Saturday 15 August 2009

The Truth - there's a Beginning and an End

Talking candidly - I feel I must in this instance -
there wasn't much else to life. There had been a morass in indulgence and violent ignorANCE. Some might recount the hedonism of Madchester and the Hacienda but I was too poor to go that far. Trough of Bowland in an old clapped out Ford Cortina was the limit, breathing in the toxic fumes of the otherside of hedonistic life (hence the semiotic nature of this blog). Have you ever tried a bucket? Not the spade version. I hated it. The first time I tried it I felt guilty and horrid. There's more to life. There's music and emotion and feeling sorry for yourself. That DM music was the escape - it happened because young people think they will live forever and have the power to shape the world. You think you will fall in love and have the world's largest orgasm and be romantic at the same time. That's what the music provoked; it saved the mind from going mad.



Tuesday 1 April 2008

Lexical Domination

18 months ago the international media picked up on President Chirac’s outburst at an EU’s conference on business and subsequently ran biased, sycophantic, and expectedly liberalistic stories about the global spread of English. 

Needless to say, my own article falls into one of those three categories. I am, as a native speaker, subject to the grammatical law of my language as each person is to their own. I am also privileged because I can communicate almost anywhere in the world and be understood, but my language is at the forefront of ‘linguicide’, along with Chinese, Spanish, French and Arabic, destroying minority languages, along with culture and customs in many cases.

Chirac’s concern was not at someone speaking English but at one of his own countrymen doing so. The French government has laws in place, concerning the cultural value of French that protects that value from the influence of foreign languages, principally Anglo-Saxon, and rightly so.

Other countries such as Bhutan, Iran, or semi-autonomous regions like Basque [and Tibet] adopt similar methods, of varying degrees, of protecting their cultures from outside influences; or recently the newly elected President of Bolivia promised to decrease the predominance of Spanish in favour of local indigenous tongues. In Italy, I must watch a foreign TV programme in dubbed Italian, but in Portugal I can hear the original language, perhaps because the Portuguese government is less sensitive as there are a 150 million speakers of Portuguese in Brazil. 

In India, a sub-continent with hundreds of dialects, its parliament speaks in English, an alien language, otherwise each speech community would never be able to agree on whose dialect to use. This was the reason for the creation of Esperanto in the EU because it was not indigenous to any state; a wonderful idea in principle except that it failed, not for any innate error but for lack of native speakers and cooperation.

Yet, in the UN’s General Assembly every member country speaks in its own language, appropriately but not without problems. There are numerous positive arguments for global languages, we all know the benefits but English marginalises populations whose first language is not a global language, then it can and does lead to cultural and economic domination of the populations speaking English as a first language.

It would appear attempts like ‘Esperanto’ at this stage of our history are the roads forward. Is EngSpanAraFrenEse feasible (Spanglish exists)? If we all put our heads together to make such a language would it succeed, or be the exclusive language of those in power?

Saturday 1 March 2008

The Enigma Game

Football and sociology go together like two peas in a pod.

Sociology gathers philosophical and cultural evidence and relies on themes and occurrences in a society to explain human behaviour.

How does one describe human behaviours when only a billion or two watch 22 people on a field of grass running round in various circles while trying to chase a globular object? Every four years the globe is caught by football fever and the young dream of playing on this international world stage to incredible receptions of passion, excitement, and unbelievable disbelief.
It's an enigma
Yet, why is it so endemic, what makes it so universal? Why do people become utterly absorbed by it to the extent where we see an out-pouring of national pride where in other circumstances we would not see? In South-Korea the scenes of millions on the streets of Seoul were unforgettable. Apart from the most obvious reasons like drama and excitement, it is a sociological enigma. One cannot deny the cross-cultural popularity of it, the healing power of it and the way in which it absorbs itself into the centre of any culture and produces talented players who go on to become superstars and ambassadors for their countries.

This sport can serve as a doorway of escape from poverty or crime for a talented youngster with a well developed left- or right foot.This social phenomenon is replicated in almost every other sport too. It might have been a comedy but 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, the story of a young British Hindu who faces the anger of her Asian community for playing football had real positive messages and demonstrated several social comments about its place in the world and society‘s attitude to football. Panahi’s Offside presented us with questions about personal identity about a story of a woman who disguises herself as a man at a footy stadium in Tehran, which is now in fact, unnecessary.

To the 32 countries from every continent participating in this festival there is immense pride and prestige, and the impact of international recognition in what can be an advertising masterstroke.

This it seems could be the tonic, a tonic that allows many to forget the routine of daily life in a ritual of spectatorship that acts as a conduit or a spiritual magnet for communities to come together.

It doesn’t matter if you hate football, it’s the immense social phenomena of seeing disparate persons from Tobago, Slovenia and Korea sharing a point of communication that all understand, that is fascinating to see.

Tuesday 26 February 2008

What do we do about all these ‘Bleeps’?

I awake to a bleep on the radio then switch on my mobile phone that bleeps with the day’s first sms. I’m compelled to check emails.

I can only enter my office, after being electronically identified by some disembodied voice behind the intercom.

A animal herder in the Gobi desert checks the weekend’s European football results on his satellite T.V. and radios friends to compare results. Apparently, in the Taklimaken plains, more people have DVD players than running water, and in the Atacama desert, where it rains every 300 years, electronic devices check the weather then precipitate water from Pacific fog banks. A dialysis machine saves the life of a child in Peshawar. International networks of terrorists, and governments, separated by thousands of miles, are able to remain in contact by cellular and fibre-optic waves. An angry teenager in Colorado creates a forum website to discuss problems about the world, then shoots a number of people with a rifle.

Do we fully understand the profound impact that technology has on societies? Technology can be a blessing in disguise for some people but it can be a disruptive social disease for others. It can create healthy and prosperous countries but bring down the most secure. 

The problems facing us today are how to measure the mixed results of this proliferation of modern forms of technology and communication, and how to understand them. This also includes the impact of modern engineering on the natural environment. And furthermore, who is in control, who is involved in the key decision-making process? UNESCO’s commitments are more crucial than ever, as are those of other NGO‘s. And governments.

The word ‘Technology’ is derived from the Greek word technologia (τεχνολογια), which literally means ‘Craft-saying’. The word classifies the knowledge of humanity’s tools and crafts. Technology is not a modern phenomenon. It is an ancient cultural activity predating science and engineering that arrived with some of man’s earliest thoughts, like the wearing of clothing, to contemporarily culminating in the carbon based micro-chip. Its ancient status means that we cannot stop it or contain it, it will always be here, it is our heritage to create it. 

However, what is important is how to live with it and most of all, how to learn to use it responsibly with morality, compassion, and consideration. Without those, we are truly lost.