Stay away from that cell phone camera

What happens when you mix social media, cell phone cameras, and a Vietnamese TV star. Well you end up with an international row, and many people searching for the almost right of passage (Think Paris, Tanya Harding, Pamela Anderson) celebrity for personal use sex tape. What is interesting about this is not that it is another star in a row, but how data moves from a country with a limited Internet resource, and how that data is then dispersed globally.

The story though takes on the added interest because this is Vietnam, and this is one of those things that is going to tick off the internal censors in the country, and in general, as expected, lead to the cancellation of the TV Show “Vang Anh’s Diary”. From the data movement viewpoint, and how quickly the data spread across the Internet, with hundreds of thousands of people looking for and otherwise trying to get a copy of the video, makes you wonder how the Internet can really be regulated. Or how the Internet can really be completely monitored even at the borders of a country.

From the falling over laughing department, it seems that Huang Thuy Linh has gotten busted by the Vietnamese censors for staring in her own sex clip that has hit the Internet. In a world of celebrity sex clips, this is not surprising, what is interesting is that the government has taken the steps to cancel the show and call it a day for the 19 year old star. Source: Streamaroo

While in America we don’t worry that much about things like this, the way that data has been distributed, via bittorrent, p2p, ftp file systems, direct links to media, really in a lot of ways covers just how hard it is going to be to stop piracy, and in general stop the flow of information once it hits the Internet. This is probably one of the best examples of how some small hits a meme, and then gets launched across the Internet. If you look at this not just from the social aspect, but from the aspect of how data travels when it hits a popular nerve, you have to stop and think about all the systems that make the movement of data much easier than it used to be. As well as the social influence of that data movement.

Beyond the idea that the Vietnamese government has canceled the show, it is more interesting in how celebrity obsessed we are globally, and how data moves, who is interested in the data, and what kind of meme the tape has garnered from a TV series that was little known outside of Asia before the hoopla.