Trawling through the Twittersphere late into the wee hours of the morning, I had come across a New York Times article which highlighted the initiative started by the Swedish Ministry of Culture that culminated in the @sweden account. For those that don’t know, @sweden is an attempt by the ministry to showcase ordinary Swedish citizens to the world. Every week, a different Swede is selected to represent his/her country. The account is completely unscripted, uncensored and at times brutally raw. For example the last @sweden, Sonja, talked about her lack of understanding of Jews, breast folding and her pictures of a hungry man with AIDS. I thought it was brilliant, obviously, because there was no attempt to refine the image for mass or worldwide consumption. Simply put, this was the real Sweden with a variety of views that may or may not offend but one thing for certain was that the Swedish people were not going to attempt to hide who they really are.
I think I started @bangkoking in hopes of emulating the candid nature of the Swedish people. We too will have a different Bangkok resident on every week espousing whatever their views are! There are just two rules, no politics and no pornography. Pornography should be fairly self explanatory since it breaks Twitter’s house rules and politics because 96 people have died in the last three years here because of it, we don’t need to add fuel to the fire. Other than that everything goes.
I think when you create an account like this the one thing you have to understand is that all these views represented is that of one individual. While they offer insight to the thinking of ordinary Swedes (or Thais), people speak for themselves and hardly the whole country. I think too often because of mass media, we tend to homogenize entire populations into neatly consumable identities that are anything but the truth. We apply labels where labels shouldn’t be applied and we see things in black and white when the beauty of life lies in the varying shades of grey.
Recently here in Bangkok we have had various arbiters of Thai “culture” try to tell us what is rightfully Thai and what should be regarded as the rot and pestilence that threatens to consume our culture from within. It seems everyone from judges of talent shows to the Ministry of Culture has a consistent view of what Thailand is, as if Thailand is this homogenized entity. I think a lot of problems here stem from the assumption that we are all the same and that this label of “culture” applies to us all. I hope @bangkoking goes some way in showing how unique we are, how different we are and that these differences should not be a cause for concern but one for celebration. I hope we get weird people, different people, I want these arbiters to see that just because we are different, just because they don’t understand it doesn’t mean we’re bad, I want them to see that the wacky, the unique and the wild is what makes us truly great.
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Cod Satrusayang is a part-time dragon slayer, part-time writer. When he’s not off defending fair maidens and tangling with mystical beasts he visits reality (never a permanent stay) where he writes for a living.
