New media
I met with Lux Mean and Virak for lunch on the weekend to chat about weblogs.
Young Cambodians are glued to their phones. Perhaps some of this information will find its way onto weblogs via phone-to-blog: text, pictures, video. I wonder how this could be made easier? I think there is some important connection that needs to be made.
After a while, the talk turned to Khmer Unicode. When I first started blogging, it was not easy to blog in Khmer. If you wanted to participate in online discussion, you had to use English, or phonetic Khmer.
Now, with the growth of Khmer Unicode, there are some bloggers like Mungkol and Khmerbird who use Khmer quite frequently. (Who is heading up the Khmer Open Source project? A native Spanish speaker, Javier Sola.)
I’m excited that there is now a Khmer language blogosphere. Like other countries, (Malaysia, Thailand) there are both English and local language blogs. Now, Cambodians can talk directly to other Cambodians, in Khmer.
However Lux and Virak were more enthused about blogging in English. Why? Because it can connect their blogs to the outside world. After years of technicians striving to make Khmer Unicode available, we are still seeing strong interest in the use of English.
I think we are going to see a growing ‘digital divide’ over the next few years: those who can read and write Khmer/English, and those who are limited largely to one language. It’s a little amusing that some of the most enthusiastic advocates of Khmer Unicode / Open Source are foreigners!
One possible shortcut: video blogs allow a window into Cambodian life, and with audio MP3s can break the literacy barrier. But these are limited still by bandwidth.
Perhaps someday we will see an automatic translator for Khmer, like “Babelfish” or “Google Translation”. But it may be a while; there is simply no money for such a project. (I will expect to see online Indonesian or Thai first.)
Despite our enthusiasm, I must remember that 99.9% of the Khmer population does not read weblogs. They are not seen as a legitimate form of writing…yet.
Maybe someday I’ll see a motodop blogging his frustrations about the price of gas. Or a farmer complaining about the yearly harvest. But I still think we are a long way away from that level of participation by the Khmer population.
