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312 Soraj Hongladarom

openness. “Hea” means “monitor lizard,” a much lower-ranking ani-
mal in the Thai cosmos than bovines. While bovines are merely stu-
pid, monitor lizards are treacherous and evil. Bovines are viewed by
Thais as beneficial, as they help them with tilling the fields. Many
Thais feel a certain sense of gratitude to them. Monitor lizards, on
the other hand, are always keen to steal the farmers’ chickens and
ducks. The word “hea” is in Thai a strong invective used to describe
those who are bad and depraved.
By mixing Thai words in the more or less English posts in SCT,
the contributors do not as much aim at being fully understood by the
global community than at talking and sharing feelings within their
rather close-knit community. Here those who do not happen to un-
derstand these words and the presupposed background knowledge
necessary for grasping the whole meaning feel left out. Thus, SCT
takes on a double function. On the one hand, it acts as a channel of
disseminating information about Thailand and its people, as stated
in its charter. On the other, it serves as a means by which Thai peo-
ple and non-Thais who are “in the know” strengthen their shared
feelings and knowledge. It is as if the newsgroup is a coffeehouse
where people who know one another very well come to discuss things
in which they are interested. They do not quite care whether out-
siders would be able to follow what is going on. That is not the point
of the communication. Such a communication as happening here has
its essential function within a community. SCT, in this instance, is
the place where members of the community come to share views,
thoughts and feelings, thus making the community itself possible.
This view of communication as the means of strengthening com-
munity ties is called by James Carey the “ritual” view. In Communi-
cation as Culture (1989, 18–23), Carey states that there are two
views on communication, namely the “transmission” and the “ritual”
views. The former views communication as one-way traffic, where
information, injunctions, news, and the like are “transmitted” from
the source of power to remote posts. One purpose of such transmis-
sion is to create political unity and to assert the power of the politi-
cal center to areas within its jurisdiction. The ritual view, on the
other hand, views communication not primarily as a means of trans-
mitting information, but as an integral part of community activity,
which members of a community perform in order to reaffirm the
identity of the community itself.
The invectives against the Thai political leaders in the SCT
are parts of the government bashing occurring after the great flow-
ering of media freedom following the Black May Incident of 1992. 5