My name is Shopp-Lee, I from Hong Kong, Are you Chinese tooorists. Yeeessss. Ok I wanna make shoppy time with you. Take you shopping, show you wonderous Hong Kong. You take veedeo, tell your friends of happys times in Honkie Town and they all cum visit and we very happy. Yes.

Okay, so it’s a poor imitation, and so are we. Once we were a shopping and business paradise, a tourist mecca and the promised land to hundreds of millions of mainlanders who could only dream of visiting the fragrant harbour. Now many of them get to visit – but all they experience is the stink of exploitation and rip-off. Do we care? Don’t we just shrug our shoulders and think there’ll always be schmucks on every tour? Well, Hong Kong wake up and smell your stink.

The world experienced a $1.65 billion quantum shift in 2006. And its name was Youtube. Never before has it been easier to be heard and seen. Before the revolution a personal bad experience was that personal no one knew. Now everyone can see and experience it, the emphasis being on the “see it”. And let’s face it, there’s a little bit of a voyeur in every one of us. Youtube is only the most visible and successful of the many video sites out there – popular videos get millions of views and comments: Hong Kong’s Bus Uncle’s rant, captured on a mobile phone camera has been watched over 1 million times. Gary Brolsma lip synching to the Numa Numa song is estimated to have been viewed online more than 100 million times, and has brought him global celebrity – whether he wanted it or not. 2007 promises to be the year of the voyeur, so what makes you think your cynicism, your contribution to the stink won’t be seen? By millions. What makes you think you won’t be the next video star, a real-life Borat?

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