I logged on to see if I could watch part of the debate in Texas between Clinton and Obama. The debate, I believe, was partly sponsored by CNN. I tried to view the live feed on CNN but was given a message that is all too familiar to those of us outside of the United States.
Various online media providers sniff out your location from your IP address and block your access to online media. This is how Netflix prevents me from watching movies online through my membership when overseas, how various programs now online through the websites of various US television channels cannot be viewed outside the US, how BBC blocks access to their regular programs usually accessible online to visitors outside the UK, and CNN blocks live streaming of the US presidential primary debate in Texas.
Thanks to the technological art of IP location sniffing, traditional and new media have found another powerful way of rebuilding national borders online. I guess I will have to wait until someone uploads clips of the debate onto youtube and try to view them before they get taken down for violating the copyright on this US presidential debate held by CNN and others.
In Korea, the media have taken a different approach: Just ask everyone for their citizen registration number. Since I am here on an A-3 US government visa, I cannot even get a foreigner registration number in Korea. That means, when I am living in Korea on a one year visa, in addition to not being able reserve train tickets and use the vast majority of the thousands of online retailers and websites, I can’t view any (that I know of) of the Korean television media streamed or archived online.
In short, in Korea I cannot use the internet to see Korean online commercial media and I cannot use it to see major sources of online media in the United States. Fortunately, there is a reason I have never used my TV since beginning my current fellowship (and it isn’t the fact that I recently discovered that the TV in the furnished apartment may never have been working in the first place): this helps reduce the distractions to my studies to that last minor source: the rest of the internet.
UPDATE: CNN blocks the video feed to everyone outside the US but an audio feed is available here. HT dailykos.com.
I finally declared war on my PDF organizing system. I am struggling to manage some 2400 or so PDF files on my computer. This huge number of files consists of downloaded or scanned journal articles, newspaper articles, historical documents, PhD dissertations, books, and various personal documents that I got sick of dragging around the world in fat disorganized folders.
This week I tried to find a dissertation I had read part of which talked about the relationship between liberalism in Japanese domestic politics under the premiership of Hara Kei and the aftermath of the March 1st movement in colonial Korea.
Did I file this PDF away in the Academic Papers/Korea/ folder, the Academic Papers/Japan/ folder, the Documents/To Read/ folder, the Docs/Dissertation/MUST READ/ folder, or was it still stranded in the downloads folder? Apparently none of these and I still haven’t been able to find the damn file. My folder system is an embarrassing mess.
However, in the 21st century, where tagging rules, why should my folder system matter? Why can’t I tag the stupid files and be done with it. If each PDF file can have a dozen tags that I could easily search through later. The file I described above, for example, could be tagged as “Academic Papers, Korea, Japan, colonial period, Taisho, liberalism, political, Hara Kei, March 1st Movement, dissertations”. Well, in order to do this I broke down and paid for the PDF indexing software Yep (Mac only, I’m sure there is something similar out there for those unfortunate Windows users out there).
I feel better now and have already made serious progress. With tag clouds, smart folders, and an iTunes like interface in Yep, I’m hoping I will gradually overcome my jumbled mess of PDF files and therefore be able to write my own dissertation in no time. Or not, but at least I feel less like I’m hunting for a document in a bombed out archive. I hope that future versions of the software will allow the option of including not only .pdfs but also images since scanning documents saved as PDFs is much slower than taking pictures of documents. I have thousands of crisp high contrast black and white photos of historical documents and newspaper articles that I would love to be able to tag in the same way without having to do it in a separate piece of software.
There are half a dozen other programs out there like Yojimbo, DEVON products, etc. which also allow you to store PDF files in a database of various kinds of data that might also include regular text, images, and so on. However, what I don’t like about them is that they are 1) often slow to import the PDFs 2) they are usually importing the PDFs into the program’s database thus swelling the size of the DB and slowing down its overall performance. I am not really interested in having over 30,000 pages of PDFs all inside the DB of a program and would like to keep them scattered in various places on my hard drive only to be indexed by a program by Yep.
I went to 춘천 in Kangwon province this past Monday to scout out what the state of local history was in the province and what materials I might be able to find on life there in the early postwar period (1945-50). The city library’s reference room was closed (how did I miss that when writing down the opening times the night before I left?) but I made a trip to the cultural section at city hall to get some suggestions and made a trip to the headquarters of the oldest provincial newspaper, 강원일보 where I was delighted to meet some very friendly journalists. I learnt that the only copies of the issues of that newspaper from 1945-50 are in the national library in Seoul. The only issue they seemed to have in the newspaper’s headquarters from that period was a single page of a single 1947 issue pasted onto a piece of wood in the lobby. They did, however, take me into their archives and let me make a copy of the memoir of the earliest head of their paper, who was also in charge of the special investigative committee on treasonous activities in the province in 1949, a work that I was having difficulty in finding.
The most interesting conversation I had that day, however, was not with journalists or city officials. As I was sitting in an underground shopping center, looking over a map of the city, an old man sat next to me and stared at me as I looked at the map. I have had this experience quite often in Korea and it usually leads to fascinating conversations with retired men who love to share their experiences during the Korean war, their interactions with Americans during the Korean war, their belief that Park Chung-hee was the best thing to come out of Korea since the hangul writing system, and that the coming of democracy has sent Korea off its rails.
When I noticed the guy was staring at me, I struck up a conversation. He originally answered in English but when we determined that my bad Korean was still better than his English, we settled upon Korean as our language of discussion. This doesn’t always turn out to be the case. Another fascinating random conversation I had with an old man outside the national library in 2005 was conducted almost entirely in Japanese.
The old man told me he had been a KATUSA (Korea Augmentation Troops to the United States Army) working with US soldiers in the Korean War, 1950-1953. That would explain the fact that he spoke some English. I told him I was spending the day trying to learn more about Kangwon provincial history and was told by city officials that very few materials are left from the early postwar period. I asked him if he had ever written anything down about his experiences since he was a “living historical archive.”
He said that he hadn’t but was willing to answer any questions I had. I asked him to talk about living in 춘천 from 1945-50. When he proceeded to tell me half a dozen stories I felt a deep frustration with myself that my Korean listening skills are so bad that I could understand less than half of what he was telling me.
My new friend was 12 years old when the colonial period ended in 1945 so he had attended elementary school under Japanese rule and learned some Japanese as a result. He says the next few years after liberation were horrible and he listed various trees and plants that his family tried to eat in order to live through a time of severe food shortages. He had some story about smuggling from North Korea that I would have loved to have understood. He also launched into a long and complicated story involving a cow which he seemed to love telling but which I just couldn’t make heads or tails out of.
I asked him if he had family in areas of Kangwon province which were under North Korean control in the early postwar, some of which later came under South Korean control as a result of changes in the lines of control. He said no, but this triggered a story about his life as a soldier during the war.
He told me, “I would not be here alive today if it wasn’t for the help of a Chinese officer.”
I could tell I was going to be interested in this story so as he told it, I repeatedly asked him to clarify and explain things I didn’t understand which helped raise the percentage of the story I came away with.
As far as I could gather my friend and a few other soldiers were in complete disarray in the second retreat in the winter of 1950-1 and found themselves way behind enemy lines. They were soon captured by a unit of Chinese troops who were quickly making their way south after China’s entry into the war. I have no idea to what degree he exaggerates the desperate situation at the time but the man told me that he believed the Chinese troops were going to summarily shoot the group of captured soldiers he was a part of before they continued south, rather than keep them as POWs.
Then, he says, a Chinese officer approached the group of captured Korean troops and asked if any of them spoke Japanese. My friend then began to have a conversation with this Chinese officer in Japanese. At this point in the story, my friend looked away from me, staring off into space, and recited the entire conversation he had with this officer in Japanese. Perhaps he has told this story a hundred times but I was interested in the fact that he recited the whole conversation to me in a language that he could not know that I did, in fact, understand. Essentially the conversation consisted of my new friend begging the officer not to kill him, the officer offering him a cigarette and assuring him that he was not going to let him and his friends get killed. He told my friend that he had gone to junior high school in Manchuria when it was the puppet state of 満州国, and had there learnt the Japanese language. The officer told him that they had both therefore, “suffered under the same Japanese rule.” Finally, my friend claims that the officer said that he really hated Mao Zedong. This, in my opinion, is the most implausible part of the story, for a number of reasons.
At any rate, after finishing his retelling, in Japanese, of the conversation he claims to have had with the officer, my friend switched back into Korean and told me the officer told the troops that were holding him and his friends (I don’t know how many there were of them) to release them, and continue moving south.
Hearing his perfect Japanese during the retelling of the conversation, I thought I could continue our conversation in Japanese, which I speak much better than Korean, but he didn’t seem understand anything I said in Japanese. It was as if the words in that conversation he had with the officer was the only Japanese he knew or still remembered. I asked him if he ever used Japanese after that encounter and he said, no, it was the last time he had spoken Japanese.
I was running out of time and had to get moving to find the Kangwon ilbo newspaper building so I couldn’t stay to ask him more about this story or other experiences but it was really wonderful to spend the hour or so with him on that bench outside the bookstore. Hearing this kind of story fills a student of history like me with excitement but it is so hard to know what to make of this kind of retelling. What can a historian do with this kind of material, if anything?
I really enjoyed an article I found by chance today about Twain’s attempts to narrate and justify his conduct during the US Civil War. From the closing paragraph:
My title, “Mark Twain, Traitor,” hails the Mark Twain who appears as such in his major work, whose text is constantly involved with the question of betrayal, of confused loyalties, not edifying us, giving us resolutions, just describing betrayal’s performance, its reasoning soliloquy. Huck guiltily betrays Uncle Jake in Tom Sawyer. and he desperately strives to betray Jim in Huckleberry Finn. “Mark Twain” is, of course, the key phrase in any letter of denunciation written for some police authority. Someone is not who he or she says he or she is. I report a Mark Twain whose post–Civil War nationalist identification is questionable, a Mark Twain at play with his progressive Unionist/Republican identification, at play with his reactionary Southern patrician identification, a Mark Twain who might be a double agent, or worse, a “free” agent, outside the rules of either comity, outside the several codes of honor, a marker, not the twain, not Southern, not Northern. I report a Mark Twain loose in his loyalties, Northern in his detestation of Southern moral turpitude, Southern in his contempt for the moral rectitude of the hypocritical Northeast, always an unreliable narrator, and for that reason always somewhere in rebellion, defying the positivities of both (particular) Confederacy and (universal) Union, their different disciplines. Mark that fellow. The name itself is a denunciation. How indeed did this transsectional Civil War rogue, migrant in all the sections of the country, never at home, always moving, become the principal icon of post–Civil War patriotic nationality? Mark Twain’s humor, William Dean Howells writes in My Mark Twain (1910), “is as simple in form and direct as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant” (118). I have no idea what this means. Mark Twain’s humor is never simple and direct. In 1901, telling his Civil War story at Lincoln Birthday Dinner, amid the patriotic pieties, Mark Twain would again directly address the question: why did you desert the Civil War? Why did he not fight for Abraham Lincoln’s noble cause? Great humorist that he is, he tells the truth. It was the weather, Mark Twain says in 1901. You never saw such weather (Mark Twain Speaking 382). (( Neil Schmitz “Mark Twain, Traitor” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 63.4 (2007) 34-35 ))
Stanford Law School professor and a key leader in the Creative Commons and the free culture movement has an absolutely amazing video summarizing in three clear and simple points why he is for Obama in this election. I couldn’t help nodding my head in agreement throughout. I have seen no better or closer articulation of the reasons why I support Obama in this election.
Lessig Video and Video Transcript
Super Tuesday brought mixed results and it looks like the primary contest will continue into March. HT to Kerim for the video link.
