Gabriela Tanasan teaching Getutza how to shoot video.

When I was in Romania last September I had the distinct privilege of meeting Getutza, one of the bloggers trained as part of the Blogging the Dream project in Campulung Moldovenesc, a small town in the north of the country. Eddie profiled Getutza on Rising Voices earlier this week. In her words:

For me, the blog is an easier mode to communicate with people. My shyness sometimes prevents me from being able to say things with animation. When I post on the blog, it’s only me and the computer. A minimal audience! Yet, a big opportunity to make my thoughts, opinions, ideas, passions, joys and problems known; and allowing me to become closer to people more easily.

On why her blog is titled Singuratate, which means ‘loneliness’ in Romanian:

I gave this name because loneliness is the most profound feeling in which I have. I’m convinced that there are many people in the world with this feeling, people who live alone, isolated, without friends, without people nearby to open a door or to say an encouraging word. Through the title I wanted to suggest all of this. I think that whoever understands the meaning of this title and shares the same feeling will connect with me; so we can eliminate loneliness from our lives.

I haven’t been able to spend much time on Rising Voices lately as I’ve been pouring 12 hours a day into the research we’re doing at the Technology for Transparency Network, but Eddie and Rezwan are doing a far better job than I ever did documenting the work of the Rising Voices Grantee projects. I really like Eddie’s featured blogger series. Also worth checking out are Shinee Sukhbaatar from Mongolia, Nora Catalina Urquijo from Colombia, and Saki Golafale from Liberia. Also, learn about the Aymara-language blogosphere and Malagasy bloggers’ challenge to the increasingly authoritarian government in Madagascar,

When Orhan Pamuk published The New Life in 1995 it became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. (1995 was the same year that Pamuk was tried along with several other authors for his support of Kurdish political rights in Turkey.) The book reads like a cross of Franz Kafka with Paulo Coelho. The Coelho half (fate, destiny, love, a cyclical plot) explains the book’s mass appeal; the influence of Kafka points to Pamuk’s desire to become part of the post-modern canon (something he writes and lectures about frequently).

This is a book about books, and about the transformational power a single book can hold – especially on the youth:

I had heard of others who had read a book only to have their lives disintegrate. I’d read the account of someone who had read a book called Fundamental Principles of Philosophy; in total agreement with the book, which he read in one night, he joined the Revolutionary Proletarian Advance Guard the very next day, only to be nabbed three days later robbing a bank and end up doing time for the next ten years. I also knew about those who had stayed awake the whole night reading books such as Islam and the New Ethos or The Betrayal of Westernization, then immediately abandoned the tavern for the mosque, sat themselves on those ice-cold rugs doused with rosewater, and began preparing patiently for the next life which was not due for another fifty years. I had even met some who got carried away by books with titles like Love Sets You Free or Know Yourself, and although these people were the sort who were capable of believing in astrology, they too could say in all sincerity, “This book changed my life over-night!”

All lovers of great fiction have experienced this feeling, right? I’ve had it many times; that after reading some novel an element of life that previously was blurry or entirely unseen comes into crisp focus. But it tends to happen in such a way that the realization itself is impossible to aphorize. You simply have to read the book.

Which is why we do. In fact, I’m convinced that those minor glimpses of personal enlightenment – and the satisfaction they give – are a major part of why I continue to read, even if I tend to forget the books themselves a few years down the road. Those books – the kind that really change your life, the ones you recommend to everyone and then grow despondent when they merely shrug their shoulders after coming to the last page – can do both harm and good. They could bring you closer to your family, relieve you of stress, convince you to live a healthier life. But just as easily, such an influential book could make you paranoid, drive you away from you friends, convince you to kill the president of your country, or the world’s most famous rock star. (Two infamous assassins, Mark Chapman – John Lennon’s assassin – and John Hinckley Jr. – President Regan’s attempted assassin – were both found with copies of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.)

The New Life is mostly about the second kind of effect books can have, the kind that destroys lives and relationships. Still, Pamuk manages to insert all of his usual themes: East Vs. West, the nostalgia of local material goods, the paranoia of conservative Islam, the Turkish empire in its final and complete decline, the ever-present irrational variable that is love and lust:

When I press my lips on that semitransparent skin between your ear and your hair, when the electricity of your hair gives fright to the birds that suddenly swoop past my forehead and face, raising the scent of autumn in the air, and when your breast stiffens like a stubborn bird taking wing in my palm, look, I see in your eyes how full and right is the unattainable time that reawakens between us: now we are neither here nor there, not in the land you have been dreaming about, not on some bus or in a dim hotel room somewhere, not even in some sort of future that can only exist within the pages of a book.

Despite the occasional piercing paragraph like the one above, this book, for me, failed to deliver. It is too much shoe polish, not enough substance. It’s the girl with the heavy eye shadow who speaks in half-allusions and riddles to hide the fact that she really has nothing to say. I’m sure that if I re-read the book from start to finish I would discover that some of those riddles and oft-repeated abstractions actually point back to clues sprinkled throughout the book’s first half. But I don’t read novels for the thrill of a crossword puzzle. I seek beautiful ideas expressed beautifully by characters I come to care for, or even loathe. In The New Life there was none of this, and much of the writing (or at least its translation) was awkward and clumsy, something the narrator even apologizes for:

So, Reader, place your faith neither in a character like me, who is not all that sensitive, nor in my anguish and the violence of the story I have to tell; but believe that the world is a cruel place. Besides, this newfangled plaything called the novel, which is the greatest invention of Western culture, is none of our culture’s business. That the reader hears the clumsiness of my voice within these pages is not because I am speaking raucously from a plane which has been polluted by books and vulgarized by gross thoughts; it results rather from the fact that I still have not quite figured out how to inhabit this foreign toy.

Many of the novel’s abstractions intend – I believe – to encourage the reader to think about how we each interpret and appropriate the books we read, as I am doing now. Appropriation, a recent topic of conversation around these parts, is something that Pamuk seems to obsess about. Jillian, having attended one of Pamuk’s Norton Lectures, criticized the professor who introduced Pamuk for referring to “world literature” as an “emerging field,” of which Pamuk is an undeniable force. I think that Jillian is right to point out the parochialism of ignoring millennia of storytelling from all human groups since the evolution of language, or even before. (“Did language develop first and storytellers evolve from the use of it? Or did language evolve as a way to express the internal experiences of storytellers?” asks Becky Hahn.)

But it is worth pointing out that Pamuk himself, in an interview with Christopher Lydon, says that the modern novel is a European invention, and, further, the most universal medium of storytelling. (Many radio, TV, and even video game producers would surely beg to disagree.) Pamuk says that the challenge for novelists living outside of the West is to appropriate the form of the novel for themselves while still building upon the work of its European masters, and not just reacting to them. I think it remains to be seen: will literature ever truly transcend nationality? Is the novel so rooted in European culture that only a new form of storytelling can escape that continent’s longstanding literary hegemony? Or, for that matter, will the novel as a medium and format, continue to exist at all?

When I was thinking about this book review, about books that had a profound impact on my life, the first to come to mind – the first always to come to mind – was Milan Kundera’s Immortality. It was the perfect book at the perfect time, and it changed how I viewed the world and my place in it. Kundera – whose writing style changed considerably since he switched from his native Czech to French in the early nineties – is one of those responsible for articulating the argument that the novel is a strictly European invention. As he writes in The Art of the Novel, the birth of the medium came with the birth of irony; specifically, Cervantes’ The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha. In his most recent book – The Curtain – which once again outlines the three centuries of the history of the novel, and of literary criticism – Kundera argues that the novel as a format for storytelling and reflection has come full circle. There are no more avenues to explore. The novel as a space to explore ideas and humanity has come to its inevitable end.

But what Kundera does not acknowledge is that the novel is also the invention of an invention: the printing press. (Iván Jaksic has a great essay about “Don Quijote’s Encounter with Technology.”) Many would argue that we have reached the end of the novel not because the format has been completely exhausted, but rather because radio, television, video game consoles, and the internet won out.

Now, there is hope among publishers and book authors alike that a new invention will save the novel: the e-book reader. As a member of the relatively rare species that loves both books and gadgets, I am empathetic to all sides of the debate about The End of the Book. In a recent interview in Newsweek, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says he is “skeptical that the novel will be ‘re-invented.’”

If you start thinking about a medical textbook or something, then, yes, I think that’s ripe for reinvention. You can imagine animations of a beating heart. But I think the novel will thrive in its current form. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be new narrative inventions as well. There very well may be. In fact, there probably will be. But I don’t think they’ll displace the novel.

Of course, Daniel Lyons of Newsweek is hinting in his line of questioning that Apple’s forthcoming iPad tablet affords writers and content creators new possibilities that have never existed in long form writing before. Amazon’s Kindle does its best to recreate the act – the sensation – of reading a printed book in electronic form. The iPad, on the other hand, aims to inspire something more novel than the novel itself. The entire device and interface is designed to push content creators (we can no longer call them novelists) to think beyond mere sentences and paragraphs when setting landscapes, constructing plots, developing characters, and exploring ideas.

No one has dissected the differences between printed book, Kindle, and iPad more deliberately and eloquently than Craig Mod, a talented designer based in Tokyo.

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over? We’re losing the dregs of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet. These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Mod distinguishes between formless content – “content divorced from layout” – and definite content – where the meaning and quality of the of the text depend on its layout:

Mod uses a book by Edward Tufte to illustrate an example of defninite content.

The Amazon Kindle is an electronic device meant to display a form of storytelling that came about with the invention of the printing press. It is meant to take cheap, ugly paperbacks and give them a more elegant, convenient, and sustainable design. It looks to the past and attempts to give a modern solution to fit our increasingly fast-paced, mobile lives. The iPad looks to the future, to help co-evolve new forms of storytelling. We are talking about more than just text, audio, high resolution photographs, and video. The iPad is also location aware, can sense movement, light, and has a built-in microphone. The next generation of storytellers can take advantage of all of these inputs and outputs when creating their works, to strike even more intimate connections with their readers.

The burning question now facing all of us writers who are considering publishing a “novel” is whether we will write a story for the past or for the future.

A lot of excitement has surrounded the mock-ups of magazines like Wired and Sports Illustrated on the iPad:

It’s relatively easy to imagine the possibilities for magazines on the iPad (swimsuit edition, duh), but what are the possibilities for a Cormac McCarthy or Tom Robbins novel when it’s created specifically for a device like the iPad? For those of us who are planning on writing our own novels sometime in the next ten years, how does this next generation of devices change the game for how we write stories?

I think that Milan Kundera is right in his diagnosis: after 300 years of phenomenal success, the novel has come to an end. But his error is in defining the symptoms. The novel has not come to an end because we’ve exhausted its narrative and intellectual possibilities. Rather, we are embarking upon something more novel: a new era of unexplored potential. And ours is the first generation that will experiment with and help set its form.

It took my favorite futurist, Scott Smith, to show me Santa Moncica’s best and most authentic cappuccino:

Wait, did I just call a cappuccino ‘authentic’? What does that even mean? Scott and I spent much of our morning kaffeeklatsch at Caffé Luxxe trying to deconstruct the concept. We last connected in Istanbul, but these days Scott is in Los Angeles observing how its residents decide what and where they are going to eat. The research is early on, but one observation he’s already come away with is that most Angelenos have come to accept and expect manufactured authenticity. Scott takes his argument one step further: our generation, he says, may very well be the last that can distinguish between authenticity and manufactured authenticity. But, then, how do you create an atmosphere of authenticity without manufacturing it? What metrics can we use to measure how authentic something is?

Our conversation fell silent for a few seconds as we both pondered the questions. I finished my eight ounce, four dollar cappuccino, gathered the flaky crumbs of my four dollar almond croissant (yes, $8 for a coffee and pastry), and looked around the cafe. There were freshly cut flowers, attractive baristas (excuse me, baristi) wearing all black, and furniture trying its hardest to come from Southern France.

Photo by Ethan Rosch of “A Blog Voyage“

Our mission at Caffé Luxxe is to offer the world’s best coffee with the most authentic European caffe experience. From the hand-crafted beverages our baristi create, to the small batch artisanal foods we bring you, everything has a natural elegance from around the world.

But the reality: we were in a small Southern California strip mall, not Provence or the East Village. And I wasn’t even sure if I was enjoying my $8 cappuccino and croissant more than my usual $4 coffee and scone at Peet’s. If one is more authentic than the other I wasn’t able to articulate why.

De La is not going to be happy, but allow me to poke a little fun. The G5 was in New York City a few weeks back and I wanted to watch the Ghana-Egypt final game of the Africa Cup. Various suggestions were made about where to watch the match including Woodwork, a new soccer bar in Brooklyn. Several emails later and valuable information was leaked that De La is opposed to Woodwork because of its “fake exposed brick”. I still can’t help but giggle a little, yet I’ve come to realize that authenticity is something he values highly. He would much rather spend his time drinking canned Tecate in a rundown East LA cantina than at a swanky new bar that installs a wall of chipped brick to give the atmosphere a rustic feel. He would rather buy a pair of used Levis than new designer jeans with fake creases and worn out pockets.

He’s not alone: seeking authenticity might be one of the great over-arching values that we can apply to that amorphous demographic we label “hipsters”. But again, how to define authenticity? Is digging through old Levis at a thrift store on Melrose really more authentic than buying new jeans at the Gap or Urban Outfitters? Why do we care about the authenticity of some objects, but not of others? Why do so many who look to the future for their politics, but to the past for their sense of aesthetic? Why does this iPhone application exist?:

I was looking for the hours of my local gym and came across a funny Yelp review by one Carina D:

My boyfriend/gym partner makes fun of me because i love the exposed brick of the gym which gives it a NY loft feel (he’s a new yorker and laughs at my decor mentions) but even he likes the get in, get out, get fit express vibe at my little exercise oasis.

Now every time that I’m doing situps at the gym and staring at its exposed brick walls I can’t help but think of Carina D and De La. Are these real brick walls or fake brick walls? What does that mean? Is this authentic? Not authentic? Do I care?

I left the store thinking that today we seek authenticity and individuality, but we prefer the economic benefits of mass manufacturing.

- Budapest, October 2009

Back to Caffe Luxxe and its $4 almond croissant. I mention to Scott that perhaps the vast majority of us have come to accept and expect manufactured authenticity, but I find that for most tourists nothing is more important than seeking out the “authentic” of where they are. Specifically, I was thinking back to a post Mario sent us from the blog of Macon D, “a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the ‘white’ part.” The guest post was written by ‘K’, “who is half-Chinese (or of Chinese descent, if the “half” is too politically charged).” She claims that ‘white people’, another amorphous demographic, annoyingly seek authenticity and, worse, pass judgement about what is authentic in other cultures. Describing the annoying behavior of a friend, she writes:

Recently she went to Jordan, and remarked that she wanted to see something off the beaten track, and that the guide delivered — they went to see Bedouins, etc., and “only saw one other tourist the entire time.”

This drove me crazy! And I’m not sure why!

Am I justified? Is it that she’s treating the experience and “authenticity” as a commodity? Is it a sense of infiltration, of “ah, I have been accepted?”

I highly recommend the post. It does a great job of treating authenticity as a commodity, which increasingly it is. That is, we give more economic consideration to the concept of authenticity than ever before. We are willing to pay for it. In fact, it cost me $8 this morning.

But, as per usual, I disagree that seeking authenticity in other cultures or treating it as a commodity is limited to only whites. One commenter on the post linked to a New York Times article shows that the same search for authenticity in China is leading yuppie Han Chinese to amusement parks celebrating ethnic minorities like the Dai people.

Similarly, busloads of Chinese and Mexicans come to Hollywood ever yday in search of authentic America. But defining authenticity in America is just as difficult and pointless as trying to do so in Jordan, China, or Malawi. There’s just real no way to measure authenticity despite its clear importance to so many.

Finally, to the Berkman Center kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Catherine expressed her opinion that “it’s a terrible idea” for White people or Asian people to wear dreadlocks. Personally I agree with a comment left by Justin: the more interesting dynamic is that for a white to appropriate black culture is typically viewed as a step backward whereas blacks assimilating to white culture is viewed as progress. But I think that Catherine’s post was less about race and more about authenticity:

I’m all for cross-cultural appreciation, but there are ways to enjoy and appreciate other cultures without losing your own authenticity. There’s got to be a level of self-awareness and humility involved. Second, when appropriated, the symbols tend to lose any importance or context and just get swallowed up into our own ethno-centric view of what they *should* mean (how many times have you seen someone with a Chinese/Japanese tattoo who clearly doesn’t speak the language?).

How do we appreciate other cultures without losing our own authenticity? And just what is our own authenticity?

I have absolutely no clue. But speaking of appropriating other cultures and losing our own authenticity, tonight I’ll be drinking a lot of tequila and dressed up as Blue Demon at the Mexico – New Zealand match at the Rose Bowl. De La will play the part of El Santo. Now, for your viewing pleasure:

I spent just about the entire weekend just about entirely offline – something I hope to keep up as February slides into March, days lengthen, and skinny jeans and boots give way to summer dresses and sandals.

So it came as quite a shock to turn the internet switch to on and discover that Chile was struck by a 8.8-magnitude earthquake. Scrolling through the photos at Boston.com’s Big Picture it is almost impossible to believe that the death count is still under 1,000. Surely that number will rise over the next few days and weeks.

Fortunately all of my friends in Chile are OK and, as would be expected, the digerati among them are using their blogs and Twitter accounts to publish news and coordinate relief efforts. On Twitter the tag “#buscapersonas” (“look for people”) is a real-time stream of Chileans using Twitter to search for their missing family and friends. It is hard to sort through all the re-tweets and I’m not sure if it’s the most effective method of sharing information about missing people, but most certainly there will eventually be a graduate student thesis to help determine exactly that. The most useful Twitter account I’ve seen so far for up-to-the-minute news about the impact of the Chilean quake is @Cooperativa of the radio station by the same name (which you can listen to live online). Already Juan Arellano has an impressive blog post (in Spanish) looking at the positive and negative roles of social networks in the humanitarian response:

Mientras tanto, en lo que corresponde a internet y redes sociales se está destacando el uso e importancia que ha tenido, por ejemplo Twitter, para diversas funciones aparte de informar, la principal quizás como herramienta para la búsqueda de desaparecidos y lanzar peticiones de ayuda. Ha habido notas al respecto en diarios como La Nación: El rol clave de Twitter y Facebook y El Mercurio: Terremoto de Chile es lo más comentado en Twitter que recojen muchas de las experiencias habidas en el uso de esta herramienta.

Sin embargo esto puede prestarse también para bromas pesadas y engaños, como aparentemente lo es el caso del usuario @biodome10 quien estuvo tuiteando pidiendo ayuda: “im atrapado en mi casa. enviar ayuda por favor # Chile”, pero que si uno revisa su perfil en twitter verá que es el mismo relacionado a este caso de falsa noticia de una muerte. Muchos usuarios de Twitter retuitearon de buena fé sus mensajes, incluso el diario limeño El Comercio en primera instancia también cayó en el engaño aunque luego rectificaron su informe.

Of course the folks at Ushahidi had an installation up tracking events related to the earthquake and aftershocks within hours. Some developers at Google quickly launched their Person Finder app for the Chile quake, which claims to be tracking nearly 35,000 entries. (Another installation for Haiti is tracking nearly 60,000 entries.)

At Global Voices Eddie Ávila and his team have done a truly amazing job sifting through all the information about the quake and humanizing it so that you really understand what it was like to be there, and what it will take to rebuild. I especially recommend Eddie’s (relatively brief) posts on “The Legacy of the 1960 Earthquake in Valdivia” and “Tsunami Scare on Easter Island.” Juliana Rincón has collected YouTube videos of the earthquake. This one says a lot:

The death toll will continue to rise, there will be a lot more punditry about why Chile fared better than Haiti, and a lot more analysis (and, yes, hype) about the role of social networks in disaster response. But in the end Chile will come back. The slim stretch of nation state has been through much worse in its relatively short history.

I realize that – aside from the predictable op-eds – today’s news will already be gone by tomorrow. In fact, as I type out these concluding paragraphs a part of me wonders why I’m writing this at all.

I suppose this is basically a journal entry, but one that can’t exist apart from the web of information, opinions, and relationships that is the internet. I’ve been to Chile three times – first in 2001, again in 2002, and for the third time in March of 2008. I’ll be heading back this May for our (almost) annual Global Voices Summit. This blog post has, in fact, taken me over two hours to write because I keep getting lost in old photographs, blog posts, and journal entries from my visits to Chile. Over the years I’ve become increasingly attached to the country despite an initial bad impression. I am excited to go back and see old friends, re-visit some of my favorite neighborhoods, bars, and cafes.

The earthquake in Chile and the overwhelming online response to it is also yet another reminder that “international news” hasn’t gone away, it’s just changed. For anyone who cares about Chile – or earthquakes for that matter – the information and the context will be there, waiting to be digested. In fact, a sizable community now exists of individuals whose attention and efforts migrate from one crisis to the next.

This evening I went for a long – a very long – run along the Pacific coast, north toward Malibu where Joan Didion lived much of her life. In The Year of Magical Thinking she describes how she found meaning in life through geology, especially earthquakes:

That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology; the two systems existed for me on a parallel tracks that occasionally converged, notably during earthquakes

I don’t know why I had so much energy, why I was able to run for miles and miles without tiring. Most of the Santa Monica’s beaches are endless stretches of white sand and volleyball nets, but as you head north toward the green hills of Topanga Canyon the geography shifts suddenly and sandstone cliffs practically hug Highway 1.

The earthquake in Chile, writes the New York Times, took place where the Nazca tectonic plate is sliding underneath the South American plate. “The two are converging at a rate of about three and a half inches a year.” Three and a half inches a year. So slow. So fast.

In the final pages of The Year of Magical Thinking Didion writes:

As the grandchild of a geologist I learned to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know is technique. The very island to which Inez Victor returned in the spring of 1975 – Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge – is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific.

This is probably the funniest six and a half minutes that I’ve spent on the internet in a long, long time. It also goes to show why guy friends (sorry ladies) are so much more fun than female friends: male bonding is more creative destruction than cautious compassion about feelings and emotions.

And that’s just so much more fun.

The half court shot prank also reminds me why April Fool’s Day is the only holiday I consider worthy of celebration. Sadly, April Fool’s Day has been cheapened in recent years as its taken digital form. The best part of a well-designed prank is seeing your victim’s face when they discover that they’ve been had:

But there is none of that when the Day of the Foolio takes to the Net. Instead, some blogger writes some ridiculous blog post. And some overworked, naive zombie believes it and reposts the headline on Twitter, and everyone else makes fun of that person for not realizing that it’s April 1st.

Yawn.

But for this post I’m less interested in the increase in April Fool’s boredom (as serious of an issue as it is) and more concerned that an increasing number of Latin American bloggers have taken to commemorating April Fool’s Day with fictitious headlines while I don’t know of a single blogger in North America or anywhere else outside of Latin America who celebrates Día de los Inocentes, Latin America’s own version of April Fool’s Day which takes place on December 28.

In other words, on the internet – big, beautiful, global platform that it is – cultural rituals and memes tend to flow from the West (and Japan) outward and rarely do we see the West import cultural memes from other regions.

Last night I participated in a discussion at the Creative Commons Salon with Joi Ito, Michelle Thorne, and Donatella Della Ratta. Donatella was wearing a t-shirt with an image of Ampelmännchen, the iconic “little traffic light man” that was one of the few cultural symbols from East Germany to survive after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Homeboy even has his own website. Michelle, who lives in East Berlin, mentioned that after the fall of the Berlin Wall almost every material product and cultural symbol from the east side of the Iron Curtain was treated as inferior and the market was flooded with goods and cultural memes from the West. Only Ampelmännchen persisted.

The very concept of love as it is portrayed in Hollywood and on MTV is foreign to much of the world. But the rituals of romance, booty-shaking, french-kissing, and prom-night-virginity-losing have been making themselves known to television screens the world over for at least a decade now. Teenagers and twenty-somethings in Morocco, Cambodia, Egypt, Malaysia, Jordan, and the world over have grown up surrounded by the imagery, and now they must decide how to incorporate those rituals into their own cultural contexts.

That debate has taken place publicly in many blogging communities and has been well-covered on Global Voices. In Morocco one media pundit insists that “there is no finer example in matters of love than the emotional commitment of the Prophet with regard to Khadija, his first wife.” Writing from Cambodia, Khmer blogger Chhay Sophal warns young women not to ‘lose their dignity’ by losing their virginity. Another Cambodian blogger, Soprach Tong, surveyed nearly 500 young Cambodians (aged 15 – 24) and found that more than 12.4% of respondents expect to have sex on Valentine’s Day. Seven percent of male respondents, according to Tong, are open to participating in gang rape. You can find just about any and every imaginable reaction to Valentine’s Day from Egyptian bloggers. Writing in Arabic Amr Fahmy is frustrated by the full-fledged importation of Western holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day. Other blogs like Silent Majority wonder why Islamic scholars waste their time issuing verdicts that prohibit the celebration of February 14th.

In Malaysia some female college students decided to celebrate the day (and their devotion to their boyfriends, apparently) by not wearing any underwear. The “pantyless movement” caught the attention and ire of some Islamic authorities who claimed that underwearless young women would not get through the day unpunished. Speculation about just how Malaysia’s moral police would determine whether young women were pantied or pantyless led to some entertaining blog posts and cartoons. But perhaps the Global Voices Valentine’s Day post that affected me the most was Fabienne’s overview of what some Haitian bloggers were thinking as the day of love came and went. For 19-year-old Guerdy Louis, like so many others, Valentine’s Day was a painful reminder of the death of her boyfriend who passed away from wounds he suffered during the earthquake.

In the past Global Voices has covered discussions and debates about the celebration of Valentine’s Day in Jordan, Palestine, and India.

I have no problem with anyone in any country celebrating Valentine’s Day. But so much of what we do comes from what we see. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz frequently pointed out, television was supposed to document how we live our lives. Instead we ended up living our lives based on what we saw on TV.

For the longest time television was a medium that carried content from Hollywood to the rest of the world. Over the past ten years that has started to change, but imagery and cultural memes still tend to flow from the West to the Rest. There are exceptions – telenovelas, Japanese anime, and Ampelmännchen – but I wonder what it is about those exceptions that make them stick. And has anyone come across any sort of directory or list of cultural memes that the West has imported?

Last week I took a trip to Graz, a university town in southern Austria, to congratulate its fine residents for their most reasonable decision to remove my governor’s name from their local soccer stadium. Just playing. But seriously, listen to Act One of This American Life #398 and just try to tell me that you wouldn’t remove Schwarzenegger’s name from your own local stadium.

In fact I was in Graz for their 2010 Creative Industries Convention, which proclaimed grandly that we would design the creative societies of the future. For the uninitiated, there is a whole world out there that believes that hip, young people with Apple laptops will invent a new 21st century economy to replace all those lost manufacturing jobs headed for China, Bangladesh, and Mexico. In 2000 BusinessWeek dedicated an entire special double issue to show how “the Industrial Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy.” Two years later and Richard Florida published his bestselling book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argued that those cities that could attract said young, hip people with Apple laptops would fare best in the 21st century.

In an entertaining response to this breathless celebration of the so-called creative class, Matthew Crawford raises his eyebrows at Florida’s claim that an $8-an-hour earning employee at Best Buy is representative of an economic and social paradigm shift:

In fact, most of us young, hip, creatives toting our Apple laptops around have grown quite accustomed to earning a salary that just barely competes with working at Best Buy. “In the Creative Economy, the most important intellectual property isn’t software or music or movies,” claimed Peter Coy in Business Week back in 2000. “It’s the stuff inside employees’ heads.” That sounds nice, but I know the people who come up with the best and most creative ideas and they don’t make any money. The lawyers, bankers, and administrators, meanwhile, are all still well off.

So just how does a creative person with a great idea make enough money to support herself? In the 20th century you needed the right connections. If you wanted to produce a book, album, film, or art exhibit you needed to know someone at a publishing house, record label, movie studio, or art gallery. Today you just need to find somewhere between 200 and 1,000 people who really believe in you. Kevin Kelly calls these people your “1,000 True Fans“:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

But first let’s step back into the 20th century: Let’s say you were fortunate enough to make the necessary connections with the publishing house or the record label. Then these corporations would give you an advance to fund your creative work in exchange for the rights to what you create. They pay you money so that you can take time off and write that book, but what you end up creating is no longer yours – they retain the rights and are able to control who can use and re-use it.

Today artists are increasingly tapping into their networks of “true fans” (which often include family members, but also sometimes complete strangers) to fund their creative endeavors. This means that 1) they retain the rights to what they produce and 2) talented people without the right connections are still able to enter the creative field.

A couple months ago I was in Istanbul with Andrew Fitzgerald from Current. He’s one of these guys who has managed to build up a frightening list of 165,000 Twitter followers. (That, for the record, is greater than the population of Flagstaff, Arizona.) But, as talented of a tweeter as he may be, what Andrew has always wanted to do is publish a book. Here, I’ll let him explain:

Andrew used Kickstarter, a crowd-funding platform to find enough support to help build buzz and cover the costs of printing copies of his first novel. He was only looking for a modest $1,000, which he reached in just 24 hours, but by now 78 different people have pledged $2,500. In return, Andrew is involving his supporters in a collaborative storytelling effort. Depending on the size of their donation they can contribute adjectives, nouns, sentences, characters, or even settings to a series of stories that Andrew will be publishing over the next few weeks. You can already check out his first story, “The Cannonball Run“, and its many contributions from his supporters.

The strategy of involving your supporters in your creative work was also used by Romanian blogger Mihai who I wrote about back in November. To fund his motorcycle journey to Mongolia he divided the trip up into segments of 500 kilometers and sold each segment of storytelling for 50 EUR. Forty three people signed on “instantly” and Mihai had 2,150 euros in his pocket. Throughout his trip he stopped by cybercafes every 500 kilometers and penned public letters to each of his 43 supporters. “Dear Gili,” begins his first post just 500 kilometers from his hometown as he rode toward Ukraine.

SellaBand is probably the most well known crowdfunding platform. Bands looking to record and distribute a studio album create a project page asking their fans to pledge around $50,000 to cover the costs of producing a full length professional studio album. Aryn Michelle is a singer-songwriter from Dallas, Texas who is using SellaBand to raise enough money to produce her next album. She only has 137 followers on Twitter, but she’s already managed to raise $36,110 – 72% of her goal. 314 fans have agreed to make a donation of at least $10. That money has already been taken from their PayPal accounts, but if Michelle isn’t able to raise all $50,000 then all of the pledged money will be returned to the users. They only pay if the album is actually produced. And in return they get a CD of the album, a digital download, and even their share of 20% of the revenue that Michelle might end up making if the album becomes popular. SellaBand users have already invested over $3 million in independent artists, but now some big name acts including Public Enemy are also using the site so that they can hold onto the rights of the music they end up producing.

I met Pim Betist who came up with the idea for SellaBand a couple years ago at Ars Electronica. He told me that he was happy with the success of SellaBand, but his real dream was to create a similar platform for African musicians who haven’t been able to break into the world music scene. That site – Africa Unsigned – launched just a few months ago. Unfortunately the pledges haven’t been pouring in. So far the leading group is BCUC, an eclectic soul and hip-hop group from South Africa. I actually really like their sound a lot (check out their tracks “Journey” and “Native Minds”). But with just $566 of $10,000 pledged, it doesn’t seem likely that their fans are going to put them in a recording studio any time soon.

Journalists are also using crowdfunding to finance their reporting. I have already written about Spot.us a lot in the past so I won’t repeat myself here, but there are some really great pieces over there that deserve to be investigated and are just a few dollars short of their goals.

So far all that turn-of-the-century punditry claiming that young creatives would become the new industrialists of the 21st century has turned out to be just that: punditry. Mostly creative types are doing what they do because they love it and they’re just getting by financially with for-the-man consulting work, and often by working evenings at bars and restaurants. The good news is that anyone with enough talent and ambition to attract 1,000 ‘true fans’ can make it work. It has opened up the prospect of creative production far beyond just the usual circles in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hollywood. The bad news is that building and sustaining a network of 1,000 true fans who are willing to not just pay attention to what you do, but pay money for it, is more difficult and exhausting than anyone had imagined.

Open Society Institute, the network of philanthropic foundations established by billionaire George Soros, has long promoted access to information because it understands that information is power and that people in positions of power often try to withhold information from those who don’t have power. In most organizations – and even entire fields – information flows only upward from those with the least social capital to those with the most social capital (and orders flow down). A team of people working on a project report their findings to a manager who then reports to his/her manager until the most important and valuable information from all projects reaches the CEO or executive director. That person then withholds information from others because doing so safeguards his or her importance; no one else has a complete overview of the organization. Helge Fahrnberger has demonstrated this pattern in a variety of contexts. Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody that the modern institutional hierarchy originated with the US railway system in the 19th century when a lack of managerial oversight could easily lead to disastrous accidents. (I have yet to see anyone support or challenge that claim.)

Valdis Krebs, an expert in social network analysis, has found over and over again that the happiest and most innovative organizations are those with a healthy intersection of ideas and debates across different teams. Employees are happier and more motivated to work when information and opportunities are spread widely across organizations with as few information bottlenecks as possible. When their work and ideas just filter up through managers without feedback other than their quarterly evaluations they grow despondent and prefer to spend their days on Facebook (a non-hierarchical network!).

I believe that Open Society Institute’s grantmaking shows that it understand the importance of spreading information, opportunities, and social capital across networks. But as an institution OSI still has a lot of room to improve. And they certainly have their challenges. Not only must they share information across their various programs, but also through their impressive list of in-country foundations. My understanding is that these foundations were created to have a fair deal of autonomy from Open Society Institute (the mothership), but they are still expected to collaborate with one another and with each other. In addition, they are also expected to coordinate with other donors in their countries in order to most effectively support civil society and promote issues that donors have in common.

Of course, the networked nature of social media is an ideal way to democratize grant-giving, distribute social capital, and to gauge what the up-and-coming hot issues are by staying tuned to the influential nodes of issue-based networks.

This is why Beth Kanter and I were in New York today for a joint meeting organized by the Information and Media programs, and with the presence of many donors from the various country-based foundations. I’ll admit, it wasn’t the easiest group to work with at the start (the average introduction was something like “Hi, my name is X and I think Twitter is a waste of time”), but by the end of the day I think we made some converts out of what were initially some pretty harsh critics:

Of course I had to pay her to post that, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. But really, this is the thing about Twitter and many similar tools – they don’t make sense until you try them. And for most people they don’t make sense until you try them out for a couple weeks. You have to wait until you come across information that is relevant to you – information that you otherwise wouldn’t have come across – in order to appreciate the advantage of being part of the network.

There is also always an inherent power struggle in teaching networked technologies to people in positions of power. New technologies always take power away from one group and afford it to another. Individuals who are at the top of institutional hierarchies often grow frustrated when they come to understand that it’s increasingly not the position you have but rather the connections you have that lead to information awareness, and to power. Often times the workshops I give are full of people who have been working years – if not decades – to move up the institutional hierarchy to positions of power. They are comfortable being reported to by their team and reporting up to their director. But they are often – and understandably – resistant to enter a network where all that matters is how which connections you have and how well you are able to absorb and parse information.

The best part of my job is seeing the uncontrollable smiles when people finally get it. When they realize that they’ve entered a network, that they are part of the ecosystem. I saw quite a few of those smiles today and they always make me happy.

I constantly come across statistics like this one: just two percent of Wikipedia users account for 75% of participation. And the general assumption is that this says something about human nature itself. But rarely do we take into account that perhaps Wikipedia is not well designed to encourage broad participation. (I have yet to really participate myself because no one has walked me through it and I feel the Wikipedia community is intimidating and not always welcoming.) I’ve come across few researchers out there who are really taking an in-depth look at when and why people participate in communities and platforms like Wikipedia, Global Voices, and Twitter. One such researcher who I’m keeping my eyes on is Judd Antin at Berkeley’s School of Information. His preliminary findings show that how a system is designed – and how welcoming a community is to outsiders – has a significant impact on the ratio between active and passive participation. I’m looking forward to Judd’s PhD thesis – so far he’s dealing with a lot of these issues in a very intelligent way.

At the beginning of today’s workshop the majority of those attending were openly skeptical about social media. (Though they obviously had some interest or they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.) But once Beth and I walked them through how the tools actually work and how different activists and organizations have used those tools to their advantage, everyone in the room opened up to the idea of adopting the tools and techniques themselves. Like every other aspect in life, it’s difficult to really accept something until you understand it.

Liberia is getting some (does quote marks) love on Twitter today because of a new web documentary on Vice Magazine. What else can we find on Vice Magazine’s website?

I’m not happy about the documentary. Here’s the comment I left on Ethan’s blog post:

Idiotic, sensationalizing, simplistic, and in many places factually incorrect. And I say this having met one of the guys who worked on it. (Also, it drives me crazy that they portray Miles as having “had malaria more times than he’s had hot dinners.” Both times that I saw him we were drinking ice cold beers – thanks to a costly generator – at an expat’s very comfortable place with a perfect view of Monrovia’s coastline.)

To say that this documentary is representative of Liberia is like saying that a documentary on Las Vegas is representative of the United States. I find it so frustrating that sensationalized nonsense like this gets so much attention when really incredible storytelling by Liberians barely gets picked up at all. To suggest that thoughtful documentary filmmakers should learn from thoughtless jackasses like these guys is, in my opinion, wrongheaded. The more important question in my opinion is how to get more people/viewers interested in understanding another country and culture rather than just looking at clips of brothels and cannibalism.

This is why I disagree with the whole ‘ninja gap‘ idea. Nothing constructive is going to come out of this documentary. All it does is further fetishize the same scenes and stories that are always associated with Liberia.

For anyone wanting to learn more about Liberia, I highly recommend Saki Golafale’s account of his trip to Freetown, thoughts on marriage from the recently married Nat Bayjay, and pretty good coverage of the forced resignation of Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism, Dr. Laurence Bropleh.

And to better understand the context around the gory images that are shown without any context in the Vice videos, Stephen Ellis’ The Mask of Anarchy is highly recommended.

While I’m obviously frustrated by the Vice documentary, I couldn’t be happier with the amazing progress of Ceasefire Liberia, one of the many amazing Rising Voices grantee projects. Their coverage of Information Minister Laurence Bropleh’s forced resignation reminded me of this little video I managed to record when meeting Bropleh a couple years ago:

And a photo of his hands:

Just to clarify, I am 100% not responsible for the intro script. Sparsh’s extra strength margaritas might be. Happy new years.

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Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film – like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year – is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it’s a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people …

It is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege.

- Annalee Newitz

I almost made it through the second half of 2009 without entering a single movie theater. But then, at a mega-shopping center in Palm Desert – a consolidation of luxury cars, Christmas consumerism, and plastic surgery – I joined three generations of family members to watch Avatar, the record-breaking Hollywood blockbuster at a time when there are no longer supposed to be record-breaking Hollywood blockbusters.

I was ready to be impressed by the computer-generated actors, the special effects, the fantasy flora and fauna of the planet Pandora. And, indeed, I was. I was also ready to be skeptical and even annoyed by the not-so-subtle social commentary of a $300 million film in need of mass public appeal.

I was less annoyed than I thought I would be. Avatar is most certainly a “Dances with Wolves in space,” as Cameron himself put it, but it is also a modern critique of “the abuse of power and creeping imperialism disguised as patriotism.” And just imagine how it must feel to be a US soldier having returned from fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan to enter a movie theater with an audience cheering on ‘the bad guys’ as they shoot arrows through the hearts of US marines. Here is how conservative columnist Nile Gardiner put it in “Avatar: the most expensive piece of anti-American propaganda ever made:”

When I saw the movie last night in a packed theater, I was disturbed by the cheering from the audience towards the end when the humans – US soldiers fighting on behalf of an American corporation – were being wiped out by the Na’vi. Washington is one of the most liberal cities in America and you come to expect almost anything here – but still the roars of approval which greeted the on-screen killing of US military personnel were a shock to the system, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan.

Imagine the public rage that would have been directed at Avatar and James Cameron if it had been released in October 2001. The fact that less than ten years after 9/11 mainstream America is now cheering on the oppressed as they fight back against the oppressors is something worth recognizing and celebrating. Cameron’s film elicits empathy and five years of Global Voices has taught us that doing so is no easy task.

Then again, Avatar is only the latest in a long history of narratives in which a male character (always the embodiment of Western masculinity) from the oppressors joins forces with the oppressed and becomes their leader to fight back against amoral imperialism. I’m sure that there are earlier examples, but the first such film I can think of is Lawrence of Arabia, based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. Other works in the “join and lead the oppressed” genre include Dances with Wolves, Fern Gully, The Last Samurai, District 9, Dune, and surely dozens of others.

This recurring narrative was pointed out in a widely cited article, “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” by freelance journalist and occasional academic, Annalee Newitz. The article does a wonderful job teasing out the appeal of a strange fantasy in which a member of an oppressive, imperialistic, unsustainable group abandons his own people to join forces with (and become the leader of) those they are oppressing. But I think it is a shame that such a well-researched essay then simplifies a complex psychological issue by dividing the world into “white people” and “people of color.”

Analee Newitz at Harvard Law School. Photo by Beth Kanter.

It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Why does Newitz, a feminist geek from Orange Country, describe us Whites in the third person singular? If she is going to divide all 6.5 billion people on this earth into just two categories, then isn’t it pretty obvious which bucket she falls in? By writing in the omniscient tone of academic commentator does she hope to transcend/escape race altogether? (Many of the hundreds of commenters on the article point out that it is filled with as much “white guilt” as the movie itself.)

Avatar’s “join and lead the oppressed” fantasy appeals to more than just Whites. My friends who most enthusiastically recommended the movie to me are what Newitz would call “people of color.” (Whatever that means.) You could call the fantasy “white” as Newitz has done, but you could also call it liberal, Western, hegemonic, or even universal.

James Cameron first began working on the basic plot line for Avatar back in 1994. That is the same year when “Subcomandante Marcos” – likely a middle class professor of graphic design from Tampico – led an insurrection of what Newitz would call “people of color” in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Is Marcos white? He is if you ask most Mexicans. But if you ask proud Chicanos in Los Angeles, Marcos is a member of the oppressed. Marcos fulfilled the Avatar fantasy – turning his back on white, middle class Mexico to lead their insurrection against the oppressors, but without letting go of what Newitz refers to as white privilege – like appearing on the cover of Gato Pardo magazine.

Che Guevara – the Argentine idealized hero of liberaldom – also came from an upper-middle class family until he joined forces with Fidel Castro to free the oppressed people of Cuba. In August 2001 a young leftist Dutch woman (cutie!) traveled to Colombia to join the FARC and fight for the poor and oppressed in Colombia. Perhaps most famously, John Walker Lindh joined the Taliban in Afghanistan and fought against US soldiers at the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi.

The “Avatar Fantasy” of leaving one’s own group to join and lead a marginalized community is clearly more than just fantasy. And, unsurprisingly, it is a dynamic that I am sensitive to because of my own work. There is no doubt that the Avatar Fantasy is pervasive in the development sector, and this yearning by development workers to be loved and accepted by marginalized communities often leads to strange relationships. The Avatar Fantasy also idealizes Newitz’s “people of color” as flawless, ecologically sensitive victims. In truth, I have yet to meet any community on earth that is flawless, or for that matter, ecologically sustainable.

So what is our lesson from Avatar and from its criticisms? Should those of us who grow up in hegemonic cultures disengage from all other cultures? What, for example, should be done in Guinea which is creeping ever closer to violent civil war? Should international activists stay involved in the war in Darfur? Should Google work with the Suruí to fight against deforestation in Rondônia?

Influenced by cosmopolitanism, I believe that we should work across cultural and linguistic divides to shape a shared human morality that is tolerant of group and individual differences. But I think that we should also be aware of the strange and unhealthy psychology of the “Avatar Fantasy”. Rather than giving up on our own communities to attempt to lead others – especially those we treat as “marginalized” – I believe that we can be most effective by combining local political change with global discussion toward a shared vision and common objectives.