Happy Valentine’s Day

I have been learning that technology is socially shaped. Today I figure out one more thing is also socially shaped. That is Valentine’s Day. Given that we are all from different countries in my office, we share our different experiences of Valentine’s Day. My Dutch and Finish colleagues told me they don’t have this day when they were teenagers. It seems to bloom recently. Therefore, they are still in the stage of observing. When I were in the U.S., I got chocolate from my students, colleagues, and some friends even though I am not so significant to them. In Taiwan, we usually give gifts or chocolate to partners or important persons to us only. There was no one bring chocolate to share with colleagues in my office. In Korea, Valentine’s Day is a day for men to give women gifts. Next month at the same day (called White Valentine’s Day just like Japan), men will get the girls’ responses. If the response is kind of negative, men will try again and wait for their responses one more month. In April 14th, if the answer is still NO, those failed men will get together to have special noodles which source color is black. Therefore, they call the date Black Valentine’s Day.

I jump to the conclusion that the way people celebrate VD reflects their values. Korean is comparatively conservative; therefore, people are afraid of showing their love and use this day as an opportunity. Taiwanese are not very shy as Korean; therefore, they show their love to the significant others naturally. One more thing to top it off for Taiwanese, they are basically from a showing-off culture. They use this day to compare with others to see who get more gifts. As for the US, too generous! One of my friend interpreted that they just don’t want to miss any possible candidates. Is it funny?

Why? Suddenly, I have no mood to write something on my English blog and I am not enthusiastic about my Chinese blog and epaper either. I conclude with two main reasons: first, I am far behind my daily work and cannot *waste* time on it; second, if you read *Being digital* before, I am just like the example in the book. When people get their first DV, they try to use the functions as much as possible, such zoom, fade, mosaic and still. After a while, they will just do it less and less. Why? The nature of people? I am going to have a English roommate. His research is about DTV which is also my interest. We talk a lot about the status of quo in UK. Although people in UK adopt DTV gradually, they tend to watch BBC 1 and 2, which they can watch without STB since they are analog. This is a interesting research topic.

To sum up, in my case I am just becoming lazy!