The new intellectuals

VIA Mongkol: Writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review, notable Global Voices author Geoffrey Cain suggests that the current crop of tech-savvy Cambodian bloggers are picking up where their 1960s beat-generation brothers and sisters left off.

Yet today a brimming young movement of intellectuals resembling those of the 1960s is quietly — and sometimes anonymously — creating change in Cambodia. They mostly draw on the same inspirations and discuss the same topics of culture, politics and romance — the latter remains a highly taboo topic. Some even listen to the same music, writing about the classics of Simon and Garfunkel. Yet unlike their predecessors, these intellectuals do not mingle in French-style cafés and art galleries, but in the new wireless Internet cafés springing up in Phnom Penh.

Looking at them, one would think they are just a typical group of youngsters. During lunch breaks and on weekends, they can be seen in popular Monivong Boulevard hangouts wearing ripped jeans and headphones, clicking away on their quirky, stickered laptops, stopping sporadically for a sip of iced coffee. Virtually all are under 30, born during a 1980s baby boom that followed the Khmer Rouge genocide. They represent a small but growing tech-savvy middle class of students, lawyers, technology professionals and journalists, who only recently came of age in a society where little public discussion of issues exists.

[...]

With stilted shacks and slums lined along Phnom Penh’s dirt roads, and a populace of which 33% earn less that $0.50 a day according to optimistic government statistics, Cambodia is remarkably wired. After King Sihanouk, now King-Father, started Cambodia’s first blog in 2002 and the Cloggers began their educational tours of the country, blogging mania swept Phnom Penh; a blogosphere once numbering 30 bloggers spawned into a vibrant community of pundits, photographers and diarists now innumerable.

The whole thing is well worth reading. It’s also a jolting reminder that the largely self-indulgent navel-gazing that transpires among outsiders is largely irrelevant to the actual concerns of Cambodians. For real insight into the Cambodian zeitgeist, Mongkol, Kounila, Tharum, Seila, and others are the voices to heed.

UPDATE: The full text of the above article is available from Khmer Students.