Eighth Week Journal

We are talking about Globalization, Digital Divide by investigating the following three essays.

Before I dig into the individual essays, I have to say that three writers are complimenting each other. In contrast to the past readings, their collective is really helping helping each others' arguments. They are forcing us to acknowledge our privileged position of academic theory mental masturbation.

Also, I must research and formulate the definition of globalization.

Wki delivers this very optistic definition: "Globalization is the increasing interconnectedness of people and places as a result of advances in transport, communication, and information technologies that cause political, economic, and cultural convergence." I personally see globalization of yet another form of white male colonialism like a juggernaut assimilating regional cultural specificities and spitting out anything not profitable. It's capitalism on the highest level if we don't go interplanetary. One of my favorite bands GogolBordello motto, a Ukranian Gypsy punk band, is go locally, fuck globally. I love them!

Iba Ndiaye Djiadji, “Artistic Aggression and Globalization: What Will Remain of Africa?” in Gerfried Stocker, ed., Unplugged: Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatze-Cantz, 2002), 68-76. Iba was one of the authors for Unplugged: Art As the Scene of Global Conflicts : Ars Electronica 2002 edition. I found this interesting link: http://www.servus.at/kontext/ARS/ars_cluster_E_1_1.ppt.pdf Someday when I have a second, I'm going print it up at the Cave.

After the initial reading, my first immediate reaction was this his essay is loaded with brilliant questions that I really appreciated.

He begins the essay with the argument that globalization is hurting not helping Mama Africa economically and what naturally follows artistically. Because this article was published in 2002, he uses the economic conditions with statistics 1996 & 1998 of Africa and the crushing debts accounting of world loans. Even though the data is ten years old, the realities seem just as grim and even worse in regions such as Darfur of Sudan, Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia to name a few. On page 7, he relates the basic economic conditions curtailing any market for the internet. Ironically, 70% of the million internet users in Africa and in South Africa that has several millions of whites that are disproportionately richer than the rest of Africans. And, to top it off, the monthly service fees for internet service is over three times the cost per month than the West.

Iba then talks about the question of how historically African art being valued from the Western perspective. This argument is almost entirely discussing the visual arts and not music or written art. He asks a fabulous universal question that is asked all over the world suffering from Globalization, how does culture hang and not completely assimiulate into the Disney/Hollywood/MTV, 1 second byte attention spans?

He concludes his argument stating that Digital Arts (scientizing art) may be the only salvation (p.75).

I believe that this is one of the reasons Soraya asked us to research the contreversial and very ambitious MIT program Onelaptopperchild to get laptops to poor children all over the world.

http://www.khaledhafez.net/critical/2.htmThough this view is by no means consistent, even within a particular declaration: for instance, Senegalese art critic Iba Ndiaye Djiadji at once laments the contamination of African tradition (WC) and praises artists who take advantage of advanced media technology. This further illustrates the difficulty in distinguishing between local traditions and contemporary global experience.

Arjun Apadurai, “Here and Now” excerpt from Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1-11.

OluOguibe, “Part III: Brave ‘New World’,” from The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 149-177. Focus on the first section.

Olu begins his argument that we must recognize the fact that most of the world is not accessible to the cybernet either by economic means or by illiteracy. Most of the world is not arguing the meaning of embodiment but instead struggling for survival. He wants to remind us that our moral obligation is to use our technology to help the majority of the world's humans. (pages 157 & 158) Also, a great he points on page 160 that the "Other", those not privileged with time and technology, are not beyond the borders but within the borders .

Within the interview on page 165, he touches upon a topic that is very close to me because I am a part of Serbian diaspora and that is the phenomena of cyberdiasporas. (p. 165)

The last point that Olu makes about multiculturalism that I loved. Olu articulates beautifully one of Sharon Daniel principles of her art when he speaks of the racism that is inherent when an artist turns their upon on alien culture and does the speaking for the culture as opposed to the culture retaining culture.