New app testing cultural norms
A DECADE ago, Prime Minister Hun Sen banned 3G cellphones after his wife, Bun Rany, issued a public letter warning of the “gravely negative consequences for social morality” and “sexual exploitation of women” that the video-capable phones could allow.
“Hold it. Do not yet start the mobile phone services through which the callers can see each others’ images,” the premier said during a speech in May 2006. “Maybe we can wait for another 10 years or so until we have done enough to strengthen the morality of our society.”
A lot has changed in a decade. Hun Sen is now himself a broadcasting star, streaming his activities on Facebook Live, while hundreds of young Cambodian women compete for their own viewers from their bedrooms using another app called Bigo Live.
Launched by a Singaporean tech firm in March – two months before the premier’s long-forgotten target to allow video phones – the Bigo Live app has this year become the third-most downloaded app in Cambodia both on iOS and Android smartphones.
Amid a proliferation in phone usage that has left the country with more SIM cards than people, the openly sexual streaming app has also proved something of a locus of a generational clash in a country that has long imagined itself as uniquely socially conservative.
“Bored? Hot Girls’ and CONTINUED