5/29/2002: Spidering American culture

[jaguar]

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.

[jaguar]

*ducks*

[Undertoad]

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.

[SteveDallas]

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?)

[Pie]

Originally posted by juju2112

...Perhaps in several hundred years, when we can all speak the same language, we'll have a much larger pool of human resources to draw from when we need to tackle problems.

Yes, and we'll all be a uniform shade of light brown...

- pie

[Torrere]

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.

[jaguar]

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.

[juju]

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. <g> So I hope my tone isn't too bad... I love all you guys! ]

[Undertoad]

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.

[juju]

<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...

[warch]

" 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.

[jaguar]

thankyou warch, you beat me to it.

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.

Hmm not really. What you're talking about sounds like cultural colonisation to me - sure we piligaed every natural resource they had, trashed the place, but now they go to church and have western clothing...and we all know the results of colonialism. I don't see why it has to be a 'swap', why thousands of years of tradition has to be lost, at the end of the day we all lose becoase of that becase you cannot repalce knowledge. Its liek loggong the amazon, we're taking cures to thousands of diseases with it, and its irripleaceable.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by jaguar
at the end of the day we all lose becoase of that becase you cannot repalce knowledge

Or spelling. :-)

But the knowlege need not be lost, although it's true that it may need to compete in a larger noosphere. It's survival as a meme will depend on a number of factors....some practical and some esthetic.

Ferinstance, for my birthday last Wednesday I was gifted by my kids with a Chneese calligraphy set. Can I write Chinese? No. Do I have other, more nerdly and hi-tech tools for making images? Youbetcha. . I personally will likely never achive anything even resembling the breathtaking artistry I've see others reach with this form.

But I intend to have fun with this; with the hair brushes, the ink stick and ink stone, and even a soapstone stick to carve into my chop stamp Darn, I'll even have to design a chop...:-)

Work with knowlege and ideas is far from a zero-sum game....

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”— Thomas Jefferson