5/29/2002: Spidering American culture

This isn't really an outstanding image of the day, but it's on my favorite subject: the cultural invasion.

This guy is Indian; he's in New Delhi. He comes from a remarkable culture. He's been there while Gandhi taught his people nonviolent revolution to reach independence. He's watched his country slowly pull itself up from its bootstraps, as they de-nationalized the farmers and learned to feed their people.

But that growth was slow, and so, other nations have grown right past India -- and beyond.

As a result, a country with four times the population of the U.S. watches a film generated from entirely within the American culture. The economic power of the west spawned cultural power as well -- and now, it simply bowls over cultures that aren't as productive.

Yesterday CNN had a report on bootleg tapes being sold from a Kabul market stand. Including... you guessed it, "Spider-man". It's out three weeks and kids in Afghanistan are watching it.

What will the long-term legacy be? I don't know; shamefully, I haven't seen the film yet. <i>Yeah, that means there are thousands of Afghanis who are hipper than me.</i> But I'm betting this does incredible good. I bet it introduces pro-freedom concepts to societies that never saw such a thing before. At the very least, they're suddenly seeing a super-hero who wears a burqa.

On the other hand, I saw Bollywood-produced "Monsoon Wedding" a few weeks ago. And I saw it here in Philadelphia.

Ive only ever seen one bootlegged movie (Office Space) and the quality sucked. I will never waste my bandwidth again downloading such crap.....the audio track was a full 3 seconds off the image on the screen.

It's constant imagery like Kirsten in a wet t-shirt that gives non-North American cultures the belief that North American women are easy and can be pawed at... I've travelled through India, Nepal, and South America and have seen it first hand many times.

An interesting note however, is that the Indian movie industry produces over 800 films a year... far more than what comes out of Hollywood, but of course there is no marketing campaigns of $25+ million. No special effects either, and if I had to watch 2 hours of the screeching singing of Indian women, I'd opt to see Spiderman too.

It's constant imagery like Kirsten in a wet t-shirt that gives me a reason to live.

Quote:

Originally posted by dhamsaic It's constant imagery like Kirsten in a wet t-shirt that gives me a reason to live.

Hey - I'm not saying that Kirsten in a wet t-shirt is a bad thing... not at all, I can't wait to get my hands on a screen capture and make her my wallpaper...

Speaking of wet t-shirts... found this link on Fark the other day... whoa baby... my college wasn't like this. <damnit!>

http://www.wheredaparty.com/drunk2.asp?party_id=48

Bad quality bootlegs? Sometimes, often damn good though. There is a 2 hour delay between a movie coming out in the US and it being availiable to the majoirty of the world on the net. Literally.

Wow! Literally? Is there actually any proof of this number, or are you pulling it out of your ass and tacking on "literally" to make it seem real?

I think he means it is actually, virtually available in roughly two hours ... literally.

Neal Stephenson

I doubt it's just a 2 hour delay. First they have to watch it (your 2 hours), then they have to get home and upload it to their computers.

Then it will take a while to disseminate enough for it to be easy to download (aka widely available).

As for cultural invasion, you should all have read "In the Beginning was the Command Line " by Neal Stephenson. (If you haven't, you should also read Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snowcrash, etc... ). Shamelessly stealing a few paragraphs here, but you should read the entire thing:

"We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences."

Re: Neal Stephenson

I was only kidding -- i'm agnostic.

tokenidiot want me to sent you the DVD of Lord of the Rings? I go to a school full of warez kiddies, the day a piece of software goes gold or a movie comes out, its on the net, ripped, packeged and broken up into neat 15mb chunks. 3/4 of our school has GTA3, it went gold about 4 days ago in the US. Genreally access is limited to private boards but it spreads quickly form there to individuals who pass it on and eventully on the normal web and file sharing services.
Basicly it goes
First Private sites
then private boards
then individuals and file sharing.

*ducks*

Yes. On the bright side, the nice thing about the spidering culture is that it doesn't totally wipe out other cultures. It assimilates them like the Borg.

I sit here at my Finnish monitor drinking Peruvian coffee, responding to my Aussie e-pal while my Korean TV alerts me to the events of the entire world. My Japanese phone rings to alert me that my German car is ready to be picked up after routine maintenance. So I can decide what to eat for lunch: today it's Italian, Chinese, or Indian. My wife, who is of Welsh descent, mentioned that tonight we're going over to a friend's place who is cooking Thai. So maybe I'll just have Swiss cheese on a Portuguese roll.

This is not typical in history.

For those in Philadelphia interested in Bollywood, there is a Bollywood Video place on Rt. 3. I think it's in West Philadelphia, but it could be over the city line in Upper Darby--I just remember it's on the way from Havertown to Center City.

I just saw Spiderman yesterday, and I thought it was good, and yeah, there was that scene in the rain that will overshadow all Kirsten's other nice appearances in the movie.

I have heard this about people in other countries watching American crap and seeing Kirsten Dunst in the rain, Christina Applegate on Married with Children, or Britney Spears darn near anywhere, and think that's the normal everyday behavior of American women. Starsky and Hutch being cited by oversees perps? That's a new one on me. What are we supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to do about it? I'm sure I'd make equally off-the-mark misinterpretations about something I watched from another country if I had equally little context to put it in. (I wonder if that happens with American consumers of Japanese animation?)

Re: Re: Neal Stephenson

jaguar: YESSSS!!! I LOVE THAT PICTURE!

juju: Unfortunately, a language (or more to the point, a culture) can be seen as the collective work of millions of individuals... it's a tragedy to see them die. It makes one person different from one another, and I think that having a fragmented set of cultures in the world has it's advantages.

Hm. I feel like quoting more of Stephenson's essay. Oh well.

UT, i can see what you mena but at what cost? Sure you can get 5 thai recipies, every other will dissipear over the next 10 years, while we keep the most common aspects of other cultures their whole and their soul is erroded.

I do not think that we should praise differences in cultures over mutual understanding of each other.

It just causes more of a gulf between us. People fear what they don't understand. It causes wars, like the one we have now.

Also let's say that guy lives in a low-tech country. Maybe he's a candlemaker (hypothetically). Now, isn't he more useful to society working in a factory or in an office? Sure, it's cool and all that he wastes his time on something that can be mass-produced, but he's not being as useful as he should be.

In the end though, if the guy in this picture is not familiar with my cultural values, in what way is this actually a good thing?


[note: i'm being forced to be up before the freakin' rooster has crowed, and i'm not exactly a morning person. &lt;g&gt; So I hope my tone isn't too bad... I love all you guys! ]

Jag, I agree. The very nature of the culture is that it homogenizes and an awful lot of good is lost in the process.

The upside is that the cultural notes the old cultures get in return are a fabulous deal. In a sense, the Thai "lose" because they did not come up with the idea of futures markets. So now we get Pad Gai from the Thai; in return, we give them notions like rule of law, respect for women, free elections, individual and civil rights, market economies, modern medicine, etc.

More than fair.

Actually, once you have some good pad gai, you will realize that we ripped them the fuck off.

<a href="http://lava.nationalgeographic.com/cgi-bin/pod/PhotoOfTheDay.cgi?day=02&month=5&year=02"></a>


<blockquote>
“Young Buddhist students at a monastery near Darjiling play the English game of cricket before a wall of Tibetan script. An infinite interplay of cultures, histories, and dreams propels a young nation as old as time.”

—From “India: Fifty Years of Independence,” May 1997, National Geographic magazine
</blockquote>

I immediately thought:

"Holy shit! A buddhist Obi Wan!"

Oh well...

" let's say that guy lives in a low-tech country. Maybe he's a candlemaker (hypothetically). Now, isn't he more useful to society working in a factory or in an office?"

No. You've obviously never seen or used his candles.

"Sure, it's cool and all that he wastes his time on something that can be mass-produced, but he's not being as useful as he should be."

Eeek! You think making things by hand is a "cool" waste of time? There is no other value than time? I would hope our guy has the freedom to choose an occupation/calling. Our guy might come up with a way to contribute or be useful to society that no one else has ever conceived of. It would be a scarey world to deny him that.

thankyou warch, you beat me to it.

A ha! I knew it wasn't Al Gore, Tom Jefferson invented the internet.

A classic example would be the presence of McDonalds in Paris. Here the traditional, centuries-old food traditions are being squeezed out for shit on a shingle. It's terrible.

And yet, nobody made those Frenchmen eat those burgers. It's a matter of choice, and they're choosing something that's homogenized, marketed, inexpensive, quick, styled, branded, predictable, and made with a minimum of cheap labor. There are plusses and minuses to the deal, but it's not our choice; it's the people's choice. And they have their reasons, whatever they may be. It's not like they choose it because they admire American culture. (We are still talking about the French here.)

To deny the people their choice because you don't like their choice is... well, basically the road taken by all those nations that we consider "backwards". Their cultures stagnate without the massive benefit of trade and shared innovations.

To give the people their choice is to spread political power down, away from the top and down all the way to the individuals. That results in economic growth. The economic power of a free and productive society is a remarkable thing. In the west, it has permitted the real quality of life to roughly double every generation. To put it in personal terms, my father died of cancer in 1967. A generation later, we knew enough about how to prevent cancer that he never would have gotten it. A generation and a half later, we know enough to diagnose early... and enough to cure him if he does get it.

Ignore productive culture? Do so at your own peril.

Maggie, but in most cases i can think of they aren't merging, just riding roughshod straight over.
I'd consider the loss of tousandsof years of cultural development a bad thing, wouldn't you? We all lose in situations like that. you're twisting my words to a different context.

Ok, so say you have an African tribesperson who's been totally isolated from the rest of the world. Like you see on the Discovery channel -- those folks who don't know what candy bars or wristwatches are.

Let's say we have the ability to grant this person an extensive library of books, in their native language, on modern American culture -- television, electronics, dating rituals, McDonald's, etc.

You want to deny this tribesman access to these books. Would you burn them so that he couldn't have them? Information is dangerous, after all.


Let's say he learns something from those books, like how cell phones work. He may choose to stop walking 6 hours a day to the next village in order to talk to his sister. He might instead buy a cell phone so that he can talk directly to his sister.

Is it really "better" for him to walk 6 hours a day just so he won't be infected by new information? Remember, by reading the books, this was a choice he had. He could have simply chosen to continue on with the old ways (some do -- they're called Amish). But he didn't, because he realized that our way is more efficient. That's competition of ideas.

Your first point completely misses the point of my last one and your second makes no sense at all.

The "endgame" boogeyman is just that; predictions of endless woes are common in a market economy, because it's scary because nobody is in control.

The health costs thread is a whole 'nother thread.

The species analogy is a great one, but think of it as evolution rather than extinction. A species may have many interesting traits, some of which are amazing and interesting, but the interesting traits may not be the ones that determine whether it lives or dies. We may well mourn the traits that are lost. But because the economic growth is a result of freedom and productivity, replacing tyranny and non-productivity, for every lost cultural note we are creating two new ones to replace it.

So jaguar, if losing those other cultures is such a shame, are you willing to give up your culture and adopt theirs? They left their culture because life sucked for them and they saw a better choice. You're assuming they were victims rather than people who made a choice, and an easy one at that.

So why don't you give up your computer and Internet, and electricity for that matter, and go dip candles by hand your whole life? Because that life is boring and tedious, and once they saw a better alternative they rushed to it. Sorry you lost the ability to sit in your living room and read about or watch these quaint, interesting cultures from your own creature comforts, but how else would you have it?

And how does juju's post not make sense? If you want to keep other cultures from being infected by our ideas, the only way to do that is to prevent them from having the knowledge that other cultures exist. Because let's face it, most humans when given the choice would choose the modern culture. That's why it exists: because freedom of ideas have produced it.

http://www.tobiasly.com/misc/onion/amishgiveup.html

And I'm sorry that my response annoyed you. It was late and I wasn't up for a big debate about how my link made sense as a response to your post.

I didn't delete to screw you over ... just to avoid an argument.

I didn't feel the need for you to see what I was getting at, so I just withdrew my comment that you said made no sense and was irrelevant.

Yes, globalization is inevitable, but what kind? I would never deny anyone access to surgery, candybars, or Spidey. I hope individuals and local cultures realize the power they possess to offer and demand choice (as the markets in this global market culture)and get what they need and want. I agree that the linear evolution model, is way too simple- cultures are in constant slippery shift and what is new is many times, but not always best. Bigger isnt alway better. And I hope as an American, that we can have a bit more spidering of the wisdom from those yet to be heard. More information and broader experiences should result in more choice, opportunity,innovation, and joy- for everyone's culture(s). (adding po-mo touch - I promise not to spell my name in lowercase)

Clearly my skills of explanation are going downhill or no one actually bothers to read what I post. Where did the argument that technological advance had to come at the cost of any kind of individual culture? Please, think about what the hell you’re waffling about. Increased communication, globalisation and general technological advancement will change a culture but not destroy it. Merger of cultures is good, it creates something new and vibrant, taking the best of both but one culture riding roughshod over another is not a good thing. Have I made myself clear?

Debt? What debt?

I think we should have more clearly defined our terms. What would you guys define as "culture"?

What debt?
The counties the IMF etc help 'develop' are left wallowing in insurmountable piles of debt. BUt nation debt is a whoel kettle of fish in itself, one i'm nto going any closer to.