![[Export] April Fool’s, Valentine’s Day, and Ampelmännchen](http://el-oso.net/blog/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache/75478a2e23c0b02a7b960ca669b51e3f.png)
Posted 2 years ago in the early evening by oso
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?
As a constant confrencer, do you find it hard to...
Using
David, I’ve just read “Cloud Culture. The Future of Global Cultural Relations”, a report writen by Charles Leadbeater. He points to the place where this cultural conflict -that you explain through imagery and cultural memes flows- is taking place: the Cloud.
Assuming that television, finally, wasn’t able to assure a proper place and status to the World’s cultural diversity, Internet presents a new and perhaps final opportunity. But the risks are in front of us: Google (as other cloud capitalists companies, as Leadbeater labeled them) wants and needs to be a succesful company, so although its mission is to make accesible the World’s information, the way is making this happen is based in previous cultural-relations patterns.
Using
did the previous comment post?
Using
We celebrated Valentine’s Day on the 13th. The 14th is just too awkward of a day. It seems as though this particular holiday is forced upon you. You have to do it or else you’re a horrible man. It’s Valentine’s Day everyday right Oso?
The Octavio Paz quote reminds of something Steve Jobs said about television being one of the most corrosive technologies he’s ever seen.
“Because the average American watches five hours a day of television, and television is a passive medium. Television doesn’t turn your brain on. Or, television can be used to turn your brain off, and that’s what it’s mostly used for. And that’s a wonderful thing sometimes — but not for five hours a day.”
Using
Valentine’s day? What’s that?
Using
“has anyone come across any sort of directory or list of cultural memes that the West has imported?”
That would be a long, long list, Oso, depending on your timeframe and how you define “meme” and “West” and “Rest”. Agriculture, Christianity, the wheel, zero….
Flipping through a basic history of European art and design of the past couple of centuries will reveal a succession of crazes for “exotic” cultures — Chinoiserie in the 18th century, Ancient Egypt in the early 19th century (after Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign), Japonisme in the later 19th century (a cultural phenomenon which exposes the historical shortsightedness of the “ninja gap” theory — Japanese culture has been “cool” in the West for quite a long time and for quite complex cultural and economic reasons), the influence of Aztec art on Art Deco in the early 20th century, right up to the popularity of some Bollywood tropes in recent years. A Jamaican writer friend who lives in Glasgow expresses amazement at how totally Jamaican slang has been adopted by some young urban working-class Scots.
Sometimes cultural interpenetration has the most durable effects when it’s so subtle you barely realise it’s happening. And there’s a lot happening off the radar screen of your average North American blogger planning an April Fool’s prank.
Using
I should clarify: I mean since around 1940. The West hasn’t been the global hegemon for that long. The list would be long, undoubtedly – from Bob Marley to Bangra to various types of Yoga, etc. – but I don’t think it would be that long.
And I agree with you about the subtle, under-the-radar cultural interplay: Not only are the Japanese great at exporting culture … it’s also interesting what cultures they import … lots of Aztec imagery, for example.
Still, we see bloggers all over the world discussing Valentine’s Day, but it’s pretty rare to find anyone outside of countries with large Hindu populations celebrating or discussing Holi even though Holi is undoubtedly a way cooler holiday than V-day. Can I get a witness?
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Aside from that first dis toward women (seriously, David, do I look like someone who sits around and talks about my feelings?), I really enjoyed this.
And now I’m definitely going to be thinking on what other cultural memes I can think of that have traveled west.
(btw: my captcha says “simmer time” – love it)
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I expect you to be very active on April 1 at Berkman.
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[...] kid is trying way too hard to be something he’s not. What I think is behind that is something my friend David raised on his blog earlier this week: Western appropriation/importation of cultural memes from other countries. (Note: [...]
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I’ve always been a way bigger fan of International Women’s Day (March
than Valentine’s Day… Makes more sense to me and is more inclusive — celebrates women as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, friends, lovers … and isn’t that the point, really? Is a pretty big deal in other parts of the world (esp Russia) and yet Valentine’s Day is what we in the US choose, so that’s what sticks…
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ha – nice comment engine turning my “8″ into a smiley face…
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Score on the Octavio Paz mention.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
My first guess is that a lot of our cultural imports have to do with population clusters and the influence those groups have… and sometimes whether that can be exploited. In terms of holidays I think of Three Kings Day, Chinese New Year, Passover, St. Patricks Day, Cinco de Mayo – maybe not the most profound examples, but…
Also thinking access to, and use of media plays a huge part in all of this… maybe we’ll be a lot more influenced in the coming years by those cultures who are kicking our butt in mobile communication.
When I think of past influences, I think Bollywood, Manga, Kung-Fu, oh and nobody ate croissants until the mid-80′s or so, right?
It’s weird because the more I think about it, the more I think we’re just a very slow sum of all our international parts – so it’s always been a slow trickle from the rest to the West. Maybe it’s just since the advent of television we output our mixed American culture faster than we’re able to take in and absorb new ones.
Still thinking.
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[...] of non-western cultural artifacts and authenticity (a theme I originally “appropriated” from him–see how that works?). Ever since I wrote that post, I’ve been meaning to respond in [...]