Chatting face-to-face 12,000 miles away Chatting face-to-face 12,000 miles away (September 09, 2005)

by Jeb Bing

I'm always amazed at the rapid changes in communications technology, including one I just bought into that now allows us to "instant message" by interactive voice and video as well as by what I have long done by keyboarding. Here I am sitting in my kitchen with a miniature microphone/camera combination atop an Apple iBook G4 and talking and seeing my son Chris as if he's at the other end of the table. The fact is that Chris is studying Chinese at a university in Kunming, China, about 1,000 miles from Beijing and virtually on the other side of the globe from Pleasanton. Sitting in his dorm room with the same equipment and on a wireless server, and with both of us signed on to Apple's trademarked iChat system, the video images are as smooth as on TV with none of the jerkiness of those days when embedded reporters beamed their messages by satellite uplink back to our television screens. Even the sound on iChat comes across in almost perfect synchronization, not a fraction of a second later that we still have in global satellite communications.

I also marvel at how times have changed in international conversations, especially from China. We talked about Tibet, about Chinese President Hu Jintao's apparent snub by President Bush in his upcoming visit to Washington, where Hu will be honored at a luncheon, but not a state dinner, and about how the news on the 30 cable channels Chris receives on his dormitory television set still toe the Communist Party line. There are no CNN or Fox News channel 24-hour news equivalents, which is why most of the air-time is filled with soaps and movies, including about two American shows a day. Despite the continued censorship of broadcast news, the abundant coffee shops and newsstands around Kunming sell the same copies of the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Time Magazine and the Economist as you can find and read here. Of course, with few people in Kunming who speak English outside of the college crowds, it's mostly the Westerners who buy those publications.

Chris, who reads the online edition of the New York Times (and also the Pleasanton Weekly), says it's interesting to follow the somewhat left-of-center, frequently anti-Bush columns and editorials in the Times, and then tune in the one English language channel in his cable selection. It's like two different worlds. The Chinese newscasters, reading from their approved scripts, can't say enough good things about their ally and compatriot, the United States and President Bush. At the same time the New York Times is blaming Bush and his administration for the failure to move quickly to help Hurricane Katrina victims, the Chinese are praising Bush for doing a god job in addressing major problems. "Look, a disaster struck," Chris quotes one newscaster while images of a flooded New Orleans appear on the screen. "Isn't it great how the U.S. government is helping all the people deal with it?"

As for the meeting between Hu and Bush, which has been delayed at least until today because of the hurricane relief effort, the Chinese news programs don't see the luncheon as a snub, but as a top-level meeting between two world leaders. If they know that most other leaders sit with the U.S. president at formal evening dinners in the White House, they're not reporting it. Chris and I will do some more "iChat-ing" (a new verb?) tonight to talk about - face-to-face - how the visit went.

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