Sia, perhaps fortunately, is not a real person. She is a character in the webtoon My Dud-to-Stud Boyfriend (story by Yerang; art by Sutggi; nine million page views at the time of writing).
Webtoons descend from printed manga and from the online picture-diaries of the 1990s. Like K-pop, they have surged hugely in popularity over the first decades of the new century, both inside and outside Korea: by 2018, over 35 billion episodes had been read, and half a million views per episode was not uncommon for a successful series. Commissioned and volunteer translators render them into – so far – over thirty foreign languages. Films, TV shows and games have appeared as spin-offs. As scholar Dal Yong Jin describes:
on a bustling subway ride to work, it’s not hard to find people staring into their smartphones or PC tablets, scrolling quickly down the screen to see what comes next. On sidewalks or in coffee shops, the situation is the same. If a smile can be spotted on the user’s face, it would not be far-fetched to say they could be reading one of their favorite webtoons.
Adapted to presentation on the web or through a dedicated app, webtoons scroll vertically through sixty or eighty panels per episode, often ending on a cliffhanger. By contrast with printed manga, they are presented in colour, sometimes with the addition of sound or animation. Genres range from biography and sports to crime noir and fantasy. Romances and self-consciously mundane slice-of-life stories are particularly popular, in which self-referential appearances of technology and social media are common: characters use phones to count blog posts, likes and comments, smart watches to check heart rate and time exercises, tablets to access music, video and news and shop, check the time, track bank payments, read toons …
The so-called artist incubation system, in which artists compete for audience attention on the webtoon platforms, has much in common with social media platforms like YouTube (or the fictional equivalent NewTube, on which Sia Yoon is such a star), with comments, likes, hit counts and followers. There has been both criticism and celebration of a model that lowers the barriers to entry – ‘webtoon artist’ is reportedly one of the most popular career ambitions for Korean pre-teens – but concentrates the rewards on a very small percentage of participants, picking a handful of winners based mainly on their popularity, who are then under intense pressure to conform to audience expectations and keep up a gruelling schedule of new material. Just like Sia herself, in fact.
Sia’s story is perfectly believable in a digital world, one in which what counts is what you can count, or rather what your many devices can count for you. In which success, popularity and worth are matters of automatically aggregated numbers of hits, views and likes. The resonance between her story and the ‘attention economy’ in which webtoon artists themselves operate adds a layer of richness to her; and perhaps a whisper of unease too.
Sia’s story is not yet finished, and her many fans – both real and fictional – eagerly await what will happen. Now that her new boyfriend is transformed, she and he have taken up positions of fame and social leadership in their school, but they have also rapidly learned of the costs of exploiting social media to shame and expose their enemies. The sponsored posts continue, but so do the dilemmas; so, at times, does a certain emptiness at the heart of Sia’s digital life. Her birthday party photos get 10,000 likes, but she comments ruefully that ‘all the presents I get every year are just sponsored products from brands’. According to Sia’s creators, there are years of content still to come, and there is no doubt that she will go on compulsively, mechanically counting views, likes and followers, all tracked for her by her devices and the online platforms to which she subscribes. She is, in more senses than one, the product of a digital age.
Is a digital world one that contains more counting, or less? What does the future hold, as human beings outsource more and more of their everyday counting (and arithmetic) to sophisticated machines? Is it reasonable to imagine that arithmetic, and even counting itself, might eventually vanish from human practice, in the same way that, say, copperplate handwriting has done? Perhaps it is. Few people with access to digital technology would now do more than the simplest arithmetic either mentally or on paper, rather than asking a device. Few would count more than, say, a few dozen objects by hand without outsourcing the task to a machine. When was the last time you counted more than a hundred of anything? More than ten?
Perhaps one of the possible futures of humanity is a world after counting.
7
Counting words and more
in the Pacific world
Counting machines are another branch of the counting story that is in danger of feeling like the story; their present-day forms are so dominant as to overshadow any other way of counting, past or present. But they are in reality only one branch among many. To continue the journey around the globe is to find further worlds of counting, in the Pacific and the Americas: rich, distinctive and fascinating.
After walking as far east and south as mainland Asia will take you, keep going. Build rafts, build canoes, and paddle or sail across the channels of water to island after island. Through the archipelago of Indonesia, making short sea passages on which you can see the next island from the one you just left. On a few of the longer passages, your destination is out of sight: a new sort of voyage into the unknown.
Continue as far as the wind and the water will take you. Discover forests, deserts, barren atolls and teeming reefs. Find new worlds, and devise new ways to live in them. To the great continent in the south; to the scatter of tiny islands beyond. Carry your language, your culture – your ways of counting – with you.
From start to finish, it would take human beings over 60,000 years to populate the Pacific.
Not surprisingly, Oceania is home to an enormous diversity of human cultures, and therefore of ways of counting. The extraordinarily deep human history in the Pacific world, with its successive waves of migration over tens of thousands of years, give the story of counting a particular flavour here. These were cultures that relied on spoken, not written words: their history must rely on archaeology and on the memory of living languages and communities. There were no number symbols here, but instead an extraordinary range of number words and gestures, from some of the simplest systems documented to some of the most complex. That range is well represented by languages spoken today. The languages of Australia, spoken by descendants of the first humans to arrive in the Pacific, have on the whole quite simple counting systems, sometimes consisting of just a few words. The peoples of neighbouring New Guinea, on the other hand, are famed for elaborate routines combining word and gesture, which seem to have developed in situ over perhaps the last few thousand years. Finally the Austronesian languages, whose speakers populated Micronesia and Polynesia over the last 5,000 years, use regular decimal systems to count to extremely high numbers, used for food distribution and other purposes. This is a region that can display the range and power of human counting words like no other.
Ayangkidarrba: Counting eggs
Ayangkidarrba (Groote Eylandt), early in the twentieth century. A woman has gathered turtle eggs, and she returns to camp in the early evening, carrying them in a paper-bark basket. Others have hunted, fished, gathered. She shares out the heap, counting in fives: awilyaba, ambilyuma, abiyakarbiya, abiyarbuwa, amangbala …
Groote Eylandt lies about 50 kilometres off the Australian coast, at the western side of the vast Gulf of Carpentaria. It has been an island for 7,000 years or more, and the original inhabitants of its 2,000-odd square kilometres are the Anindilyakwa. Hills, springs, rivers and of course the coast make for a rich range of habitats from forest to sand dunes. Traditionally, it supported a few hundred people, at one of the highest population densities in aboriginal Australia.
The island was a dense network of named places: natural features and resources controlled by different clans. The human world was a similarly dense network of kinship relationships linking fourteen clans. A prodigious knowledge of the local environment enabled the Anindilyakwa to gather foods ranging from berries, roots and fruit, wild honey and drifting coconuts to wallabies, dugong, fish and turtles, in a pattern changing with the seasons. Spears, harpoons, bags and baskets, ornaments, musical instruments and even canoes were all made from local materials including wood and bark.
Sea turtle eggs, as counted on Groote Eylandt.
Sabena Jane Blackbird / Alamy Stock Photo.
An ethnographer visiting in the 1970s described a visit to the bush, by then much rarer than in earlier generations:
[the people] would awake at sunrise, boil some tea and have a bit to eat from what had been left over from the previous day. Then they would work fishing, hunting or gathering until the sun was directly overhead, eating enough to sustain themselves from what they could gather as they went along. During the heat of the day they would sleep, then begin work once again in mid-afternoon, returning to camp in the early evening with the bulk of the day’s catch, which they would then prepare and consume communally. Following this they would sometimes wander through the shallows with a light in search of fish, or rest beside their campfires four abreast with a fire between each pair telling stories. After a few hours of sleep they would again wake up, have something more to eat, wander around and perhaps tell another story, then sleep again, waking at sunrise.
The Anindilyakwa had strong relationships with their neighbours on the smaller islands surrounding Groote Eylandt, and on the mainland; they imported certain materials – flint, ochre, emu feathers, bamboo – in exchange for local products, and they intermarried. And for two hundred years or so, up to the early twentieth century, they were regularly visited each December by Makassar people from Sulawesi in Indonesia. Ranging widely on the north Australian coasts, these visitors harvested sea cucumber (boiled, dried and smoked, it made food and medicine prized in south-east Asia); they also took turtle shell and pearl shell. Employing the Australian people to work for them collecting sea cucumber, they provided such imports as tamarind and chilli, cloth and metal items. They introduced the dugout canoe, some new place names, and perhaps forty words, mostly for the items they themselves brought.
The Anindilyakwa’s own language – Amamalya Ayakwa – spoken on Groote and the smaller islands nearby, is probably related to languages spoken on the nearby coast, but long development in separation from the mainland has given it a highly distinctive character. Words are long – up to fourteen syllables – and there are thirty-two distinct consonants. The grammar is one of the most complex ever documented, with nouns divided into eight classes which require different prefixes on the corresponding verbs and adjectives. As well as singular and plural options there are also special forms of verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives for the dual (two items) and the trial (three items, sometimes four).
Meanwhile, the actual counting words work in fives, with words for ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘four’, ‘five’, ‘ten’, ‘fifteen’ and ‘twenty’. They gain prefixes to agree with the nouns they accompany, like other adjectives in the language. There are special forms for ‘once’, ‘twice’, ‘three times’ … and for ‘by ones’ ‘by twos’, ‘by threes’ … Sometimes gestures support the counting routine:
The hand is held loosely with the palm facing the person counting. The fingers are placed together one by one; index finger to thumb, middle finger to thumb, ring finger to thumb and little finger to thumb, until all fingers are bunched together. If the number is more than five the fingers are held together while counting continues with the other hand. After ten, the toes are touched one by one, first on one foot and then on the other.
Despite this, the number words show no detectable relationship with the terms for hands or feet.
What were the counting words used for? One context was hunting: counting numbers of people available to hunt or numbers of animals brought in. Similarly, the number of warriors going out to fight or returning might be counted. Another possibility was calendar calculations; yet another, the counting of food resources like eggs. In fact, the main context for counting in Amamalya Ayakwa seems to have been sharing mid-sized food items like fish, eggs or wild apples.
There is a story on Groote Eylandt about a mythical dog that could count. The story tells how the dog went hunting and returned to his family with the turtle eggs he had found. He began counting them in order to share them (though the story reveals that the dog cheated by hiding some eggs, causing a fight to develop!).
Reports from the mid-twentieth century show that turtle eggs could be gathered in quantities of over a hundred, and the counting procedure, as demonstrated to a visitor using a heap of pebbles, showed how they were counted out into heaps using the base-5 number words.
