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A blog by Álvaro Ramírez
In the next couple of weeks I will be traveling to New York and later to Bogotá mainly for family gatherings. I guess I will have very little chance to post in this blog for a while. I will try though. It will all be a matter of new schedules some tourist activity and real life as opposed to cyberwriting. I am looking forward to it.
Internet like many other technologies were created Eurocentric. And this will have to change. Like many other things many westerners using Internet asumme that everybody has to write using the Western alphabet. But the facts tells us that millions of people in this planet have languages that use diferent characters. And the Internet should include them.
Eurocentrism is naturalized as "common sense" and by this concept goes that the best has been created by Europeans which includes also "neo-Europeans" of the Americas, Australia and elsewhere.
Eurocentrism, as Ella Shohat and R.Stam have described it, engenders a fictitious sense of the innate superiority of European derived cultures and peoples.
The Internet as as site of power has been develop in the English-speaking countries. But the demographics are against this dominance.
BBC reports that since the net's centre of gravity is moving East, there are efforts aimed at finding standards in order to communicate more easily and make Internet a truly international resource.
I hope that this type of news increases an awareness of how big the World really is and how Eurocentrism narrows our view of the planet.
Today, a hundred years ago, one of my favorite writers, Pablo Neruda was born in Chile. That is a big day for the owner of this blog. Time to celebrate his words by citing one of his poems.
Ode to the Book
translated by Nathaniel Tarn
When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.
The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine" Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.
No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.
Want to read more by Pablo Neruda? click here
The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution is a very good article written by independent researcher, Christine Boese.
She discusses weblogs and klogs (knowledge blogs) as a notable social phenomenon.
By applying some of the key concepts of The pedagogy of the oppressed to analyse Main stream Media Institutions like Time and CNN she makes an original exploration on digital and online dialog (through the blog technology) as sites of contestation and resistance.
I recommend not only this article but most of the others in the new publication Into the Blogosphere
PAUL KRUGMAN Op-Ed Columnist of the New York Times makes a very interesting and relevant point in his column today when he points to the small space mainstream media outlets in the US are giving to one of their most important duties that of being a public service channel for Democracy and the citizens who turn to them to get information and a qualified opinion.
News Media should always be a watchdog for the use and abuse of power. In this sense I respect Michael Moore much more than Krugman seems to do when he says :
"And for all its flaws, 'Fahrenheit 9/11' performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn't promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren't the reason why millions of people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven't been doing their job."
On June 22 Michael Moore's official website informed that the famous documentary filmmaker will soon become a blogger. I must say he is very welcomed to the world of instant publication.
In today's review at The New York Times: Fahrenheit 9/11 by A. O. SCOTT, a very fresh and engaged film critic discusses the powerful film that opens this week in the USA.
Mr. Scott criticizes some of Michael Moore traits but points out that Fahrenheit 9/11 "is worth seeing, debating and thinking about, regardless of your political allegiances."
He concludes his article in a very compelling manner: "The most moving sections of "Fahrenheit 9/11" concern Lila Lipscomb, a cheerful state employee and former welfare recipient who wears a crucifix pendant and an American flag lapel pin. When we first meet her, she is proud of her family's military service — a daughter served in the Persian Gulf war and a son, Michael Pedersen, was a marine in Iraq — and grateful for the opportunities it has offered. Then Michael is killed in Karbala, and in sharing her grief with Mr. Moore, she also gives his film an eloquence that its most determined critics will find hard to dismiss. Mr. Bush is under no obligation to answer Mr. Moore's charges, but he will have to answer to Mrs. Lipscomb."
