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Comment by 用心涼Coooool 3 hours ago

四、推動社會包容性與在地文化認同

文創不應只是純粹的商業行為，更肩負著社會與文化傳承的使命。聯合國教科文組織強調的永續發展，在文學領域體現為：

少數群體發聲：鼓勵原住民、移民或弱勢群體透過文字寫作表達自我，豐富了城市多元的文創面貌。

社區文創活化：將文學活動引入社區圖書館、閒置空間或邊緣街區。透過在地故事的採集與書寫，凝聚社區共同體意識，讓文創利潤下沉到基層。

提升文化軟實力：文學是保存母語與在地記憶的最佳媒介。藉由國際交流，將在地獨特的文化符碼推向世界，轉化為具國際辨識度的文化資產。

 五、 建構國際文化外交與文創貿易網路

「創意城市網路」本質上是一個全球性的共享平台。對文創領域而言，這意味著打破地域限制的國際化通路：

全球創意資源共享：獲選城市之間建立了密集的合作機制，例如共同舉辦跨國作家交換計畫、國際文學翻譯補助等，讓在地的文學創作者直接對接國際舞台。

文化貿易出海口：透過網路內的城市結盟，大幅降低了版權輸出、文創商品外銷的門檻，有助於中小型文創企業（SMEs）拓展海外市場。

結語

聯合國教科文組織的「文學之都」概念，將文學從精緻藝術的象牙塔中解放出來，全面融入城市的經濟與社會體系。它向文創領域證明：文字不只是紙頁上的符號，更是一股能夠帶動出版轉型、跨界改編、觀光升級與社會創新 的強大生產力。

在這個架構下，文學不僅是文化的容器，更是引領城市走向永續、創新與繁榮的核心羅盤。

[註] 聯合國教科文組織的「創意城市網路」（UCCN）共涵蓋7大核心領域。每個加入該網路的城市，都會選擇其中一個領域作為其發展文創與永續城市的策略核心：

文學（Literature）：專注於推動出版、閱讀、寫作推廣及國際文學交流。

電影（Film）：聚焦於電影產業發展、影展舉辦、影像教育及電影文化資產保護。

音樂（Music）：致力於音樂創作、音樂產業活化、音樂節慶及普及音樂教育。

設計（Design）：強調將設計思維融入城市規劃、公共建築、工業設計與生活美學。

媒體藝術（Media Arts）：融合數位科技、電子藝術、新媒體創作與科技文創。

手工藝與民間藝術（Crafts and Folk Art）：保護與傳承傳統工藝、民間美術、編織、陶藝等在地文化技藝。

美食學（Gastronomy）：將飲食文化、傳統烹飪技藝、在地食材永續利用與文創觀光結合。

 

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on August 19, 2026 at 3:16pm

[iCONADA Research Team] Shanghai-based Fudan University in Miri, Sarawak.

Sarawak is witnessing a historic breakthrough in the fields of international higher education and smart healthcare. Shanghai-based Fudan University, ranked among the world’s top 50 universities and one of China’s leading medical institutions, has officially selected Miri, Sarawak, as the site of its first overseas international campus.

This High-impact project aims to introduce a world-class medical education and research ecosystem to Sarawak, while also helping to alleviate the urgent shortage of approximately 2,000 doctors in the state. The plan has already received formal approval from Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) and the Sarawak Government, and is now at the final stage of seeking approval from the central government of China.

Three-Phase Blueprint: Establishing a Presence in “Kenyalang Smart City”, Miri

According to the cooperation agreement signed by Sarawak Deputy Premier and Minister for Public Health, Housing and Local Government, Datuk Amar Dr. Sim Kui Hian, and Imasa Dinasti, Fudan University’s development in Miri will be implemented progressively in three phases:

Phase One: Establish the “Miri Branch of the Fudan Southeast Asia Institute of Integrative Chinese and Western Medicine Research” and undertake the renovation of the former Miri Municipal Council building. To date, approximately 85% of the renovation work has been completed, with the first phase expected to officially commence operations early next year.

Phase Two: Upgrade and establish the “Fudan University Miri Medical School”, with a comprehensive focus on medical education, professional training and clinical research.

Phase Three: Ultimately develop the full-scale “Fudan University Miri Campus”, creating an integrated overseas campus combining education, research and smart healthcare. The main campus and the Integrated Medical Research Centre will be located in Miri’s emerging new core area, “Kenyalang Smart City.”

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on August 19, 2026 at 3:14pm

Leading with “Technology-Driven Healthcare”: Integrating Chinese and Western Medicine and the AI Doctor Experience

Sarawak Minister for Transport and Senadin State Assemblyman, Datuk Seri Lee Kim Shin, said during an inspection of the construction works that the project would introduce an advanced technology-driven healthcare model.

The report highlights three major development features of the project:

Pioneering the dual-track integration of Chinese and Western medicine: Fudan University, one of only two Chinese medical institutions currently accredited by the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC), will combine modern Western medicine with traditional Chinese medicine, pioneering a unique dual-track model of medical education and healthcare delivery.

“AI Doctor” smart healthcare system: An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Medical Experience Centre will be established on the first floor of the research institute. It will introduce an AI healthcare system developed by Fudan University. Once operational, members of the public will be able to experience first-hand how AI can assist in early and precision diagnosis.

Tropical rainforest-based drug discovery and development: The campus will establish an Integrated Chinese-Western Medicine Innovation Drug Research and Development Centre. Leveraging the rich biodiversity of Sarawak’s tropical rainforests in areas such as Baram, Belaga and Kapit, the centre will explore ways to transform indigenous medicinal herbs into innovative pharmaceutical products capable of generating multi-billion-ringgit global business opportunities.

Outlook: Strategic Higher Education Cooperation under the Malaysia-China “Golden 50 Years”

Sarawak Premier Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg emphasised that Fudan University’s establishment in Miri is fully aligned with Sarawak’s long-term strategy to advance technology, the green economy and artificial intelligence research.

This strategic partnership will not only create opportunities for Sarawak’s young people to pursue world-class medical education locally, without having to leave the state, but will also gradually strengthen Sarawak’s autonomy in healthcare and education.

At a time when Malaysia and China are entering a new “Golden 50 Years” of bilateral diplomatic relations, the partnership is also expected to become a new model for strategic cooperation between China and ASEAN countries in higher education and smart healthcare.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on August 15, 2026 at 9:17pm

[iCONADA Research Team] Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory(ANT)～～In the context of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the social world is not made of abstract "structures," but of dynamic, relational webs woven by both human actors (decision maker, public, content creators) and non-human actants (algorithms, social media platforms, oil pipelines, religious institutions).

ANT has historically been notoriously difficult to map because tracking the sheer volume of micro-interactions between humans and non-humans requires massive empirical labor. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can serve as the ultimate methodological toolkit to operationalize, track, and build ANT networks.

iCONADA hereby proposes that how AI can assist in building and visualizing Actor-Network Theory, specifically applied to analyzing political realities like the ones we discussed thus far:

1.Mapping Non-Human Actants: Tracing the Digital "Allies"
In ANT, a non-human entity (like an algorithm) is not just a passive tool; it is an active participant that modifies human behavior.

Algorithmic Auditing: AI can reverse-engineer and audit how social media algorithms (the non-human actants) accelerate the "post-truth phenomenon." By analyzing recommender systems, AI can map how specific political rhetoric (e.g., the "Barbarians are coming" narrative) is selected, amplified, and fed into Chinese-language echo chambers.

Network Translation: AI can track how a digital actant "translates" (Latour's term for transforming meaning) a complex political debate into a 15-second emotional soundbite on TikTok, showing exactly where a factual "Matter of Fact" mutates into an emotional "post-truth" artifact.

2.Large-Scale Trace Ethnography (Following the Actors)

Latour’s primary methodological command is: "Follow the actors themselves." In the digital era, actors leave millions of digital footprints that are impossible for human ethnographers to trace manually.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on August 15, 2026 at 5:39pm

Cross-Platform Deep Scraping & NLP: AI can deploy Natural Language Processing (NLP) to crawl and analyze millions of interactions across distinct linguistic and cultural spheres simultaneously. It can track how a "Middle Eastern political strategy" deployed by Malay leaders translates into grassroots sermons, and contrast it in real-time with how it is re-interpreted inside Chinese-language WhatsApp groups or Xiaohongshu.

Semantic Vector Mapping: AI can analyze text not just for keywords, but for relational distance. It can map how words like "unity," "threat," or "secularism" change their relational meaning depending on which nodes of the network they pass through.

3.Visualizing Dynamic and Fluid Networks (No More Static Charts)

Traditional sociology relies on static categories (e.g., "The Chinese Community," "The Malay Elite"). ANT rejects this, arguing that these groups only exist if they are constantly being performed and re-knitted.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): AI can use GNNs to build real-time, 3D interactive knowledge graphs of political ecosystems. These graphs do not show fixed demographics, but fluid connections. Users can see how human political figures are connected to funding networks, media platforms, and religious institutions.

Weighting Network Alliances: AI can dynamically adjust the "thickness" of lines between nodes based on interaction frequency, sentiment intensity, and transaction flows, showing exactly which alliances are holding a political narrative together at any given second.

4.Simulating "Crash Tests" (Predicting Network Durability)
Latour noted that reality eventually hits back against post-truth illusions through "crash tests" (like extreme climate events or economic crises) that shatter digital bubbles.

Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) powered by LLMs: AI can simulate thousands of autonomous "agents" (representing different segments of the Malaysian electorate, media nodes, and economic variables). Researchers can run simulations to see how the current "post-truth/fear-mongering" network would react when hit by a real-world material crisis (e.g., an economic recession or a subsidy rationalisation).

Vulnerability Identification: The AI can pinpoint which specific node or non-human actant (e.g., a specific piece of legislation or an independent media outlet) is the "weakest link" or the most critical anchor keeping the network stable.

Bridging to iCONADA's Cultural Critique: AI as a Tool for "Down to Earth" Politics

If the contemporary crisis of the Malaysian Chinese community is a "structural ignorance"born of digital self-enclosure, AI can be the tool that breaks the bubble. Instead of using AI to generate more clickbait, progressive leaders can use AI to build ANT dashboards.

By using AI to map the actual socio-economic anxieties, institutional connections, and Middle Eastern geopolitical influences affecting the Malay majority, the minority community can move away from abstract, online emotional fear.

They can use AI to achieve what Latour called "landing on the
Terrestrial"—gaining a precise, empirical, and scientific blueprint of the ground realities of the nation. It allows modern leaders to see the world as Tan Cheng Lock and Tunku Abdul Rahman did: not as a battle of online caricatures, but as a complex, material network of interlocking interests that must be pragmatically negotiated and built together.

Please Help explore how an political movement today could practically design an AI-driven ANT framework to map out a new, cross-ethnic political consensus?

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on August 3, 2026 at 12:32am

The Case Against Travel By Agnes Callard

It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

(June 24, 2023 The New Yorker)

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 29, 2026 at 6:42pm

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.”

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 24, 2026 at 9:33pm

We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?”

So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position.

I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk.

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 23, 2026 at 8:53pm

（Con't）In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist's project is self-undermining. I'll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,”is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.”

Comment by 用心涼Coooool on July 16, 2026 at 5:20am

（Con't）He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one's own feelings that count.

Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist's impulse to honour the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. They study why travellers can't truly connect to other human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon.

Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel's dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

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