An elderly man sits on the ground on the side of a dirt road and types on a laptop. YouTube logos top the 4G plan ads along the roadsides, as if Google sponsored the major highways here. Cell networks are surprisingly decent here compared to other developing nations I’ve visited in Asia. People are starting new businesses and taking up new hobbies, but censorship runs deep and internet adoption is sporadic. Some observations of Cambodia:
At a computer lab at a foreign-funded after-school center, 400 children learn basic computing skills every 6 months. Due to lack of time, they don’t get much deeper than the basics of MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but I pointed the teacher to the Kahn Academy and explained that there is a lot of good free educational content online. We had a conversation about what should come first: “computing skills (MS suite)” or “internet skills (Chrome+Google).” I argued for the latter – my kids’ first computer was a Chromebook – but he had never looked at it that way and perhaps didn’t know how that would lead to marketable skills for his students. I pointed out that at least that way the ESL children could listen to more native English speakers on YouTube or khanacademy.org. He seemed unconvinced but interested to see if things were really free.
A YouTube power user nestled a tech rig among rural rice paddies. This twenty year old lives in a traditional stilted house in rural Cambodia. Like all farmers we met in the country here, his house is prepared for the annual floods by situating the floor a couple meters above ground, and they are surrounded by their family farm. Unlike some others, his house is on the electrical grid so he has enough electricity to power a laptop and speaker system. He proudly shows me a slick korean cell phone with HD cameras and his YouTube channel, replete with dozens of videos of him and his band playing traditional Cambodian music on xylophones. The family puts his cheap Singaporean laptop and speakers into service to play pop music, and he laments that the machine is too underpowered to do video editing very well.
On Christmas night, we bump into a tuk-tuk driver with a karaoke party coach. He pulls an android tablet off the handlebars, turns on the data connection, opens YouTube and tells us to pull up any song we like. After the six of us sit down in the two facing bench seats, he hands us microphones and we drive off with lights flashing and music blaring. I guess 4G is good enough here for the enterprising entrepreneur to drive tourists in style!
But be careful what you say online! The locals told me that if you criticize the government you can get your accounts shut down, or worse. One guide’s friends will travel to other countries like South Korea to speak up about the Cambodian government. While the internet may be lauded in the west as a fountainhead of democracy, it need not be all that. Fear tactics can go a long way, as every terrorist and totalitarian regime knows. Here, the internet is becoming a tool for commerce and education, with free speech and access to media easily put aside by a communist state.
