Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

It recently dawned on me that it must be time to celebrate the 10th anniversary of “Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog.” Then I checked and realized that I began writing this blog in 2010.

So, it’s been 11 years. Happy 11th birthday, Le Minh Khai!!

In any case, on the occasion of this not-so-important date, I have been thinking about what has changed over the past decade in relation to this blog.

In particular, I asked myself what I expected when I started to write the blog, and what unexpected things have happened over the course of the decade.

In no particular order, here is what I came up with.

When I started this blog 11 years ago, I did so assuming that it was something that many other professors would soon be doing as well in one form or another. After all, we have entered a new age of communication, and the Internet is where that communication takes place.

And when I started making videos, I assumed that before long other professors would, if not make videos, at least have videos of talks/lectures/interviews online. After all, YouTube is a major component of this new age of communication.

With the presence of all of this information online, I pictured, for instance, a scenario where a prof/teacher would be able to assign a blog post by one prof and a video by another on the same topic and then students would be able to discuss the different ideas in class.

Alas, 11 years later, that has definitely not been the case.

There are a few exceptions, like Jason Gibb’s (not officially a prof but, come on. . .) Vietnamese music-focused blog (http://taybui.blogspot.com/), Tuan Hoang’s blog on Vietnam-related scholarly issues (https://tuannyriver.com/), and Jonathan Saha’s Colonizing Animals (https://colonizinganimals.blog/).

But in general, most profs have stayed far away from the Internet, so it’s about as difficult today to piece together that imagined blog post and video for a class discussion as it was 11 years ago.

I started writing this blog under the pseudonym “Le Minh Khai” out of an awareness that some of the things I was writing about had the potential to surprise some people.

It’s getting hard to imagine this now, but 11 years ago, simply talking about the ways in which the Vietnamese nation is a modern construct (like all other nations) was enough to ignite a cyber-war.

I started writing this blog right around the time that Facebook was getting popular in Vietnam, and in those early years, the Vietnamese Facebook-sphere would launch from one “scandal” to another, almost weekly, where some poor soul would be criticized endlessly for having made some comment or having done something that other people didn’t like.

That happened to Le Minh Khai a couple of times, and there were a couple of critical editorials in the newspaper Nhan Dan, but these days I don’t think anyone gets “shocked” by this blog.

That points to changes that have taken place as people have become exposed to more and more ideas, and it also probably points to information overload as well.

“Le Minh Khai said what? . . . Hey, check out this cat-in-a-spacesuit meme. It’s so funny!!”

At the beginning stage of writing this blog I quickly became aware that I had to pay attention to not only what I put online (the content) but how I presented it as well.

Of course, the blog format limits to some extent what one can do, nonetheless, there are things that one can do to try to make a blog post look appealing, and it quickly became obvious to me that this was something I needed to consider.

What I didn’t see coming, however, was how much and how quickly the visual/design side of things would transform and come to dominate the Internet.

Behind every cultural change is often some technological or business innovation, and over the past decade, there have been certain such developments that have been extremely influential.

Adobe’s decision in 2013 to change from selling individual pieces of software to offering a cloud subscription (at various levels of affordability) to all of its products is one.

Beyond Adobe, there are many other companies that now offer free, or freemium or affordable versions of their products.

This has opened up all kinds of creative possibilities to tons of people around the world, and those people learn from YouTube and subscription sites like Skillshare and Udemy, both of which were founded in 2010.

As more and more people have become proficient in using the various tools for creating digital media, they have gotten better at what they do, and everyone’s visual tastes and preferences have gotten ever more sophisticated.

So, a video with no cool and artful motion graphics that have all been stylized to provide a particular feel? That’s not going to be effective now, whereas simply having a video was good enough a decade ago.

While the visuals on this site are pretty random and are the result of my experimentation, the websites under the Urbanist Network in Vietnam, like Saigoneer (https://saigoneer.com/), are doing a really good job of producing intellectually and visually appealing content.

That’s now the norm, but it wasn’t a decade ago.

11 years ago, the world of History that I was in was pretty active. Things seemed to be going ok. But then a lot of things started to head south.

In the US, for instance, the number of people majoring in History at the undergraduate level went down by about 50%, and senior profs “delayed retirement.” Not surprisingly, given those developments, the number of jobs for young people went into a nosedive.

Meanwhile, as the digital revolution picked up speed (with the developments mentioned above), Historians continued to stand firm by their black print on white paper/screens. . . and to write articles and books that fewer and fewer people read (myself definitely included).

While I think I was still able to make a case for the History field 11 years ago, I definitely can’t do that now. There are so many skills and things that one needs to know to thrive in the world today, and studying History does not equip one with those skills or knowledge.

As for the knowledge that professional historians produce, too much of it only speaks to the interests of a tiny group of fellow historians and ends up in traditional print media which fewer people read.

So, as I see it, the History profession is now kind of like a secret kids’ club where some friends get together in a bedroom, write some indecipherable code on scraps of paper, and then seal those pieces of paper in a box that they hide in the back of the closet.

It’s a fun game for the kids involved, and how awesome it is for those who get paid to play it, but. . .

A year ago, I decided that it was time to start making general history videos about Southeast Asian history.

I have been slow to do so as I’ve needed to upgrade my skills and knowledge (particularly motion graphics) to be able to make videos in the way that I want them to look.

However, the response that I see on YouTube is positive in that I can see that there is an actual audience for such videos.

Indeed, while I think that the History profession is willfully marching down a dead-end road to obscurity, people still like history, and there is definitely a need for people who know about history to be able to communicate their knowledge in ways that make sense in our current age.

It is also really interesting to see the “pushback” that I get in some of the comments. On the one hand, it shows me that Malay/Philippine, etc. nationalism is alive and well, and on the other hand it also shows me that there are some things I’m saying that don’t make sense, and I’m just saying them because they are the things my profs (or other profs) have said.

As I’m writing these comments in the summer of 2021, the world of online communication is abuzz after Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, declared in a public statement that “Instagram is no longer just a photo-sharing app.”

In making this statement, Mosseri signaled that Instagram was joining YouTube in attempting to compete with a new kid on the block, TikTok, as YouTube had earlier started testing “YouTube Shorts,” videos in vertical (i.e., smartphone) format of up to 60 seconds.

What these companies have discovered is that more and more people like to flip through stuff that moves rather than to look at something static, and that they’re ok with seeing amateur-looking video as they come across as more “authentic.”

I say this not to announce that Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog will switch platforms from WordPress to TikTok in the next decade, but simply to point out that the world of digital communication continues to rapidly transform, and to do so in unpredictable ways.

As such, it’s not clear to me where it is going and when/how/if it will stabilize, but I am very confident that whatever happens, the academic monograph and academic journal article are not going to make a comeback.

Therefore, I think that there will continue to be a niche for this blog in the future of Cyberspace, as a site where the obscure world of academia peeks into the human realm.

And in that niche corner of Cyberspace, there is, of course, room for an accompanying TikTok channel, so I should never say never.