would react to it. Taking the MBA was my response, of course.
As I think about this, I can perhaps see a niche evolving where I could see an opportunity… got to start planning for the next few years…
I am not a computer gamer, nor do I play one on TV. I am a techie, though (or was until fairly recently) so games are on my radar, and I thought I had a reasonably good take on what’s happening. In recent weeks, I’ve had to do a lot of reading up on them for work, and gave a presentation on Thursday to a very diverse group of professionals, explaining to them how most of their professions can have an application in game design (much to their surprise). As a demonstration, and talking point, I showed them the famous Leeroy Jenkins machinima piece.
I’ve been doing a lot of exploring in Second Life as well, as you’ll have guessed from the spate of recent pieces about that. Thanks to Preetam’s directions, I found the virtual Singapore, which seems to be growing fairly quickly. Most of the people I’ve met there seem to be students (which here in Singapore means schoolkids rather than university-level as elsewhere), but I hope I’ll run into older people there at some point.
What’s got me thinking about this even more is finding a story in the WSJ on the rise of the QQ coin as a virtual currency in China. As the discussion about the story in Slashdot points out, most currencies are virtual anyway, since they’re no longer backed by reserves of precious metals. This was pointed out during my MBA finance courses as the dirty secret of the currency trade: although a currency may be ’sound’ based on economic and trade figures, intangible and irrational issues such as political events, rumours, or a simple lack of confidence can cause the currency’s value to crash, often with little warning. (This sort of thing is often done deliberately – George Soros, I’m looking at you!) In other words, a currency holds value only as long as traders believe in it.
This sort of process is happening now in China, with the sudden and unexpected rise of the QQ coin as an alternative microcurrency. Unless the Chinese government clamps down (which they inevitably must do) this is bound to develop in to a bubble, and a crash. Even so, one of the most interesting points of the article is that a virtual currency has occupied the economic niche that elsewhere is filled by credit cards. As a meme, I think that this means the genie is out of the bottle, and can’t be put back. Will this mean irreparable harm to the credit card in China? If young people (the only ones who will ever be affluent enough to be potential credit card users) are now attuned to using virtual money, who will meet that need? Will the credit card companies be able to change their model? Or will an indigenous Chinese or Hong Kong bank introduce a virtual currency and dominate the Chinese market? If China adopts “game money” instead of credit cards, what trends will that kick off in the rest of the world?
Of course, the QQ coin isn’t the only privately issued virtual currency to have a ‘real-world’ presence: Second Life’s Linden dollar also does, as one example. These game currencies are therefore just as real as Scottish bank notes or Hong Kong dollar notes, which are also privately issued. The difference with China, as always, is the number of people involved – and that as with other other technologies, China seems to be leapfrogging generations of financial tools, going straight from cash to e-cash, and bypassing cheques and credit cards.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. I’ll also point that in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, the collapse of the traditional states, and the rise of elective, non-traditional dispersed nations is credited to the inability of states to control online transactions, and the subsequent erosion of their tax bases. With the growth in the value of trade in Linden and QQ dollars, governments will eventually seek to tax them – but since the participants are global and often untraceable, it’ll be interesting to see how this could be done. If the Chinese and US governments try to do this via the parent companies, there will be the inevitable temptation to reincorporate in the Caribbean, or some other haven; what then?
Gah, things are moving so fast! I seem to be really behind the curve on this, at least by my own standards.
OK, I’m still thinking about education, professionalism, and virtuality.
Here I ramble a bit.
As I wrote before, tertiary institutions here in Singapore have a dress code for students that forbids caps, long hair, and so on. This is so that they “look professional”. Personally I don’t agree with this, and during my time at NTU was rarely seen without a baseball cap firmly fixed on my head. Of course, special case: I was an MBA student, and so there’s an element of “if he’s paying that much to be here, if he wants to wear a cap, let him”. I wore it in class, too. There were good reasons – my hair was very, very short then, so the hat kept my head warm in the arctic air-con, plus it shielded my eyes from the harsh lighting. I don’t think any of my professors would say that wearing the cap hindered my participation in class. So the clothes are not really the issue; it’s the attitude – and the context. My feeling is that the concept of “professionalism” these rules are meant to support are out of date, and better suited for producing cubicle-dwellers and low-level managers.
Not all that long ago, I was on the election committee of the first male member of the UK House of Commons to wear an ear-ring in Parliament. He got a bit of press about it at the time, but the story went away quickly because no-one cared. Man wears ear-ring at work, big deal. Happens all the time.
I’ve also worked as a consultant with a number of multinationals, in Singapore and in China. The managers I dealt with there were smart – but they dress colourfully, creatively, and with style. No question about their professionalism, though.
How about a senior manager who has spiky dyed blond hair and wears a kilt to the office? What kind of image does that present? What messages does that send? Is that professional? What kind of company would endorse that?
Well, the answer is: IBM.
And yes, it’s in Second Life. Fast Company has a really interesting article on how IBM is using the virtual world for mentoring and training – not only in the US, but also in China. I alluded to this before; guess the guy who thought that Second Life is for losers really needs to get up to speed on what’s happening!
How does one’s professional online avatar reflect one’s real-life professional image? Should you try to make an avatar that looks like the real you? Does it matter less because it’s online, even though you’re doing your work there just as you would offline?
