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“Care the Brand, Share the Dream”: The New Words of China’s “Foreign” Brands

June 22, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

In China one often hears the lament that China has no great globally recognized brands. While China may be the world’s workshop, the absence of name brand products desired in international markets is seen as an indication of not having quite reached the next rung of the market capitalist developmental ladder. Chinese may make products, but don’t create great brands. This, of course, stands in stark opposition to the fervor with which China’s new wealthy classes snap up objects of […]

Categories: Consumption, Cosmopolitanism, Language • Tags: brands, China, Chinese brand names, fashion, name brand products

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Amanda, The Computerized Telemarketer Who Insisted She Was Human

January 14, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.”― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot I just had the strangest conversation with a telemarketer. Well, actually I’m not sure I can consider it a conversation—because I’m sure the telemarketer was not even human. It was an exchange that quickly turned into a kind of Turing test, with a […]

Categories: Cyborgs, Fakes and Forgeries, Language, Scripts • Tags: Issac Asimov, lifegivingmoments.com, robocalls, Sarah Palin, telemarketing, Turing test

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Marking Value with a Foreign Language Tattoo

September 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Something interesting happens when the linguistic sign gets the added value of being in another language. Language isn’t just the signifier/signified relationship of the word’s meaning, but also contains the added social value of the foreign language as it is read by others—no doubt indexing the owner’s global cosmopolitanism. Why tattoo “love” on your arm when you can tattoo amour or 愛? Love isn’t just the boring old “love” of English, but acquires the added bonus valence of French or the “artistic beauty” of the ideographic […]

Categories: Bodies, China, Language, Mystery Objects, Value • Tags: Chinese Character Tattoos, Chinese Tattoo, cosmopolitanism, foreign language, tattoos

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Tom Skype’s Sensitive Words: A Trove of Keywords for Contemporary China

March 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

In China, pretty much everyone knows that the Internet is heavily policed. The people know. The government knows the people know. The people know the government knows the people know. In fact, the “open secret” of the Great Firewall is surely an important part of the way censorship works in China. Precisely because people know Internet censorship exists, the party-state benefits from the efficiency of self-policing as a means of control rather than relying exclusively on external enforcement in real […]

Categories: China, Discipline, Internet, Language, Scripts, Surveillance • Tags: censorship, internet, language, sensitive words, Skype, technology, 敏感词

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