Sarapen

Según Barthes, el autor está muerte. But according to me, I'm alive and well and in Guatemala.

So what's up? Well, my job with that NGO in Costa Rica ended at the beginning of this month, I'm taking the opportunity to travel. I've already finished two weeks in Nicaragua and am now in Antigua, about to hike up an active volcano in two hours.

Nicaragua was interesting because it felt more like the Philippines than Costa Rica. It was definitely just as hot, I saw grass burned yellow by the sun. It was also poorer than Costa Rica, I saw trash on the side of the highway, and until that point I hadn't realized that Costa Rica's roads were missing that particular detail. Nicaragua also apparently receives more international development assistance, since I saw lots of signs about stuff being donated by Japan or Germany or some other country.

Anyway, I can't seem to put myself into the right mindset for anthropological thinking, so I'll just leave you all with this update on my whereabouts and bid you adieu for now.

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 12:16 PM to News from the Front | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just realized that I might be behind the curve now.  I admit, I'm not keeping a constant watch on news about the Internet, but in my subjective experience, the amount of English-language media coverage given to blogs has decreased whereas it seems to me that the current information technology zeitgeist has been taken over by social networking sites.  You know, stuff like Facebook, MySpace, etc.  My guess is that blogs and bloggers are starting to find their niche in the Anglosphere, thus becoming more mundane with every passing day.  One certainly can't disregard the high visibility of political blogs in the US and the constant commentary on them provided by the traditional news media.

So: blogs are mainstream now.  What else is next?  Social networking sites, apparently (a.k.a. SNS).  I mean, Foreign Policy did an article on them and The freaking Economist has a Facebook group.  Yeah, I know, it's a bit bizarre.  I wonder who's responsible for maintaing that group?

Okay, so perhaps when such staid auld institutions like The Economist have joined Facebook then it's more a sign of being mainstream than cutting edge (and apropos of nothing, but apparently The Economist's website has been redesigned).  However, being so new, in real time as opposed to Internet time, SNSes have barely been studied by academics so far.  Scholars are still grasping at the answers to such basic questions as who uses Social Networking Sites.  Via the Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website (see what I mean about blogs becoming mainstream?), however, I found these two links to various stuff around the Internet related to SNSes:

The first is an article from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication by Eszter Hargittai, a sociologist from Northwestern University and contributor to the Crooked Timber group blog entitled "Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites" (2007).

Hargittai mentions that "students who have at least one parent with a graduate degree are more represented on Facebook, Xanga, and Friendster than they are in the aggregate sample, while students whose parents have less than a high school education are disproportionately users of MySpace", which is to say that North American socioeconomic divisions are reflected online by which SNS you join: MySpace for the working class, Facebook for the middle class.  This accords with what danah boyd observed in the blogpost that stirred up quite a lot of online reaction, partly because I think Americans don't like to be reminded that class exists in their country (and as another tangent, I'd actually made the exact same observation as her that Facebook and MySpace users were clearly being segregated according to class and had even been half-assedly formulating a blogpost on the subject, though it's just as well that she broached the subject first since she reaches more people and she actually used more than 50% of her ass when writing the post).

Basically, the point of the article is that who joins and stays with SNSes can be somewhat predicted by various demographic factors, and that we might be seeing the rise of a new social divide, this time between those who use SNSes and those who don't.

The second link is a story about how people inadvertently flock and follow leaders when they are in crowds, such that 5% of crowdgoers can nonverbally direct the movements of the other 95%.  Qué interesante, you say.  Nunca he pensado sobre esta tema.  That's not what I really wanted to point out, though.  Instead, look at the bottom of the press release and see that there are buttons for you to share the story on both Facebook and Digg.  I'm somewhat impressed that the University of Leeds' publicity department is on top of this Web 2.0 thing, since university websites are usually not that up with the haps online.  Perhaps even SNSes are approaching mainstream-ness (mainstreamity? I think I like this one more).

Still, nothing can top my last item, this time coming from the antropologi.info blog: it seems that Owen Wiltshire, a grad student at Concordia University in Montreal, is planning on studying how anthropologists who study online social phenomena form online communities themselves.  Yes, you read that right, an online anthropologist is studying how online anthropologists work with each other online.  It's so deliciously reflexive.  He's also got his own blog, so I might just pop over sometime and say whattup.

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 08:42 PM to Internet Stuff , Stuff Found Online | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From The International Herald Tribune:

On the cusp of economic history

Is economic history about to change course? Among the chieftains of politics and industry gathering in Davos for the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, a consensus appears to be building that the capitalist system is in for one of those rare and tempestuous mutations that give rise to a new set of economic policies . . .

"The pendulum between market and state is swinging back," Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, said by telephone before traveling to Davos. "The year 2008 is a crucial year that could end up setting the tone for some time to come. What we need is an ideological mutation without falling into the trap of protectionism."

One such mutation in mainstream economic policy took place after the Depression of 1929, which led to a protectionist interlude and then gave rise to Keynesian demand-side policies and eventually the welfare state. Another took place following the oil price shocks in the 1970s, which refocused policy makers' attention to supply-side measures and strengthened those pushing for privatization and free markets as the best way to stimulate growth.

When students of economics open their history books in 2030, they might read about 2008 as the year when the groundwork was laid for a re-regulation of certain markets, a more redistributive tax system and new forms of international policy coordination, economists say.

I don't know, isn't this just more of the classic cycles we're supposed to expect from capitalism?  But having said that, it would be unfair to claim that nothing has changed and that we're stuck in a perpetual circle of death and reincarnation.  Perhaps the roller coaster is a more apt metaphor - things go up and down, but they never go backwards.  After all, the environment is in a more precarious position today and the emerging economies of China and India are far stronger than they have been in the recent past.

So, while no one can expect the abolition or even the gradual phasing-out of the capitalist nation-state system, perhaps we will see some encouraging moves towards allowing more people around the world the chance not to get gang-raped out of nowhere by economic policies they never agreed to.  And perhaps some of these people might be more open-minded to an alternative to the current political-economic system?  Hope springs eternal.

By the way, that picture of Davos just makes me even happier that I'm in Costa Rica right now.  Man, it looks cold up there (although it's snowing so it must be relatively warm, like only -5 Celsius).

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 09:23 AM to Stuff Found Online , The News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Language Log: No Dogs or Canadians? 

This is rather bizarre, but apparently in the US, the term "Canadian" is apparently increasingly being used as a replacement derogatory term for "black people".  It's ideal for cryptoracists because it doesn't sound racist.  "Damn Canadians" doesn't sound like a racial slur, after all.

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 09:26 AM to Language | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From Foreign Policy:

The World’s Top Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have made the world seem like a small place after all. But even on the Internet, persistent language barriers and cultural differences mean that the planet may not be quite as interconnected as you think.

Coming to Costa Rica, I found out first-hand how parochial the Anglosphere really is.  It's easy to over-estimate the global reach of English when you're immersed in it, but one must remember that the majority of the world doesn't speak the language of Shakespeare.  The Anglosphere might seem all-encompassing in its totality, but all you have to do is change your linguistic environment and suddenly people are talking about celebrities you've never heard of and singing along to classic songs you never knew existed.

As offline, so also online.  I'm only now dipping my toe into the Spanish Internet and it's rather fascinating to discover the differences Spanish Internet talk has from standard written Spanish (for instance, hardly anyone uses the upside-down symbol things like ¿).

This article from Foreign Policy is a nice round-up of the state of social networking sites in different language zones of the world.  I hadn't known that Orkut was big in India or that its membership had plateaud, and neither did I know that Facebook was also big in the Arab countries, nor that Skyrock even existed.  And finally I found out who's been using Hi5.  Anyway, do read the article, it's only 2 pages long and is a good corrective to English-language ghettoism online.

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 09:05 PM to Internet Stuff , Stuff Found Online | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I posted this on the board of the Facebook group Asian Media and Contemporary Cultures but it seemed a shame to just leave it there where only group members could see it.  Lately I've mostly been using Facebook to do stuff that I used to use this blog for, it's just that I've mostly been writing personal stuff (yesterday I visited the rainforest, etc.) and it all seemed to insubstantial to put up on what I consider to be a serious blog.  Anyway, the short essay:

I tried to write this comment in response to the posted article "Communities Dominate Brands: As web content migrates to mobile internet" but it was apparently too long.

Anyway, I wrote that such rah-rah essays extolling the future within our grasp never sit quite well with me because they never mention what happens to people who can't join the revolution.

As a grad student in Canada I couldn't afford to surf the Internet on my phone (that first phone bill was a shocker), and now in Costa Rica I don't even have the option. The government has a monopoly on telecommunications, there are long waiting lists for cellphone numbers and long lineups outside the govt. offices when new numbers are added, and most phones are 5-8 years old. Only in November did ICE (the Instituto Costarricense de Electiricad, which despite the name handles more than just electricity) sign an agreement to allow the use of Blackberries in the country and it was specifically mentioned that it was for the convenience of foreign executives in Costa Rica, not local ones.

This situation has come about mostly through the exigencies of politics, as in many other parts of the world. All of my fellow development workers stationed in Africa that I've talked to have mentioned how much slower the Internet is there than they're used to, and I remember being warned against using Flash in my pre-departure training because it would slow down the computers of developing country users to unacceptable levels. Perhaps viewing the mobile Internet on a PC will be akin to watching colour programs on a black and white tv, but I can't help feeling that we're watching the further economic segregation of the Internet, as indeed already exists for the global high-speed vs. dial-up divide.

Time will tell, I suppose, as it always does. Anyway, what are other people's experience on the subject of digital divides vis-a-vis Asia and other parts of the world?

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 07:55 AM to Internet Stuff , Stuff Found Online | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So here are some blogs that I've discovered in my time away from blogging and some a little more recently:

• Passport, the blog of Foreign Policy's editors.  It's all about foreign affairs.  The blog is okay, I can take it or leave it.
• Managing Globalization, from the International Herald Tribune.  Jagdish Bhagwati and Jeffrey Sachs are apparently attached to it.  This blog is slightly more appealing to me since it's all about the big G.  It's especially interesting reading the interview with Jeremy Hobbs, the executive director of Oxfam International, since he talks about the role of NGOs, a subject near and dear to me right now.
• The US State Department's blog.  It's pretty much the National Geographic-y depoliticized (ha!) PR copy you'd expect.  It's no accident that it sounds like National Geographic, since the magazine itself was founded with the express purpose of American aggrandizement.  But still, interesting to look at in a car accident sort of way.
• And speaking of car wrecks, what about the Private Sector Development Blog run by the World Bank?  Check out the subtitle: A market approach to development thinking.  If that doesn't sound off neoliberal alarm bells in your head, then you should get your internal capitalism detector checked.
• Continuing on with the theme of disaster, I've just now seen that the IMF has a new blog called the Public Financial Management Blog.  Considering the low point the IMF is in right now, I guess every little bit helps in convincing the public that it's relevant.  But as far as I'm concerned, the sooner Bretton Woods is dismantled, the better.
• While we're dismantling, why not dismantle the whole thing?  Down with nation-states, up with anarchism, says Molly'sBlog. It's more activist-oriented than the usual theory blogs on my RSS feed, but it's certainly helped me get a better grasp on the intellectual underpinnings of anarchism.
• There's also International Political Economy Zone, a blog devoted to, well, international political economy.  It comes at things from a Marxist-influenced angle.  It's only because of the blog that I understood what exactly the subprime mortgage problem was--briefly, banks gave money in the form of mortgages to people who didn't have the income to meet their mortgage payments, a.k.a. the less well-off, a.k.a. the subprime.
• Lastly, there is the Institute for Canadian Citizenship's blog, cBook.  With articles in French and English, the blog explores issues related to citizenship: multiculturalism, surveillance, policy issues, recipes for tossed salad, etc (NB: one of these things is not true).  One of my friends writes for them, do check them out; judging from their very empty comments queue, they need all the readers they can get.

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 01:10 AM to Stuff Found Online | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in the middle of reading a roundtable discussion between a bunch of anthropologists of Europe talking about the New Right in European politics.  It's from 2003, so some of their stuff is out of date, but it's still mostly spot on.  In the middle of their discussion, the panelists start talking about the hybridity and border-crossing stuff that's been popular recently.  They discuss two discourses on the issues.  The first speaks of border-crossing in terms of leakiness, where miscegenation--whether cultural, biological, or economic--is threatening, while the second celebrates the hybridity and cultural enrichment found from mixing different cultures.

As Jonathan Friedman asserts, though, the discourse of fear is produced by people at the bottom and middle of a society, while the discourse of celebration comes mostly from the top:

JONATHAN:

I have it very clearly. Look, I’ve never found a working-class hybrid who celebrated his mixture. I’ve never found even an example of it in ethnographies. It’s always by interpretation. There is one very, very strong kind of discourse of hybrid that’s being produced at the top. And I have hundreds of examples of it. What I’m interested in is saying, ‘Okay, these things are located, they’re positioned. They’re interested discourses in the sense that there are interests behind them’. I’m not sure exactly what interests they are, but I think they’re pretty clear. And these have nothing to do with Left and Right. The people at the top are producing hybridity: I don’t want to classify them as Left or Right. But there is a long history of colonial hybrid discourse being reproduced at the top. I don’t want to be stuck in how I represent that. I don’t want to have to represent that saying that ‘this is good, and the other is bad’.

THOMAS [HYLLAND ERIKSEN]:

But I’d like to challenge that, Jonathan. You’re probably right, that the people who celebrate hybridity are, as it were, middle class, I mean, members of the chattering classes, basically. The Salman Rushdies and so on. But those are the people who always open their mouths about anything, so that’s neither here nor there. Christopher Lasch belongs to the same class himself, now doesn’t he? But if you look at the people who are uncomfortable, and who present the kind of leakage that Sarah mentioned, and who are anomalies, and who don’t fit in and so on, a lot of them would belong to the lower ranks of society. I mean, all the illegal immigrants who make New York go ’round, who New York is completely dependent on in order to survive as a city. And the Pakistanis in Norway who spend three months a year in Pakistan, and who, you know, bring women back and who have this traffic in marriage and so on.

JONATHAN:

Yes, but what does this have to do with hybridities? You compare Gloria Anzaldúa, of border crossing ideology. She’s an author, and then there are hundreds of people who write about her, it’s an industry. It’s an industry of border crossing and of hybridity. But then in Lund we have people who have worked on illegal immigrants in California. Those immigrants are scared shitless of the border. There’s no celebration of hybridity, they haven’t got time for that. They’re not into those kinds of problems at all. They’re into very different kinds of issues. They’re trying to survive. Hybridity is a leisure issue.

-----

Well, take that Appadurai.  I already had bunches of stuff critiquing cosmopolitanism, but this roundtable discussion is certainly easier to read.  After this part the panelists went back to discussing the New Right in Europe.  Anyway, it's certainly food for thought.

Reference:

''Anthropologists are talking' about the new right in Europe',
Ethnos, 68:4, 554 - 572

Posted by Jesse de Leon at 11:14 PM to Research , Theory , Thesis Stuff | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)