Global Voices and Asia-focused blog The Rice Bowl both reported this week on the preponderance of Cambodian songs about social networking site Facebook, both apparently working from a post by Cambodian blogger Khmerbird (Santal Phin) in which he muses on the cultural impact of Facebook, both on and offline.
[You can follow the links to the songs, which are awesome. Sadly, the Global Voices and Rice Bowl folks seem to have overlooked that some of these are the same songs, simply rerecorded by different artists.]
In his original post on the phenomenon, Khmerbird professes his own slight social media dependency ("sometime we spend too much time on Facebook, I always warn myself 10 min per day on Facebook should be enough. I found I lied to myself all the time,") expresses a concern that the site will shut down ("someone told me Facebook will be closed on 15 March 2011. It is insane whatever the source come from,") and enthuses over the sharing of news that can be done socially ("I myself enjoy the news that have been shared via Social network. I rarely Google to find the latest update on any topic. I am using search engine of Social Media. The people that share the news is human Vs search engine that index the information by auto algorithm. It is like human and robot. I found more comfortable with the human.")
Now, this all mirrors discussion points I heard during a panel at Pannasastra University of Cambodia in January, where I was invited to speak about youth and popular culture. Students and faculty alike wanted to address, sure, the influence of globalized media and the relative lack of genuinely Cambodian-created media—but they got really excited when we got on the topic of Facebook.
Keep in mind that, according to socialbakers.com, only 1.76% of the population (of 14 million) is on Facebook, and those are mostly 18-24 year olds—primarily male. I generally work with women in this same age group, and among the student populations that I travel in, I can vouch for the site's popularity with them as well. (In fact, when the young women I originally worked with in 2007 first got accounts the next year or so, I was shocked. These young women grew up on rice farms, struggled against unbelievable odds to go to college largely in an effort to gain english language and computer literacy skills in an urban environment where electricity was likely if not always a given, and were pursuing two or three degrees at two or more universities. And what were they spending their time on? FarmVille.)
On the PUC panel, I was asked a couple of endearingly moralistic questions, which amounted to "Facebook: good or bad?"Of course I had to remind folks that these are businesses, and in a nation still in poverty, that matters. And I had to remind the trusting and delightful Cambodian folk that, you know, the information they put into the site was used by marketers to sell them more stuff, and that it was important to develop a critical vocabulary around that, so you learn when to share information and when not to.
But this was not very interesting, particularly not to my own adorable students, who constructed their final zine projects around certain kinds of popular culture in Cambodia. Chakriya's, above, focused on Facebook. "Internet has provide many website in Cambodia," she explains on page one, "but the most popular website is Facebook."
The advantages of Facebook are many, she writes in the zine. Among them: "Connecting student to organization," "company can advertise of the product," and—likely her personal favorite—"a perfect gateway for love to make a dating process." The disadvantages are outweighed, but worth noting: "weak eyesight," "waste a lot of money on internet" (many ISPs still charge by the hour), "availability of personal profile," and "chatting." This last was never explained but, basically, I agree that chatting is just plain old bad.
What Chakriya finds in her conclusion is that Facebook is OK, but we shouldn't waste too much time on it, or we won't be good students. Probably true.
But Facebook is having an interesting effect. Cambodians aren't using the site to organize so much (likely noting that neighbor Vietnam simply shuts it down when damaging news breaks), and yes, they're mostly using it to send moony messages to each other, and to me. But news gets shared and people write on each others' walls. In short, Facebook accounts are allowing some Cambodians to feel more connected to the rest of the world, and are giving literacy a sense of immediacy and vitality that, let's face it, state-controlled newspapers and books of aphorisms simply do not.
And the songs about the site? Well, some studies of copyright piracy in developing countries indicate that originality and creativity are achieved only after a period of mimicry and blatant theft. Cambodia's musical output has been stuck in that period for some time now—a few good songs get covered by most singers before showing up on a karaoke screen, and many are Khmerized versions of American pop tunes in the first place. It is possible that social-media-themed music offers Cambodians a near-perfect bridge between writing about love (sni sni) and thinking about the influence of media in their lives. And if an original or semi-original song about the website is all the rage, awesome. Or at least: better than wasting more time on FarmVille.
Of the delightful songs about the social media entity, here are a few titles, most listed in Cambodia Khmer Magazine, "a blog about something in Cambodia":
"Facebook friend! My girlfriend kicked me out!"
"Tear drop when surfing Facebook"
"Start having Facebook, love exists"
"Tear sent via Facebook"
"Facebook ends love"
"Suffered by Facebook"
"A Night With Facebook"
"Facebook waits love"
Sort of delightful, especially in comparison to the snarky homegrown songs about the same social networking site. (Although, here's a notable Chicago-bred exception.)
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