Online Voices of Taiwan’s Expat Community

As his PhD students lower their heads to study that day’s reading, “Teacher Michael Turton” cannot wait any longer... Picking up a pen, he starts scribbling notes for that evening’s blog entry, shuffling and prioritizing headings, until he is happy with the order of his stories. Turton writes early in the morning and often again, late at night, but admits that sometimes he just can't control the inner-talk, urging him to “get at it” when there is a big issue cooking. The “big issue” for that particular day, was a connection between Betelnut Stores and illegally shipped Japanese brand cigarettes, research that Turton and University colleagues had been collecting for months. He chuckled when it was put to him that “Blogger Michael” may be the reason why he is yet to complete his own PhD.

Turton (from Cleveland, USA) never suffers from writer’s block. In any week he has at least 15 stories in mind and says, “the real question is when am I going to find time to put this post up…” Turton’s online creation, “The View from Taiwan” which covers Taiwan politics and closely related issues has, without doubt, become the most frequently visited English language blog in Taiwan. It has been read and analyzed not only by the public, but also the political elite from both Taiwan and abroad and has daily statistics of up to 1100 unique visitors.

If politics is not to your liking and you are in need of a little linguistic guidance, head over to a blog titled “Doubting to Shuo” written by Mark Wilbur (from Boulder, USA).



Here you will find extensive information about learning the Mandarin language, particularly from a Taiwan and technology perspective. At the other end of the scale is (Vancouver Island, Canadian born) “Scott Sommers’ Taiwan Weblog”, a blog about teaching and education issues in Taiwan. Still, if both politics and education are out, then you are sure to find something of interest with “David on Formosa.”  Here, David Reid (from Melbourne, Australia) deals with almost anything of popular interest.

 
    Blog by Michael Turton at  http://michaelturton.blogspot.com

Blogs, blogs and more blogs... You can now find Taiwan blogs on subjects as diverse as photography, fashion, martial arts and herbal medicine, all written by native English speakers and long time residents of Taiwan. Maybe you have contemplated, “I can do that, I want to start a blog.”  As you will hear from our interviews, being an expatriate blogger is far from a breeze. Our long-term English language bloggers are not only passionate about writing, being people who can easily tap off, from Monday to Friday, around 700 words a day, they are also people who have had to constantly question their motives, assumptions, ideals and balance these with the fact they live in a culture that is substantially different to where they originated from...

If you want to blog, be prepared for both rejection and ignorance. On one hand, speaking out is not always appreciated and on the other, the issues that interest you, may not be covered by mainstream Taiwanese media at all. For those who really want to become successful bloggers, get used to sailing in a cyber galaxy where writers often feel very much alone, as well as occasionally sailing in dangerously crowded harbors, where you will need to dodge your way through a maze of unfamiliar behavior and cultural sensitivities. Either way “foreign bloggers” interviewed, describe feelings and situations where they are seldom one hundred percent certain about what their position is on a multitude of different issues. Here, Taiwan’s leading English language bloggers discuss their personal experiences in these areas.

More Savvy than “The Old Homepage”

Welcome to the world of ‘Web 2.0’. In case you had somehow passed the link on this, Web 2.0 is the name for a “second generation”, or at least “more advanced” set of technologies, that use the internet. These include utilities and web coding that allow people to more easily podcast (broadcast) audio, create wikis (online content that anyone can later modify) and publicly express themselves in a variety of other formats. The most prominent of these new forms of expression, is the act of “blogging.”

Not long after the internet went public in the mid-1990’s, it became common for the more technically savvy to produce “personal home pages”, essentially a series of html pages, linked together and including occasional graphics or pictures. Blogging is something quite different. Its appeal and huge growth has been because very little technical skill is required. Blog site templates are ready-made and can easily be modified to personal taste. In addition, blogging allows visitors to leave comments, which can (if desired by the blog owner) appear as live uncensored feedback.

Asked how our Taiwan bloggers found the geeky side of their craft, each had a very different story to tell. Turton started online in 1996 with a personal homepage containing pictures that he had been taking around Taiwan. Together with a 2001 personal blog made by Taipei creative talent “Poagao”, Turton is recognized as being one of the pioneers in the area of expatriate online expression. His blog also links to dozens of other blogs that deal with a multitude of Taiwan topics. “When I first opened the blog, I went out on the internet looking for who was the centre of the blog, where was the Taiwan blogisphere”... “I didn’t find it, so I decided to become that... That’s why I link to so many other people in Taiwan”, says Turton from his home in Taichung.

He recalls that his first year on the internet was with a “very prosaic picture site, very day-to-day Taiwan, not stereotypical at all and people loved it.” Soon his email inbox filled with dozens of greetings from Taiwanese-Americans, saying how much they enjoyed looking at the pictures, remembering their “old life.” By then Turton had started to include comments about Taiwan politics and jokingly admits that he sometimes received emails instructing him to, “stop talking about politics and just put up more pictures.” Perhaps fate had its way when, the U.S internet company he had been using “disappeared”, providing no forwarding URL, losing Turton thousands of regular visitors. It was at that point, in February 2005, when he moved his political thoughts over to the ready-made templates the blogging services provided. Turton can probably be considered average when looking at the technical capacity of bloggers, occasionally experimenting with whatever is new.

At the other extreme is Scott Sommers, who started blogging in early 2003, “I cannot understate how technically illiterate I am, I use a paid service called TypePad which is extremely user-friendly ... as for personal homepages, I found them far too difficult” Sommers said from his home in Taipei. He later revealed that the sole reason why there are no pictures on his blog (about Education in Taiwan) is because he finds the entire upload and cropping system too time consuming, adding that most blogging services can still go a long way to make the process more streamlined for people like him. At the high-tech end is self confessed geek Mark Wilbur, who writes about studying Mandarin in Tawian. Wilbur comes from a background in computer sciences, having first latched onto PCs in the early 1990's. He started blogging (then in the US ) in 1998, after being constantly annoyed at inaccurate reporting of I.T issues, and finding a need for more people inside the industry to produce their own news. After moving to Taiwan, Wilbur developed his blog to help people learning Mandarin. He agrees that the structure of blogging, including its often locked use of templates, can be restrictive or too time-consuming for some people. It was for this reason that he decided to use his own domain with customized layouts. In this manner, we see a return to something like a personal homepage, but with various add-ons that allow blog-like interactivity. David Reid (like Turton) started with a personal homepage put together in 2000, later migrating to the blogosphere in 2005. Reid articulates, “I don't see that there has been a huge change from when we were doing personal homepages... Back then we were still linking to each other and creating little networks... but with blogging, it became easier and faster for most people to create content… This is the real change.”

    Blog by Mark Wilbur at  http://toshuo.com

Speaking Loud in Public

Despite origins and differences in technical ability, the end result is a type of collaboration and a new sense of expatriate community, albeit cyber-community. People in all age groups, have become involved in online communities, blogging being a primary part of this. A major motivation is the necessity to stay connected in a world where information and communication is vital to advance career goals, enhance business services, meet similarly minded people and other activities. At the expatriate level, blogging often involves a constant comparison between the standards and customs a writer has become used to in their homeland and how these compare to their adopted land. Along the way, there are also concepts of assimilation, cultural understanding and tolerance. These aspects, mixed with the fact that many online interactions are also being viewed by English literate Taiwanese, can be a recipe for substantial misunderstanding and contention. At the same time, only a fool would want to disregard the role that blogging has taken as a tool for social development and in this regard, a brief look at overseas/foreign reporting in general, shows many fascinating connections between the traditional Journalist and the blogger...

Professional ‘correspondent’ reporters are known to take risks. Many of these “risks” can be as simple as making an observatory statement. No matter how objective or balanced the statement may be, in an open and fully democratic society, people are quite entitled to disagree. Yet, when easily recognizable “foreigners” speak “too loud” or openly, they sometimes place themselves in positions of conflict or even danger. During personal interviews with Taiwan’s English language bloggers, it became apparent that many problems which face the professional correspondent, also face the part-time, expatriate blogger. For instance, in a region like Taiwan, where people are often very staunch about political identity, being either “loudly green” or “loudly blue” can be enough to get you into very deep water. Generally, Taiwan, being a small island and a, “unsure, could-be, perhaps, maybe country”, is not that different when considering daily issues that linger in peoples minds. Concerns about education, health and quality of life are much the same throughout Asia as elsewhere. However, the way in which certain people express disagreement can cause problems, particularly from the perspective of the average North American blogger, who cherishes nationally enshrined ideals of free speech and democracy. What bloggers see as “free speech” can be dishearteningly viewed by others as “causing trouble.” Turton, Sommers and Wilbur all relate how they have been either “threatened”, “abused” or “felt intimidated” at some point during the time they have been blogging, either in soft or hard attempts to impose limitations on what they have been trying to talk about.

Michael Turton details, “I’ve put up posts (on issues) because I don’t know what’s going on... I just discuss some phenomenon in a soft controversial way and people will get on the blog and threaten me...” A few years ago, Turton decided to stop publishing pictures of his family, after obscene threats were made. He recalled how the issue had been very long and contentious, but had absolutely no relationship or connection to his family… “Nonetheless, this person took the disagreement to an absurd personal level,” causing him to reconsider the security of his family. Asked whether he takes threats seriously, he could not give an exact answer, “...Well, you never know what’s going to happen, because it would be very easy to figure out where I live... You’ve gotta be cautious, it’s a small country and everyone knows everyone and you never really know who you are talking to, so...” Turton now moderates all feedback on his blog and has studied various Journalistic methods in order to protect himself.

Scott Sommers has also had brushes with hostility, “…sometimes the hostile feedback bothers me, it bothers me a lot for a while and then it disappears; I have had feedback that is intended to intimidate me.” Interestingly he says, “none of the negative feedback I have received has come from Taiwanese people, even though the majority of my visitors come from Taiwan … The negatives are usually made by either native English speakers in Taiwan or abroad.” Sommers says that some feedback has made him realize the importance of his work, such as a few years ago when he wrote a series of original investigative articles on unaccredited schools, “I received a series of very directly worded emails asking me for more and more sourced information... Although they were not intimidating, I remember it as being a turning point in my writing, as it made me realize that people were interested in what I had to say.” However, Sommers concludes, “I know there are some other bloggers in Taiwan who are concerned about their jobs and what they write about..”

Mark Wilbur has even received hostile criticism at the high-tech end… “Once I wrote a review about a Chinese learning site; at the time the site had many bugs to sort out, so my initial review wasn’t all that positive... The next day you should have seen my inbox... I had no idea how they figured out what house I live in, when I finished high school and all the information they dug up on me...” … “Basically they were trying to say I had no right to talk about this thing, but it was only a review of a language learning service…” ... “It made me feel somewhat disappointed that people can get so much into something, when really it was no big deal.” However, to reveal again the frequent and strange inconsistencies of the blogosphere, Wilbur recalls how the emails were not from the owners of the site, rather extremist elements who had other agendas. In terms of personal editorial guidance, Wilbur says “if it’s a personal entry and I’m writing about my experiences, my own life, then I will pretty much tell it how I see it... But if it’s a broader issue affecting other people, I would be more reluctant to take a strong stand, especially on local issues...”  

Observing political commentary, David Reid says, “People here are very passionate about their politics and in Taiwan, the English language blogisphere is mainly very green” ... “If people were to only read the English blogs, they may not get a wide range of viewpoints and that can be a problem for some people.” Reid says that, “generally, I don’t find blogging scary, but I think you have to have a sense of responsibility, check your facts, be aware that somebody might be offended and most of all, know that people do read what is being written; if you get something wrong, they are going to call you on it.” He continues, “I rarely get any negative feedback, in fact I can’t even remember anything really negative, only sometimes comments that I will strongly disagree with.” Thoughtfully, he later added, “you’ve got to be careful about what you put into the public domain and what should be kept private, but remember, this is about any type of expression....”

Traditional Media Versus You

Blogging brings many challenges to many people, from the technology involved, to the values and opinions that bloggers have and write about. Then there is how they are received by the larger community as ideas of free speech and a new form of mediated expression. Until very recently there has been a touchy, tussle-like relationship between the world of blogging and traditional mass media. This applies to Taiwan as much as every country with established internet and media systems. In true blogger fashion, Turton and Sommers paint a picture of Taiwan Journalism as an elitist fashion activity, where media starlets prance around in high heels, reporting anything they are told by Public Relations people, rather than being truly interested in digging deeper to find a meaningful and original story. They were particularly critical of television, saying that when there is apparent depth, it is often “misrepresentation”, “fabrication” or “deception” and that the marriage connection between many TV figures and politicians, in the words of Turton, “especially sucks.” He complained, “They are also very Taiwan centric, but not in a good way, they rarely put Taiwan in a context that’s useful for locals to understand how they relate to the world.” Sommers, who covers Taiwan education, says, “Mainstream media doesn’t attempt to understand the complexity of Taiwan education which has a very complicated character from the major historical periods of martial law and now, post martial law.” When comparing media practice, Reid details how, “bloggers don’t have the same constraints as traditional media, we don’t have to deal with deadlines, style issues, we have a lot more freedom in what we can write about and we decide what is newsworthy, not some godlike editor”... Still, Reid reiterates on what other bloggers say by adding, “there is a big problem with media bias in Taiwan and most of the main TV stations are very blue.”

These are all common criticisms held by bloggers against mainstream media, from both Taiwan and abroad. In return, it is not surprising that mainstream media have attacked blogging at its weakest points. Comments that blogs are usually poorly written, hyper-opinionated and produced by self-important amateurs have sometimes not been far from the truth. When blogs first started to emerge as channels of news, bloggers were heavily criticized for their ignorance of basic ethics and total disregard for editorial function. Yet over a very short period of time, bloggers who simply wanted to create a sensation, found themselves on the outside of the blogesphere and in a situation where editorial responsibility did actually exist; - through the harsh and instant live feedback received whenever their untruths or inaccuracies were uploaded. Blogging is almost a complete reversal of mainstream media, where stories are written and then edited before publication. In the blogosphere, stories are published and then, if need be, edited though interactive criticism. As for ethics, our bloggers pointed out that, some of the mainstream media in Taiwan and elsewhere are hardly in a position to boast, with a history that consists of, among other media crimes, the most hideous invasions of privacy.


    Blog by Scott Sommers at  http://scottsommers.blogs.com

As blogs have grown older (many have now been up for over four years) and their writers have become more experienced, newspaper sales and TV viewers have dwindled. The “big boys” of the media world have also seen bloggers out-scoop them on hundreds of occasions. In a sense, this is hardly rocket science… A huge newspaper such as the New York Times, with almost 400 Journalists, cannot possibly compete with the eyes and PC's of an entire nation. Therefore, large papers have more recently tried to integrate what they see as “citizen journalism” into the day-to-day news gathering process. Interestingly, the term “citizen journalism” comes from a time when people started producing citizen made documentaries in the 1970’s, upon the development of lightweight film cameras. In the same manner, blogging allows an opportunity for everyone to become a Journalist. With substantial press-media acceptance, other mass media are now starting to re-think about blogging, using a range of terms such as “participatory journalism”, “grassroots reporting” and “annotative reporting”. Even more substantial is the fact that, where previously, bloggers fed off the content of mainstream media, we now see mainstream frequently feeding off bloggers for story ideas and leads. For example, Turton criticizes the mainstream as being biased and says it is both difficult and sometimes boring to keep questioning their output. One solution around this is to use fresh academic research, such as his story about the connection between Betelnut stores and illegal cigarette selling. “The academic stuff that comes out of Taiwan is usually very good, so I want to find new ways of integrating original content like that,” says Turton excitedly.

There are strong signs that the issues and topics expatriate bloggers write about in Taiwan, are increasingly being taken seriously by external media outlets... As Sommers details, “Sometimes I have written posts that have attracted international attention… One was on children of foreign residents in Taiwan, that was picked up by several major linguistic programs; likewise my work on accreditation of Taiwanese Universities, which was mentioned on some large pro-democrat websites in California .”  Turton has also been contacted by two US government departments, asking for more information about things he had written about. Although specific details were not given, they were related to research on foreign policy. At a much lighter level, David Reid says he gets a lot of international contact when he covers popular cultural stories, such as the University Cosplay Competitions, the recent Betelnut Beauty Exhibition and surprisingly, the Taiwan High Speed Rail, from train enthusiasts around the world. Reid says there is also considerable attention from people who want translated information on Taiwan produced movies, “...these are not heavily promoted in the West, even though many find their way to Western audiences, through legal and illegal (internet) channels,” he says.


    Blog by David Reid at  http://blog.taiwan-guide.org

A Report Card on Taiwan

The challenges that bloggers make to traditional mainstream media, are similar to those they make to various community values, the world over. Although recognition from mainstream media is welcomed by bloggers, this recognition pales when compared to the much larger impact the voices of bloggers are making on some communities. Media come and go, but communities “stay” and bloggers see themselves equally as “part” of the community and a voice of free speech “for” the community, even if a community is sometimes not receptive to what is being written. In many countries, bloggers are changing long outdated concepts of “free speech” and “appropriate behavior” in the media and in the wider community. Our bloggers are not only passionate about communicating their subjects, but also about free expression and more open discussion and debate.

For example, Michael Turton noted that he has recently become concerned about statements from various Asian politicians, who proclaim Singapore as an ideal model to follow for future social development. In fact, Singapore ranks very poorly in terms of freedom of speech. There is no doubt legitimacy in Turton’s concerns… A society without freedom of speech equals a society without freedom of expression. Without freedom of expression and open, honest debate, any society is doomed to suffer the same fate as nations that have eventually become totally corrupted and crumbled to the ground. History teaches us many lessons, if we are simply allowed to read them, but without freedom of expression, we read nothing - and repeatedly make the same mistakes. As many scholars from Taiwan have written, Taiwan is still a “new and fragile democracy”, where freedom of expression is, even after 20 years of democratic government, still a concept to get “used to.” Witness the various degrees of feedback our bloggers have received, as testimony to this. Do you still want to be a successful expatriate blogger? Bloggers like Turton, Sommers, Reid and Wilbur have sometimes written at a very personal cost. In view of our discussions, it is clear that our successful English language bloggers have made, and continue to make, a very positive contribution to Taiwan, as they push old boundaries of what “is” and “isn’t” acceptable.

A major test for a society’s level of democracy is the ability of its citizens and residents to express political and other personal beliefs without fear of reprisal, either personally or politically. At this point in history, it appears that our expatriate bloggers have not been muzzled. On the contrary, they have been generally well received. This extends to various levels of respect from local Taiwanese citizens and officials, some of whom are frequent readers of the material being written. Whether Taiwan can still be classified as a “fragile” or “developing” democracy is a hot issue. However, for the most part, the acceptance of these writers is at the same level they have experienced in their originating countries. This can only be a good sign.