Tshering, 46, is highly educated and literate, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard, but he just doesn’t like newspapers. He finds them irrelevant.
I track down Dolma and she suggests we meet at a trendy new internet cafe in the main street. Her daughters, whom she brings with her, are growing into articulate, independent young women, yet it is Dolma who is most changed. While the girls update their Facebook pages, Dolma tells me Arjun has gone for good. But even better than that, she says with a proud smile, is her new legal status. She withdraws from her handbag stamped citizenship papers and a new bankbook. Two years ago she often seemed to be cowering, as if trying to take up less space. Today she sits easily in this modern cafe, every inch an equal to the rest of the crowd. She confidently orders a cappuccino and a piece of banana cake – in honour of Mal, she says, who taught her how to make it.
There is something very convivial about being able to fly in and immerse myself in what is happening here in Thimphu. People drop in and out of the newspaper office, staying for tea and gossip. There are new babies to meet and relationship updates. Sydney’s depressing nightly news, with its emphasis on conflict, violence and money, feels a long, long way away. My visit ends all too soon and Phuntsho sends me home laden with gifts for the family, each one uniquely Bhutanese. I promise that next time I come I will bring her something specifically Australian.
Back in Sydney, I finish my thesis, quote the Fifth King in my graduation speech and continue to follow what is happening in Bhutan. Phuntsho’s emails become increasingly gloomy. I subscribe to the e-edition of Kuensel and follow Bhutan’s news via Twitter and Facebook. An anonymous website starts up: Bhutanomics is ferociously anti-government, and trying to unmask whoever is behind it becomes a hot topic on social media. The Opposition leader? Disgruntled journalists? In the lead-up to the July 2013 election, dozens of Twitter accounts spring up criticising the government, which is slow to catch on to this new phenomenon. For the 45,000 tweets that criticise them, the government responds with just 615 tweets. Tshering Tobgay manages 3,676 tweets along with posts on his Facebook page and blog. In this virtual space, at least, he is able to set the agenda. Not everyone is in on these conversations, but it doesn’t matter. With strong family networks and widespread mobile-phone coverage, what is discussed in Thimphu spreads out to families in villages and beyond.
It becomes obvious even from 10,000 miles away that the liveliest public discussions are not in Kuensel or Bhutan Observer but online. On 13 July 2013, Mal and I, sitting in our lounge room in Sydney, follow the Bhutanese elections on Twitter. Seat by seat, the government falls. It is a landslide that no-one had predicted. Tshering Tobgay’s party wins 32 seats and the incumbent party just 15. For days afterwards the country seems to be in shock. We just voted out our first government. How much of that result was due to social media, I wonder?
A year later I get further leave from my family and return to Bhutan to investigate how social media is working in the country. I email Phuntsho to tell her I’m coming. I’ve had three and a half years to think of a gift that will appeal to a Bhutanese media mogul who wants little beyond an end to suffering for all beings, but is quite partial to chilli and a chewy lump of dried pork rind. At the airport tourist shop, I find lurid packets covered in Australian flags that contain spicy kangaroo, emu and crocodile ‘jerky’. They just about scream Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi. Perfect!
At the airport Phuntsho is in a summer kira and greets me with a huge smile. We haven’t made it out of the car park before she tells me sombre news. Next week she will close Bhutan Observer. It’s time, she says. They haven’t printed for a year, moving totally online to cut costs. It was intended as a temporary measure till income improved, but they have accepted that conditions for the print media can only get worse.
Thimphu now has an incredible 12 newspapers, and of the 11 owned privately, any of them could close at any time. Three newspapers haven’t paid their staff for months. Some just print when they get advertising. Only Kuensel is doing okay, still getting half of the government’s advertising. Bhutan Observer has managed to keep its webpage afloat because Needrup won the contract to publish Druk Air’s in-flight magazine, Tashi Delek. But Phuntsho tells me that Needrup has just handed in his resignation. It was the catalyst she needed, she says, and now she is working up the courage to tell the last four loyal staff. Rabi, just back from Perth with his newly minted Master of Journalism, will take over editing Tashi Delek. Tenzin will find jobs for the other staff in his hardware business. And that, says Phuntsho, will be it for Bhutan Observer.
I feel a rush of emotions but Phuntsho smiles serenely, steering her little white Maruti around hair-raising bends. I marvel at her equanimity. She has been pushing this huge rock uphill for eight years. And now that’s it? She shrugs. Her children are both healthy and doing well at school. She and Tenzin are happy. She has all her sisters around her. Life is good. She needs to recognise that and let go. It’s a lesson for her in the Buddhist notion of impermanence. ‘We could all be dead tomorrow,’ she says, which I think is meant to cheer me up.
In the Bhutan Observer office, I find Needrup is just as philosophical. He says this is his opportunity to finally have a go at writing a book. Being fluent in Dzongkha, he thinks he can get enough part-time translation work to pay the family’s bills.
I wander around Thimphu looking for copies of all these new newspapers that have helped push Bhutan Observer over the edge. The largest bookstore, which sells all the major Indian and international newspapers, stocks only Kuensel. I find Business Bhutan and The Bhutanese in a grocery store, but both are a week old. The others are nowhere to be found.
I visit Kuensel to meet with the editor and the chief political reporter. Even though this newspaper, with its circulation of 6,000 to 7,000, will undoubtedly survive, the editor says the state of the private media saddens him. ‘They are literally dying. Now we have no competition. From 2006 to 2008 was the best time. There was Bhutan Times and Bhutan Observer, then Bhutan Today. We used to get the other newspapers and compare their coverage with ours, see what stories they had covered that we hadn’t. Now those journalists have just gone.’
We talk about the rise of social media as a forum for news. One Kuensel reporter has been assigned full-time to social media, to find stories for the newspaper as well as to spread their own stories further afield. As Kuensel’s political reporter says, social media is both a competitor and a source. She gets many story leads from Facebook as most MPs have their own pages, which they use to communicate with their constituents, trying out policy ideas and seeking feedback.
I talk to more people and it becomes clear that apart from newspaper journalists, Phuntsho and me, few care that private newspapers are dying. Most people say they never read them, so they won’t miss them. Instead they keep referring me back to the internet and the many interesting Facebook pages and blogs. One name in particular keeps coming up. Passu.
Everyone in Bhutan with access to the internet knows Passang ‘Passu’ Tshering. He is a high school teacher from Wangdue Phodrang, a few hours east of Thimphu, and he writes a popular blog about things that matter to him, which often then come to matter to everybody else. I’m in luck that it is school holidays and he is in Thimphu, so we arrange to meet.
Ten minutes with Passu is exhilarating. He speaks quickly, ideas tumbling out in a steady stream. Aged about 30, he is excited by all the possibilities of modern media, poking around to see what they can do. He launched ‘B-Bay’ on Facebook, which has 30,000 Bhutanese members all across the country selling everything from houses and cars to air tickets, laptops and kiras. Another success is his cyber ‘park’ at Bajothang High School, which provides students with internet access outside school hours. On weekends many of Wangdue Phodrang’s youth can be found in Passu’s park, on their laptops and mobile phones, finding mater
ial for assignments, uploading their own music videos to YouTube or catching up on Facebook. He has many more projects, including setting up a museum to rural life and a Wi-Fi book cafe, and he wants to write a series of children’s books with Bhutanese heroes … The list is endless.
Passu says the internet arrived in 1999 but took off in Bhutan only after Bhutanese started to join Facebook in significant numbers in 2006. It now has around 130,000 users, he says. Such is its importance that he speaks in terms of before and after Facebook.
Like Tshering Tobgay, Passu doesn’t read newspapers. ‘If something is important it will be on Facebook,’ he says.
Passu’s blog has become an influential forum and people pay attention to what he writes. Bhutan Times sometimes publishes an entire post as ‘news’. When two illicit Bhutanese sex videos started to circulate, it took Passu to make it a public issue. One had been filmed through a hotel door peephole, and in the other a young Bhutanese woman clearly had no idea she was being filmed. Both appeared in Passu’s Facebook feed. ‘Everyone was talking about them, but the newspapers weren’t writing anything,’ says Passu. So he wrote a piece on his blog, chastising anyone who watched the videos, re-posted them or forwarded them by phone. His post had 25,000 hits.
‘There was a huge reaction from people saying they wanted to do something but didn’t know how,’ he says. ‘After my blog I noticed people started removing the videos from Facebook.’
Kuensel interviewed Passu about his blog post, as did popular radio DJ Namgay Zam, who then started an online petition onchange.org calling for laws against the non-consensual distribution of sexual material. Bhutanese leaders signed up, including Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche and the electoral commissioner. Two months after Passu’s post, the government called a high-level meeting to discuss strategies to deal with social-media porn.
Passu is the unofficial leader of the growing number of bloggers in Bhutan and he takes me to one of their semi-regular meet-ups at a bar in Thimphu. Bhutan’s bloggers, or the ten that come drinking this evening, are passionate about their role in the media landscape. Some are former journalists without a job, others just experimenting with having a voice.
Forty-something Tshering Dorji from Paro says the internet has been a revelation to him. ‘In my generation we were bullied by teachers at school. We couldn’t speak up about our opinions. We didn’t know you could write books. Now we can all have a voice.’
Tshering broke a major story about corruption at the Food Corporation of Bhutan, which has been followed up for investigation by the Anti-Corruption Commission.
Another blogger, Riku Dhan Subba, is a former Bhutan Observer journalist with a passion for social justice. His most popular post criticised late-night partying – and the rubbish left behind – at the foot of the massive new Buddha statue that sits high above Thimphu. Everybody in the city was complaining about it, but the TV and newspapers never mentioned it until Riku made it an issue on his blog. Riku likes the interaction with blog readers, saying that when he was writing for the newspaper he was never sure anyone read his stories.
The bloggers have created their own vibrant corner in Bhutan’s growing media space, starting public discussions, exposing problems and reporting news. What they write about spreads via Facebook, Twitter, radio and word of mouth. The whisky flows and I leave them happily arguing about the sexual antics of Drukpa Kinley.
While I’m here I volunteer to take some workshops for Siok-Sian Pek-Dorji at the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy. I know they are doing clever things with young people and media, and this gives me a chance to see for myself. For the school holidays, Pek has brought together students and teachers from all over the country to attend ten-day programs on using modern media to be engaged citizens and help their communities. Pek wants them to go beyond the old news paradigm of exposing problems, instead empowering them also to find solutions. In one program she has partnered with UNICEF to teach the youth about ‘community mapping’. In groups they learn to identify what makes communities strong, how to interview people, how to tell stories using photography and digital media, and how civic policies are made, and then they are set loose in Thimphu to find both problems and solutions. By ‘mapping’ these communities they discover that many issues can be solved at the local level by ordinary citizens.
One group tells me they want to tackle the problem of childhood obesity. I’m surprised. Obesity? ‘Given all the walking you do, I wouldn’t have thought that was such a problem …?’ I venture. They laugh. They know from the internet that obesity is an issue in the West and they are teasing me. ‘We don’t have fat people like you do,’ one says. In fact, the group is interested in the problems of street hawkers illegally selling vegetables on the main street. The hawkers can’t afford to pay for stalls at the market but they clog up the footpath, upsetting shopkeepers. To remedy the situation, the students find a sympathetic company who will not only allow the hawkers to set up outside their front door, but also build them a canopy to protect them from rain.
Other groups in the program tackle issues such as buying local rather than imported food, changing a bus route to improve access for people living in a slum on the outskirts of town, and helping disabled people get from the hospital and across a busy road to the Memorial Chorten.
At the end of the ten days the groups present their results as short videos, which they will upload to YouTube and spread on social media for the benefit of other communities facing similar challenges. I sit with Phuntsho in the audience, feeling inspired. More than 60 per cent of the Bhutanese population is aged under 25, and while nearly 10 per cent of youth are unemployed – some of whom are clearly visible in the town square, high on cough medicine or worse – these shiny faces are their counterparts. Bright, engaged and ready to tackle the issues, big and small, facing their country. Phuntsho is equally moved. With her newspaper about to close, I can see her mind working furiously. ‘This is very good,’ she says. ‘I must talk to Pek …’
Pek and Kinley invite me for dinner at their home. As secretary to the Minister of Information and Communications, it is Kinley’s job to write the country’s media policy. He has just returned from an international conference in Korea, and is thinking about ways in which social media fits within the framework of Gross National Happiness. He thinks many countries aren’t recognising the cultural and spiritual possibilities of social media.
As an example of its potential, he tells me two stories. A few years ago he had trouble getting his two sons to join him at the Thimphu tshechu to watch the famous Black Hat dance. The boys thought it would be slow and boring until they found a video of it on YouTube. The clip started with a close-up on a spinning black hat, before zooming out to reveal the whole performance. The boys were entranced. It gave them a new perspective on their own culture.
Recently, the elder son returned from studying at Stanford University and went to visit his uncle, a yogi who was doing a lifetime retreat in a remote cave. Taking his mobile phone, the young man called up old film footage he had found at his American university of his uncle’s Buddhist master. They watched it together, in his cave, high on a mountaintop. Again, it shows how this deeply spiritual country is using modern media to serve its own cultural practices.
But, Kinley says, for all its power, social media will never replace word of mouth for spreading news throughout Bhutan. It was his greatest competitor when he was editor of Kuensel and is still how most news travels. ‘Even now, if you ask people where do you hear things, how do you learn things? they say through my friend or family. Word of mouth is very important now. We are largely an oral society.’
Kinley is unfussed about the state of newspapers. He believes there is only room for two or three and whichever are still standing in five years will be the winners. It’s survival of the fittest.
The strong oral nature of the society works well with mobile phone technology. Instead of sending text messages,
many prefer to use the app WeChat to record and then send short voice messages. This is cheaper than a phone call, and Phuntsho swaps voice messages with various sisters throughout the day. She says it’s also very popular with monks, who record pujas and send them to each other.
I’m often amazed at the creative ways Bhutanese use their mobile phones. Although they were introduced only in 2003, nearly 93 per cent of households now own at least one. BBS and Kuensel regularly run stories about how the mobile phone has changed people’s lives. The Ministry of Agriculture provides a daily recorded message giving updates of vegetable prices at markets across the country. Instead of driving for days only to find a glut of their particular crop, farmers can ring and find out where they will get the best price. Kuensel also reports that farmers no longer have to walk to neighbouring villages to pass on messages. They can call for urgent help when wild animals attack their crops, and the phone doubles as a handy torch.
While few can afford smartphones, a basic, black-and-white Nokia can play Bhutanese movies stored on memory cards, and people transfer them to one another over Bluetooth. One farmer says he has watched 25 Bhutanese movies on his phone. Another has two Bhutanese movies and a few cartoons for his two-year-old son stored on a 2GB memory card in his Nokia phone.
One unforeseen consequence of the mobile phone is that it has brought an end to the rural practice of night-hunting. These days, the reporter notes wistfully, men and women call each other.
I finish my two-week visit feeling melancholy for Bhutan Observer and what could have been, but excited, even inspired, by the many ways the country is using other media. The mobile phone has been as revolutionary as I imagine the printing press must have been to 15th-century Europe. Facebook is similarly impressive, challenging all my preconceptions of what it means to be literate. Needrup uses it to keep in touch with his childhood friends in Mongar, a few days’ travel away. Some of them didn’t go beyond the equivalent of Grade 3 at their local primary school and can’t read or write English or Dzongkha. They speak only their local dialect, Chocha Ngacha, which has no written form, but they know enough of the Roman alphabet to write it phonetically on Facebook.
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