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Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

So much for the new media...

...or the old media for that matter. Despite it being 2011, and having the world (or much of it) at my fingertips via the intertubes, it can still be surprisingly hard to find some sorts of information that you need.
Yesterday, while working from home, I kept hearing a very noisy helicopter buzzing overhead. Eventually I got curious enough to look, and I realised it must be a fire-fighting helicopter, as I'd seen pictures of these in Australia. I then realised that not only could I see the helicopter, I could see the location of the fire, and I could see flames! Hmmm! While this was on a reasonably distant hillside (perhaps five kilometres away), you learn to be quite sensitive to the issue of bushfires coming from Australia, particularly after the bad bushfires we had almost exactly two years ago today, in Victoria.
I could tell it wasn't a high fire-danger day, at least from what I am used to, because there was very little wind, but I do know how little rain there has been here since we moved almost six weeks ago, and I can see how dry the ground is, so that is not exactly reassuring.
So I got on the web, and found nothing (not even a skerrick of information) about a fire in the New Territories. I could find information about a bad fire they had here fifteen years ago in almost exactly the same spot, and even someone on a blog talking about how most fires here in Hong Kong are started from human carelessness. This is nothing new, though the specific cause is new to me, from people lighting incense and small fires as part of their respect for their ancestors.
I even got desperate enough for information, after exhausting all the English-media news sources I could find, to try and find a twitter feed that might tell me something, and I don't even UNDERSTAND twitter! Still nothing.
So last night we enjoyed an impressive view of quite a significant firefront creeping towards us down the hill, wondering if there was anything we really ought to know, but didn't.
                               ....
It's now morning, and the fire is still there, and the helicopters are back at work. The fire is still quite a distance away, but I still don't know anything more than I did last night.
So I have to ask the question? Is our new media environment all it is cracked up to be? Are we any better off than when gossip was our finest news source? Would I have found something if I spoke and read Cantonese?

I did (later) find this link to another source of fires, appropriate to the season, which is Lunar New Year fireworks.

1 comment:

  1. I think new media gives us far greater expectations that we can find information without actually talking to people - though then again I remember my sister running to the fire station to check the notice about where the fire was whenever we heard the fire siren as kids

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