每日电讯报博客：Why internet polls are silly but fascinating

空气稀薄

Why internet polls are silly… but fascinating
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100032818/why-internet-polls-are-silly-but-fascinating/

Peter Foster
Peter Foster moved to Beijing in March 2009. He was formerly the Daily Telegraph's South Asia Correspondent based New Delhi from 2004-2008. He is married with three children.


The Chinese web is abuzz with an internet-based poll being run by TIME magazine to find 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. [Details here]

China’s army of 380m ‘netizens’ are currently rallying round the cause of Han Han, a 27-year-old novelist, controversialist and hyper-popular blogger who attracts millions of hits for his posts taking on some of more high profile examples of corruption and stupidity from the Chinese super-state.

Recent battles taken on by Han Han include the row over Green Dam internet monitoring software – on which the government backed down last year – as well as more trivial matters, such as coming out and saying that the state-backed biopic of Confucius (recently eclipsed by Avatar in China) was a turkey.

Anyway, Han Han is now (time of writing 17.00hrs Beijing April 6) ranked as the ninth most influential person on the planet in 2010, which is two places higher than he was at lunchtime.

I, like millions of Chinese, am an admirer of Han Han’s but I suspect that it might be stretching it a bit to describe him as the 9th most influential person in 2010, since I suspect that almost no-one outside the China-watching community has ever heard of him in Europe, India, or America north and south.

He’s currently ranked as more influential than Barack Obama (15), Apple’s Steve Jobs (49), Tiger Woods (64), Bo Xilai (90) [He’s the Communist Party Secretary of Chongqing who’s been winning plaudits for his anti-corruption campaign], the US top general in Afghanistan Stanley McChrystal (137) Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu (142) and Ben Bernanke, the Fed Chairman who was 2009’s Time Person of the Year, currently scraping along at 146.

Of course, this is a roundabout way of saying that internet polls don’t tell us much – like that dreadful New7Wonders thing that was around a couple of years back which narrowly missed including the Taj Mahal until India’s netizens were mobilized.

It’s not surprising perhaps that Indian cricket god Sachin Tendulkar and Bollywood badboy Shah Rukh Khan are at 6 and 7 respectively, even though Bollywood doesn’t travel much outside India and its diaspora and cricket isn’t big in China.

Most hilarious of all is the fact that the second most influential person (after Lady Gaga) is Yu-Na Kim, the woman who won South Korea’s first ever figure skating gold medal at the last Winter Olympics, which says it all really.

Of course, however silly and skewed these polls are, they can still tell you something interesting – Liu Xiaobo, the Charter 08 dissident recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize after receiving an 11 year jail term for his pro-democracy activities – is ranked 40, two places higher than he was this lunchtime, which suggests someone’s got a campaign up for him too.

There is another interesting thing which, for my money, these polls reveal, which is how culturally disconnected much of our ‘global’ world still is – really famous people in China or India can still be pretty well unknown in the West, and vice-versa.

I never forget being on an assignment in Afghanistan in 2001 and bouncing through Panshir Valley listening to my ipod, when my translator (an urbane Afghani who was training to be a doctor) asked what I was listening to.

I thought I’d bypass the truth – it was in fact the Irish-American rapper Erik Schrody aka Whitey Ford (Everlast) – and go for something a bit more accessible. So I said, it was Western music, “like the Rolling Stones?” He looked blank. “you know, like the Beatles…?” Still blank. “Madonna?” Blanker still, he replied. “Like Beethoven, you mean?”

Sometimes the world isn’t as flat as people in the West make out.

magicboy

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