AsianVoices: Changes

The previous site – AsianVoices – has closed.   

The website was a platform for young Asian writers to publish their poems and stories. It housed 188 poems and 35 stories. Over the years I was inspired by the wonderful works sent in by the contributors. Occasionally readers would get in touch with me to let me know that they were moved by certain works. I would like to thank all the contributors for sharing their words, ideas and passions with the rest of us.

When I started the site in 1997, personal websites and blogs were relatively rare. Contributing to the AsianVoices site was a good way for budding writers to get their works online. They sent in their text; I formatted it and uploaded it and there it stayed.

The other day, I looked to seee what my eight-year-old son was doing on the computer. I had expected him to be playing his favourite online game – Tales Runner. Instead he was updating his blog in Chinese and English, adding photos and profiles of pop idols. When did he get a blog? Who taught him to upload images? Where did he get the Avril Lavigne background? Avril Lavigne?

Had my daughter, who is three years older than him, introduced him to all these things? She has been requesting a new computer and PhotoShop so she can make her own blog(s) more attractive. She found it quite funny when I told her that I hadn’t owned a computer before l I was thirty.

I have to admit, I was rather surprised to see him blogging away. I guess it has finally arrived – the digital generation. I, like most other teachers, had been expecting a generation of computer-savvy kids to blow us away with their technical expertise. I had thought I would be seeing them in the 1990s, but they didn’t turn up then. I guess they are here now, though–IMing, blogging, youtubing, photoshopping and pirating their hearts out.

If unsupervised eight-year-olds (I better watch him more carefully!) can run a website, there isn’t much need for me to be formatting and uploading texts. That is one reason for letting the site go.

The other reason is that I think the writers should have more control over their texts–to decide what the page will look like, to be abe to edit whenever they want and to correspond with their readers.

To all of you who have contributed – I hope you will keep on writing and sharing your work. Let me know if you post things online and I will add a link to them from this blog.  You can add a comment below or e-mail me at: zijun01@gmail.com

¬ Stephen