Media and activism

I fired up my news reader for the first time in three months and it promptly fetched me 582 headlines off 82 feeds. I hadn’t missed a single one all this while. Some serious pruning is in order.

We watched television last night. The dialogues were so dramatic, I couldn’t bear to keep looking. Real people never speak like that.

And then again, in KL Friday, I hung out with jhybeturtle and her friends, who speak to each other in English. Their accents were curious, so for a while I stopped listening to the conversation, listening to the sound of their voices instead.

You know what? It sounded exactly like a Hong Kong movie dubbed into English. Maybe not exactly the same for someone intimate with the accents, but my ear isn’t that tuned yet. Real people speak like that after all, it seems.

Jhybe and friends were making their (bi-?)weekly trip to the police station, having all been arrested for various acts of activism and subsequently released on bail. Including one person from the ASEAN summit protest I got pictures of. The station near Masjid Jamek looked remarkably like an Indian government office. One young officer gestured me aside and asked something in Malay. I didn’t understand. He tried again. “What is wrong with your friends?” I said I didn’t know. Jhybe turned around and asked what was up, at which he mumbled “nothing” and hurried away.

I have a video of their gender inequalities demonstration that I can host if they don’t mind it circulated. It’s a little under 40 MB; about 4 minutes. Jhybe?

Later in the evening, Dennis, who is trying to make a career out of activism, asked if I was an activist too. I said I would have been, but I don’t have a cause. There are things that bother me, like the state of mass media (including blogs pining mass reach) and their role in (mis)education, but I’m far too lost making sense of the landscape to be any sort of activist. The best I can do is hang out with them and understand their concerns.