Facebook With Chinese Characteristics

Facebook.com, for those of you who don\'t know, get someone in college to explain for you. Facebook has not expanded into other countries, leaving a very successful business model and idea to be picked up by other people here. The result is xiaonei.cn for those of you who want to look, and it is definitely facebook with Chinese characteristics.

The first thing you notice is that the colors are exactly the same as facebook, the menus in the same places and mean almost exactly the same thing. They have your personal page with your interests (爱好), music, contact info, etc. There is the wall, your list of friends and their pictures, your groups, events, etc. Its in the differences that xiaonei.cn becomes really interesting. The biggest difference, painfully evident upon visiting most people\'s pages, is that you can change the background of your page, adding a background picture and even music. Its quite amazing. You also have a \'blog\' that appears above your wall posts which some people use a little like a xanga, but others don\'t update. The other huge thing is that you can see how many people have looked at your page and who they are. For most people this is probably not that relevant, but then there are those people that aspire to the list of the most visited profiles. I saw a girl at beijing university (luckily the list isn\'t strictly ranked by numbers so you can\'t know for who has the most) who had 50,000 hits.

I started a xiaonei.cn profile, of course. All you need is a Chinese email address, which I got for free, not a college one. It\'s really fun to figure out the language on the site and type ridiculously simple wall posts.

In different news, last night was a Kareoke night, which is a perfect activity for kids who want to have fun but half don\'t want to drink (female roommates). We stayed out till 4, and because we\'re so far east that means the sun was rising, aiyah. But that did let me watch the first half of the Italy/Ukraine game. Today we\'re off to a big tourist park for a picnic lunch, tonight perhaps a massage, and then back to the books.

Talking about the priveledges of a small, liberal arts College

Many of the roommates here are very interested in what college life is like in America, understandably. They like to ask questions about how big our classes are, our schools are, what the dorms are actually like as far as singles, doubles, genders, hours, etc, what the food is like, relationships with professors, etc. Basically everything one might get asked when hosting a prospective student. Now, I am only speaking from what I know from friends, because I have obviously not attended a large state school, but I\'m going to venture to say that HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) is much more similar to a large state school than it is to a small liberal arts college. I think this double tier of differences makes describing school in America difficult.

A few obvious similarities: There are 50,000 students at HIT. Dorms are all single sex, and I think some significant proportion at some state schools are. Tuition here is very inexpensive ($500-$1000 per year), much cheaper but comparable to instate at most state universities. Social life here is organized around your 社团(she tuan) which are groups close to co-ed fraternities of around 100 people that most people choose to join. They organize social events, speakers, live together (but split by gender), and generally form tight groups which correspond somewhat to the fraternity culture of big universities which seems to be as alive as ever. And also your major is very important for who you know and see regularly here. Here you choose your major before you arrive at school, which I think is true for most technical programs at American Universities.

A funny story about choosing majors in china. You actually choose them (I\'m pretty sure) when you get the results from the national college entrance exam. They give you a list of the universities that you can attend based on your grade (pretty efficient, huh?). I was talking with a student here who chose a major that turned out to be something very different from what he thought he chose, which apparently isn\'t an uncommon ocurance. He picked 电子科技与技术 from the list, which literally translates to \'electrical science and technology\' but actually is the word for \'laser\' which he didn\'t know at the time. Now his entire academic life at school is devoted to studying lasers, plus the required courses on Chinese political philosophy.

Anyway, I got into a bit of a discussion with him about how they were probably getting a very distorted image of American education, since such a small percentage of Americans attend small, liberal arts colleges, and yet I think 13 out of the 16 of us CET students here do, or did. Sometimes I feel a little guilty because I think the American system of education, with experience based learning and an emphasis on individual, original thought is superior in most ways. This is somewhat reinforced by the fact that large foreign firms operating in China prefer most of their employees who do creative or high level work to be western educated. But at the same time it does feel good to describe the richness of the different kinds of education philosophy (or political systems or rural lifestyles) possible in our pluralistic society.

Old Harbin

First of all, in an almost comical conclusion to my lengthy explanation of buying a cellphone and all my great plans for using it, I lost it. It was very stupid; we were riding in cab and it fell out of my pocket. I noticed about a minute after we got out, ran back, but the taxi had taken off. Not exactly what I had in mind for the phone, but really, what can you do? I\'m not sure if I\'m going to get another, maybe a second hand one this time, but I think I\'ll wait to see if it\'s a pain not having one. So it goes.

The Chinese students here have been very busy these last few days as they cram for the big exam which starts right now, 10:00 am Sunday morning. Every first year has a big exam on Mao Zedong theory, second years have Deng Xiaoping and third years have a big test on Marx, which along with a month of mandatory military training, forms the core of the state\'s presence in higher education. I read the first page of their book on Deng, which was full of the words I\'ve been learning like \'system\', \'reform\', \'economic pace\' and \'possessing Chinese characteristics\', and found it rather readable. The introduction basically said \'China has made two attempts to establish a Socialist country. Mao tried once and it didn\'t quite work out. Deng\'s theory, with the help of Mao\'s theory, is succeeding in working towards a socialist system.\' I might try and read more of the book, because you have to admit, its interesting to see what the official line is on balancing Mao, Deng, opening and reform with an inflexible political (although not government) system over the 57 years of Communist power.

Anyway, yesterday we all piled into a bus and headed off to the old quarter of Harbin. It is a few streets by the river that were part of the original city here, mostly built by the Russian. The city of Harbin is actually only about 100 years old and dates back to when the Russians were asked to assist in building a rail link from China to Vladivostock port. In that respect it is a little like Shanghai, started by foreigners as a purely economic center but now fully integrated back into China. While this area of China was the industrial heartland for most of the first half of the 20th century thanks to Russian and Japanese development here (whether invited or not), it has since been eclipsed by the booming coastal cities in the south and now has fallen back a little to be the trading hub of the very rich agricultural lands of the northeast.

Our roommates took a few hours off from studying Deng theory to come along and we all got out to wander around the streets. It looked like a bustling part of the city, the buildings were mostly run down Russian styled ones, and there were a lot of Weiger (from xinjiang province/muslim chinese) people working in the outdoor markets. We walked right down to the Songhua River to skip some stones and take pictures. The river\'s a few hundred meters wide here, flowing slowly to the north, and it looks quite pretty until you get right up to it and then you see a little bit of oily streaks here, the usual old plastic bag there, and then you realize its like just about every other river in China – something to be used and considered pretty but not worth spending the money to clean up. But maybe its not worth putting money into river clean up when it\'s necessary to pay much needed teacher\'s salaries, or subsidize food so even the poorest have no problem eating, or even more necessary, building another large electronics store. And of course oily streaks don\'t stop the young men from wading out into with their fishing nets to catch a few entrees for a near by restaraunt. My final judgement: the river \'possesses Chinese characteristics\'，具有中国特色。

The riverside is several miles of parks with wide walking paths and trees which actually are quite nice if you don\'t see the bits of garbage everywhere. We wandered into one park complete with a playground, children\'s slides and a WWII tank, WWII plane and a more recent fighter jet sitting on cement blocks for the kids to climb on. (You\'re just going to have to live with that description, I can\'t explain why they were there.) We met for dinner, enjoying the amazing variety of foods here. I think there is more variety in Northeaster food here than there is all of the \'American\' restaraunts put together. I did stay well awy from the fish though.

Buying a Shouji

Todays\' Chinese word of the day is: shouji. It literally means \'hand\' and \'machine\' and put together that translates to \'cellphone\'. Cellphones are a way of life here, probably used more than Americans use theirs. In addition to staying in constant touch for locating one another or gossiping, young Chinese are constantly using their txt messaging to write short little notes. My roommate uses his a lot to keep in touch with his girlfriend, maybe writing her as many as a dozen txt messages a day, and once I even saw him in the morning, sleeping with his phone in hand. I couldn\'t tell if he had fallen asleep while using it or if he was just keeping it close at hand in case he recieved a txt while he slept. Many Chinese even have two cellphones. A cellphone that can call all of China, or even America if you\'re willing to pay the rate, is probably a little more common, but lots of people also have a local phone. It\'s a seperate phone that has a seperate calling plan and is extremely cheap to make or recive calls from the same city but can\'t be used to make or recive any from outside.

With all the hype, I decided to buy a shouji to see if txt-ing was really as addicting as it seems. My roommate, Yaorui and I went to the nearest large department store, walkinig past the long rows of airconditioners, hot plates, TVs and cameras till we got to the long, shiny display cases full of cell phones. Because here you buy the phone seperate from the plan, there\'s a huge market to cell every brand and every model of phone. There were literally hundreds of choices, and the fuwuyuan (service person) immediately wanted to show me the best phone there, costing about $400, it was very slim, had a mp3 player, zoom camera, huge color screen, everything you could ever want in a phone, and of course it was very shuai (handsome/cool). I of course told him I was only here for two months and wanted something on the cheaper end.

After about half an hour of intense discussion between me, Yaorui and the very anxious fuwuyuan, examining about a dozen different models, I finally decided on....you guessed it, the cheapest one. Motorolo C118, for those interested. It cost 400 RMB, or about $50, has a black and white screen and is the most basic cell phone I\'ve ever seen, which is perfect. Next came the hard part, buying a cell phone plan. It is possible to buy plans (SIM card, phone number, and minutes) at most street stalls, but the school has an office that sells them too. As we walked up to the counter the girl behind it gave us a lazy look. Lazy doesn\'t really describe it, it was more of a how-dare-you-disturb-my-lazy-afternoon kind of look. As an employee of basically the government (government - state run university - university run cell phone service desk), she was in sharp contrast to the fuwuyuan of the department store.

I picked out a phone number, (13703607956) based on how many 3s, 6s and 9s it had in it (lucky numbers here), and then came the hard part. As someone who\'s obviously not Chinese, she was surprised that I had a student ID from this university. We had to photo copy that for her, and then she needed an govt. issued ID. Obviously this would have been my passport, but for somereason she and her boss needed a citizen ID. I had to explain to them that we don\'t have that in America, which left no impression on them as evidenced by their blank stares. We ended up getting the phone plan under Yaorui\'s name, using his student ID and citizen ID. I feel this was a ton of identification just for a cell phone plan that is entirely prepaid, but who am I to say.

So now I have a shouji, which i\'ve been using a lot to txt in Chinese, mostly with Yaorui, about mostly logistics. But I think the process is another little step to go through to become that much more at home here and that much more fluent in the cultural as well as obviously the language pecularities of university students in China.

Diving in Headfirst
Today was the first day of class. Yesterday we took our language pledge (\'i pledge not to speak any language other than mandarin...\'), met our teachers, got our first homework and met our roommates.

My roommate\'s name is Yao2 Rui4. He is from the province south of here, near Dalian, and he studies something having to do with electrical engineering, I haven\'t figured it out exactly yet. But he\'s really nice and this evening I got to meet a few of his friends, we all hung out in our room and chatted for a while about music, movies, etc. My new word of the day (one of many, but if I had to pick one,) is dao4 ban3, which literally means pirated, as in DVDs. It feels so good to just sit around and chat in Chinese, even if more than half of the \'chatting\' is them trying to explain to me what they mean, but still, very linghou (free, smooth).

Today we started class. I have 4 classes, each fairly distinct, unlike last summer\'s fully coordinated and integrated program. First was Business Chinese, learning long lists of shengci (vocab) like \'efficiency\', \'economic system\', \'financial loss\' and \'to establish a unified system with special characteristics\'. My other class is a literature class where we read various short stories written in modern China (for Chinese readers, not foreign students), which looks like it will be my hardest class by a bit. We also have one-on-two class, which is mostly pronounciation, with which I defiinitely have a few distinct problems. Probably the one I\'m most excited about and nervous about is the one-on-one class, or the research class. I met my professor already, and she seems very cool, and her specialty is very close to the research topic I chose. I will be looking at Chinese perceptions of westernization, how they feel the west is encroaching on (or brightening) their lives here in a fairly out-of-the-way city. She studies how technology affects society, so I\'m also very curious to hear more about her work.

Last night we went out to a restaraunt with our new roommates. There were about 12 of us sitting around a big table with a big lazy susan in the middle. This restaraunt\'s specialty is a kind of northeastern dish that consists of either ribs or leg bones of pig stacked in a heaping pile on a plate, with bits of meat hanging off them. They give you a plastic glove with your chopsticks and you just grab a big hunk. It feels very neanderthal, especially to someone who\'s three years of vegetarianism is on a brief two month haitus, but I\'d be lying if I said it didn\'t taste good. Then we started toasting each other as if we were old Chinese businessmen, trying to make the people around us drink more and more by doing a ganbei (literally, dry/empty your cup) with them. I didn\'t drink that much, but when I came home and started doing my homewwork I lasted about 20 minutes and then fell right asleep at 10:00 or so. This morning I had to reassure my roommate that this is not my xiguan (habit), that I really stay up later and he shouldn\'t worry that he\'s stuck with a nerdy, early-to-bed American. But the combination of jumping right into the language pledge, meeting the roommate, running for over an hour then playing an hour of soccer, trying to homework for the first time in a month and not quite being adjusted to the time zone meant I was out like a light for the next ten hours. So it goes.

We arrived in Beijing at about 11:00 pm last night and got into the hotel fairly
exhausted. I intended to hold my promise to see Paul, Grace and David from
last summer, so I rallied the troops, fought off travel fatigue and took a taxi
accross the city. Conversation was awkward, I\'m more rusty than I thought.

We ate jiaozi (dumplings) at a little restaraunt where I celebrated my 21st
birthday last summer and watched Tunisa vs. Soudi Arabia on the bigscreen
outside on the sidewalk. Sanlituan has changed a lot in a year, there\'s now a
huge mall where there wasn\'t anything before.

Today has been a day of walking around the city, doing nothing in particular. I
was happy to be a good tour guide to a few of the kids here, ordering the
yuxiangqiezi (fish-like eggplant) like a pro, and walking around Tiananmen
square. But tonight we\'re off to the train station for the overnight trip to
Harbin, where the adventure really begins.

12 hours in soft sleeper, woohoo!

Arriving in Harbin, or Ha1-er3-bin1, yesterday morning was like stepping into a new world. From the train windows we watched the large, green fields pass by with the occasional factory or highway dotting the landscape. Other parts of China, around Beijing and Xi\'an tend to be much drier and less fertile and I was expecting this part of the northeast to be even drier but instead there is rain! Although it had just rained when the train arrived the sky was already half blue and the air was so fresh. I don\'t want to speak too soon but I think the air pollution and heat aren\'t going to be as bad as Beijing.

Breakfast was yet another surprise. We stopped at a little cafe which could have been in San Francisco. It was yellow stucco, there were nice tables outside on the patio and a trendy looking sign that read \'Hamamas Kofi Haus\'. The food was European, with coffee, bread, cheese, jelly and fruit. I commented to the shifu (proprieter) that I liked it and she told me it was a Papua New Guinean establishment. I smiled and nodded, confused as all hell as to how it was connected to Papua New Guinea, but figured that was her problem.

The day consisted of orientation, a campus tour, the entrance exam, arranged dinner, shopping for toiletries, etc. In the fangbian shitang (convenient cafeteria) I ate what must have been the cheapest lunch ever, 8 jiao (10 jiao to 1 yuan, which is 12 cents) for a plate of dumplings. Apparently in the inconvenient but main and better tasting shitang the food is cheaper.

Then a couple of us went out to a little bar to watch Argentina beat the crap out of Serbia and Montenegro. The bar was a foreigner\'s hang out, but had a healthy group of Chinese students that we talked to. One guy, we didn\'t get his name, had long-ish hair, wore a Nirvana T-shirt, and asked me immediately if I was Christian. I said sorry, no, and we proceeded to talk about American music, futbol and the city of Harbin, switching back and forth between Chinese and English. He was duly impressed that Wang Li Hong (a famous pop singer in Taiwain) had graduated from my school and that he and I had the same Chinese teacher. Then I had a bit of a conversation, this time all in Chinese, with a girl from Germany, going to school in Vienna, but doing a year of study abroad in Harbin. Being fairly jet-lagged still, I didn\'t stay to talk to the handful of Australians, the Bulgarian, a couple brits, a few Russians and the other Chinese who all happily were squeezed in, two to a chair, into this little bar.

Technology = Incredible

Technology is pretty amazing. I'm not only writing this while gazing out the
window at the Brooks range of Alaska, I'm also logging on to the internet to
post it right now. Traveling at 600 miles per hour, 40,000 feet up, apparently
they said 'why not have wireless, highspeed interenet?'

I had a wonderfully touristy day of 'urban hiking' around New York, seeing
ground zero, Wall St., Battery Park, Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. All
this was interspersed with stopping outside bar and restaurant windows to watch
a little world cup. The US lost to the Czech Republic, no body was happy.

I met up with a few friends from ACC last summer for some Mexican food, going
out to a restaurant as if we hadn't seen each other for a week, not several
months. They're all working in the city for the summer, or some part of the
summer, and I feel like I'm taking it easy, avoiding the working life to back
and 'study' for the summer. I guess that's just a reflection of how much I've
come to love classes this past year, that I consider studying the polar
opposite of working on a scale of enjoyable to less desirable.

Todays' traveling has been great so far, took the bus from Grand Central to JFK
and checked in without a problem. All of the summer CET students that are
taking the group flight are here, which means most of the 80 students in the
Beijing program. I met a few in line and then saw a large group of bright eyed
college kids sitting together at the gate. There wasn't any doubt about who
they were. I did meet 3 other students who are going to Harbin, and things are
looking great.

Now I just need to convince myself that it's 8:20 am and that I've slept for
three hours (instead of thinking its 8:30 pm and I took a long afternoon nap).
Luckily Japan air has a dozen movies as well as Nintendo games for every seat!
I'm going to play so much Tetris and Space Invaders my head will fall off.

Endless Conversation

I've just gotten to NYC from the Williams reunion. It has been an overwhelming
week of excellent conversations. I feel like in many ways its been a nonstop
conversation about China, and me, and politics, but mostly Williams in all its
forms. But there's just been so many. I went to the class of '71's political
discussion which was very enlightening, and then expected to sit in the coffee
shop and chill for a while, but Matt Allen sat down and we talked about
philosophy and the environment and politics for a while. It was time to go to
NY then so I had to say goodbye, and I got to the bus station and immediately
started having a long and in depth conversation with Diana Jaffe about
everything, interrupted only by a short nap on the 5 hour ride to the city.
But we kept talking and then talked with her parents for a while until it was
time for bed. That means I've been conversing for the last 12 hours straight
with only minimal interruption.

What does that even mean? People talk about the age of technology which means
time is shortened and there is no time for real communication anymore, and yet
I have days like this when there are so many interesting people to talk to that
I see in person that I don't even have time to read the news, much less the
books I'd like to get to.

It's really wonderful, and I know that China is going to be quite the shock in
some ways, because the language barrier is going to make it harder to really
communicate the way I like to, and I'll maybe resort more to writing thoughts
down. But I feel the people in the program, both Americans and Chinese are
going to have amazing things that we all want to talk about, and we'll just
have to see where it goes.

I'm nervous, in a healthy and vivacious sort of way, and mostly just excited.
Worried that I might explode because the pace of my life has been at what feels
like full speed for so long, but I really feel like now is the time to keep the
pedal down and really see what this engine can do.

Sneakers and Sweatshops

Here's a little email echange that I thought would be intersting to share here.

Hi Morgan,

I've been thinking about what you told me--that one of your main concerns is the disconnect between American consumers and the products they buy. As you said, we often don't know how or where are products are made, who makes them, how they get to us, etc. Well, I've got a problem. I'm planning to buy some new clothes, but I'm having trouble finding relatively cheap stuff, especially shoes, made in the USA. Do you make an effort to buy clothing made here? Basically, I'm wondering what you do, or would do, about this problem. Check out the following...
http://www.chucksconnection.com/articles/ConverseArt07.html

When are you leaving for China? Do you plan to do any investigations into workers' rights there? Visit sweatshops? Of course I've read, seen, heard stories about the horrible conditions. I'm curious to know what you find.

Hi Paul,

I'm flattered that you thought to ask me. That's an interesting article, although 12 years old now and I dont think New Balance is still manufacturing in the U.S., although I could be wrong. One company (or activisim group) that comes to mind here is adbusters, which makes a shoe that is 'brandless', called the blackspot sneaker. http://adbusters.org/metas/corpo/blackspotshoes/ They look sort of badass, although they probably make more of a statement than you or I want to wear around every day, and they're not athletic shoes. I've bought used athletic shoes before but they don't last as long, so I generally loosen my morals when it comes to ankle support, like the article says.

For almost all my clothes now I've been going to the Women's Exchange or other second hand stores. I save money and I support the industry of reuseing which is by far the least polluting and least impacting economy out there. Basically if I can buy something outside of the corporate economy I will. It's not because I hate big corporations that make money, and its not even that I hate sweatshops - some are bad but others give people work who wouldn't otherwise have it - my biggest concern is just that consumers need to assert their power over the company and the brand because too often it happens the other way around. If we are more concientious about the stuff we buy, and get it on our own terms, then we own our stuff instead of our stuff owning us. The mass of Americans (and middle class Chinese) who are owned by their stuff is the biggest perversion of modernization.

No, I'm not going to do any investigation of sweatshops in China, partly because its the wrong part of the country for it, but mostly because I just don't see this issue as being as important as the demand for cheap products. I will be looking at Chinese consumer practices, how they (like us) are buying more and more stuff to create personal identity and establish some unique culture in the face of the onslought of mass communication and the global economy's reality of bland uniformity.

-morgan-

Gloriousness of the Mountains

Kundera speaks of the unbearable lightness of being because it is poignant and wrenching and somehow uniquely human. But there is also the buoyant lightness of being. There are days when the stars melt away in the morning mist, the sun inflates you like a balloon and every step you take adds little pumps of happiness into your deepest being. The cool breeze washes away the cares of the past and the future, but it is not escaping, it is supposed to be that way. You are balanced on so many levels of consciousness that the levels themselves seem to be in harmonious choir, humming the anthem of a beautiful day. And you might stop and wonder for a little while why every day can't be like this, but it is only a brief thought because on these days you are detached enough from 'reason' that this doesn't even seem a valid question.

I was biking down a street around sunset on such a day and I saw a bit of a mountain rising up out of the mists. I couldn't see its base or its summit, but I knew it from the many times I have seen it before. Nevertheless, that mountain struck me and looked into my eyes in a way that few people ever have, and seemed to caress my heart in a way that I've known and lived for since I became a thinking person. I wondered why I love mountains so much, and I think I have a bit more of an answer because of today. It is because mountains have layers and depth which they bear to the world, offer up to be molded, used, marveled at from afar and struggled with at close range. Flat places seem a paltry option, where things are hidden, static, uniform and safe, qualities that throw my soul out of balance. It is only when one rises up bravely, regardless of the insurmountable forces wearing away; tearing, pulling and limiting, that we can expose more of our layers to the choir of life and let the harmony of our beings ring out in all the more complex and wonderful expressions we are capable of. May we never forget how amazing mountains are and how necessary they are to us.

All that STUFF

Ok, I usually try and refrain from making sweeping social judgements about the intelligent and hard working (yada yada yada,) students of Williams college. But when I see the mountains of crap that piles up in the dumpsters outside dorms this time of year, it just makes me feel awful inside for so many reasons.

How much stuff is getting thrown out that is in perfectly usable condition, only the owner was too lazy to find a new owner for it? How much of that was used once all year, and is now cast away as too old or no longer worth the space? How much does it really made your life better here at Williams?

Yes, I'm talking about extra rugs and funny looking pillows, blow up chairs and halogen lamps, strings of Christmas tree lights and garbage bags full of t-shirts, mountains of books and entire couches left out in the rain. Why are you throwing these perfectly good things away? Can it possibly be that we like the act of acquiring the stuff and the value that comes from bringing home something new and flashy more than we actually like keeping them around and dealing with the space they take up?

Its like this is the dirty little secret of our rampant consumer lifestyle, rearing its ugly head for one short spell of wasteful glory, getting it all out of the way in a few painful days, so that we can return next year with more 'cool new things' from home to fill up the new spaces we'll have. And what's worse is that Williams is just one of thousands of colleges and universities whose dorms are emptying in the same way as we speak, all carelessly filling up dumpsters and thinking about trendy things to bring to the dorm next year.

Well, I'm grossed out. I'm making a point of picking up as much as I can and saving it until it can be given or sold to someone who will value this stuff for what it is. And please, don't feed me back stories of how you've 'saved this item since grade school' or 'aren't throwing anything away'. I know you good people are out there and I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the people who fill up the dumpsters, what do you have to say about your excessive waste!

A World Without the Poor

Just step back and consider for a moment a world in which there are no poor. Where everyone has enough money to not be considered poor or lacking and everyone has disposable income to spend not only on 'luxuries' but also to spend on lawyers, political rights, education, etc. Lets put the economic and sociological feasibility of this project aside for the time being because I am going to stay away from that.

Instead, consider how you would act in such a world. When you want to buy a new hot tub you have to find a way to produce the electricity needed for it. You could not build another coal power plant somewhere because the people living there wouldn't allow it, and in this world they would have the means to make that desire a reality. You couldn't even build a windmill somewhere because there would always be some active protester who didn't want the eyesore on his ridge top. Instead you'd have to either build a power plant in your community, and mine the coal from your backyard to power it. With every kilowatt put into the hot tub, you inhale a little breath of coal smoke. Suddenly the hot tub becomes less appealing.

Next lets drive to the store for some groceries. But would you think twice about getting into your car if you know gasoline costs $20 a gallon? If the people in the middle east, Colombia, Nigeria and Sudan were as well off as we are, do you think they'd be selling crude oil for as cheap as they are? No, they, and everyone, would be using more and they'd live in a society that didn't give away its resources. Just imagine if Saudi Arabia's oil reserves were under America instead, would we be giving the stuff away at $70 a barrel? No, we'd be calling it a strategic resource and trying to manage it responsibly so that we can drive gas cars long after the rest of the world is starving for good old fossile fuels.

Then you'd get to the store, maybe on your bike at this point, and go in. Maybe you feel like ham for dinner. But as you reach for the pork you begin to smell the stench of the hog farm just outside the grocery store, because after all no body else wants a hog farm stinking up their backyard unless its going to benefit them in the only particular way a hog farm can: giving them pork. I mean, the only other reason you'd have a hog farm would be to make a living, and if it came down to making $30,000 a year raising hogs or $30,000 a year sitting in a puffy chair writing political satire, which would you choose? Given a free choice I'm not sure how many people would choose the pigs.

When anyone says 'not in my back yard' it either means 'I'm rich enough that i don't have to deal with this' or 'I'm not rich enough and the only thing I can do is complain to the few people who will listen'.

A world without poor is probably not possible, but I'm no theoretical economist. What I do know is that we profess ideals of humanism and equality and hold the power of money in politics in contempt. But as Americans we often blatantly overlook how our own actions may contribute to perpetuating the poverty, pollution and corruption that plagues our supposedly developed and modern society.

Unpackaging Modernization

Unpacaging Modernization

"I don't think the Western 'packaged view of modernization is inherently flawed." - Claus Jacobson

It has been thought that modernization was a process that had a 'package' of 'natural' consequences which are inherent in this self propelling process. The process is specifically the commodification of labor and resources which leads to economic development, industrialization and specialization. These are the most primary characteristics, and they are followed by the acknowledgment of a legal-rational system of government, property rights and professionalization of the work force which should in turn allow for pluralism, greater human rights, democracy (1 person, 1 vote - very individualistic), the project of the self, i.e. the notion that the goal of life is to improve one's condition, ability, position, etc. Increased value of the self should replace community and tradition with chosen groups of spatially separate friends and a scientific world view. The old ways become less relevant in the new world, and religion as a traditional institution should fade in influence: secularization. This is the my rough paraphrase of the theory of secularization, associated with modernization, put forth by Weber, Marx, Casanova and others who have said it much better than me.

But what happens when a country does not modernize in this way? The middle east, for instance, has seen enormous growth in wealth and lifestyle comforts, but have not secularized (at least as we understand it). This could be because they depend on the global economy for a lot of their production and larger financial stability. But the United States has not seen a decrease in religiosity, it has seen a growth from the low 30 years ago. Hardly becoming more marginalized or privatized, religion in America is gaining public support which throws a big monkey wrench into the traditional, liberal view of modernization.

The continued strength of conservative religion in America is a direct contradiction to the idea of modernization being a value-normative force, a connected package.

Interestingly, secularization theory operated as a self-fulfilling idea for a long time. Church leaders also resigned themselves to the eventual demise of their influence, or at least the possibility of growth. All it has taken has been the refusal of one group, the American evangelical movement, to deny the inevitability of demise and pro actively seek political-religious power, and the possibility has been opened up to many other religious groups to do the same.

I don't think secularization is the only aspect of modernity that should come under scrutiny like this. While I would like to believe that China can never become an economically modernized country while still restricting the open flow of information to its population, we must consider that scenario because the old theory is not a sure thing.

Language of Authoritarianism in America

Vaclav Havel starts off a 1979 essay on eastern European society with this image: “The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: 'Workers of the World, Unite!' Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world?... Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?”

Havel answers no, this grocer has no need to think about what it means because no one else does. In eastern Europe everyone has been raised on this stuff and they know by now that when one quotes Marx, all they are really saying is 'I am a normal person who does not want to attract attention to himself' This is called normative or performative use of language, where it only matters that it is said, not what is said. In a society imbued with propaganda it is very easy to spot the people who merely reproduce the message because it is the easiest thing to do, there is no risk or challenge. Furthermore these people are attuned to what language is propaganda and what isn't and so keep their sanity in a world split between unquestionable meaning and their own private lives.

Under the soviet system most people were neither dissidents or activists; they simply didn't care about politics. Those who did resist were often seen as dangerous to the state and dealt with. Interestingly, those who were activists and truly believed in the communist program were also disruptive to the state. Imagine your local grocer really believing the workers of the world should unite, and haranguing you about it everyday, and also doing everything in his power to unite and organize workers. Taken literally, most communist ideology was as threatening to the state if it was followed as if it was resisted. Just think of how many labor unions were smashed and strikes broken up by communist states. So in a society where no one used the constantive meaning (opposite of performative), those who did threatened the stability of the rest.

In the United States we also have a national performative language. When we talk about things like freedom, equality, democracy, free speech etc., we understand the societal (performative) meanings of these words without fully considering their constantive meanings. Lets take the right to self expression for example. I found a news report recently http://www.wpxi.com/education/8508170/detail.html about a ten year old girl who is protesting her right wear a mini-skirt to school because she needs the freedom to express her individual identity. This girl clearly uses the same argument that many others have used to win their rights of expression, but in a way that none of them intended. But because she is repeating accepted phrases that have a resonance in our society (as opposed to not wanting to wear clothes or wanting to look cute for other 4^th graders), she causes a minor disturbance.

This girl is an activist, someone who takes our uncontested American language seriously and therefore threatens what we call normal society just by upholding the values our normal society is supposedly based on. Some (probably more liberal observers) may find her argument noteworthy because it is within their own language of authority, after all, why can't 4^th graders express themselves? Others, (possibly more conservative) see this as a sign of the absurdities of the left, that things have gone too far, because they may be more likely to pick up the stand out phrases

Unlike in the Soviet Union and the communist bloc countries, we have two sources of authoritarian language, and neither is as strong or unified as the Soviets was. But because neither is as strong, they are both more believable to their respective followers. We don't know when we're being propagandized to!

I make note of an earlier 'vine post http://sheep.newsvine.com/_news/2006/04/07/159903-how-to-distinguish-between-news-and-propaganda, about republican use of key terms used repeatedly to solidify identity and allegience more than getting a point accross. The right sees a 'liberal media filter' and the left sees a 'conservative propaganda' but both sides have a much harder time seeing their own linguistic framework. (I'm heartened that most liberals don't like Michael Moore)

So what am I saying? I am not saying we are spiraling down towards some horrific low of 1984 style control through language. Nor am I saying that present phenomenon are fundamentally or significantly different than the past; proclaiming such things is, I think, the most frequently drawn false conclusion in popular social commentary. However, 'viners and the public at large would benefit for sharpening their reading eye to the use of language as an identifier and social signifier, and most importantly in our own speech, myself included, being aware of the sub-conscious use of language to strengthen our social status quo rather than express our ideas.

photo for profile

 

The creation of a blog

Entering the public domain is a profound thing. It is at once saying you have something to say that no one else is saying, and that other people will care. Now, I'm not too sure about either of these things, but of course the main purpose of this will be to share pictures and experiment with better ways of sharing various bits of information.
We'll see what happens.