One Sunday I was with a group friends at a bar, when my friend approached me to use my phone since his battery had died. I naturally agreed, and promptly took out my SIM card so he could use his. While my friend was busy away with my phone, a distraction in conversation led to the SIM card falling between the floorboards, lost to eternity and a blaze of incompetence.
Upon realising my error, a wave of great anguish swept over me, a feeling I’m sure anyone has felt when failing at the most basic hand-motor-control.
The night wound to a dramatic climax, and upon waking up I realised that suddenly, I wasn’t connected…out the telephonic loop and unable to check my email or Facebook with there being no Internet at home. Phones have advanced a great deal have they not?
Initially, a great sense of abandonment filled my thoughts, since surely now was the time a vital call, SMS, or online message will be sent and I just won’t be able to get involved. I was cut off from the outside world, with my only saviour being an online chat available from the email account I use, at work, which barely cuts it as a tool of communication when faced with problems of what to do over the weekend. Coordination is everything.
The question I asked myself was why I, just as an example, feel this way just because I can’t be contacted or contact people for a couple of days when on the move?
The answer lies perhaps in the notion that society has become increasingly dependant, and therefore inadvertently hapless, at dealing with life without a Blackberry (the new fad from the north), Internet or a cellphone. With communication technology having advanced tremendously and one could say quite startlingly over the last 10 years even, the dependence of people on technology is becoming ever more apparent.
South Park, that great diocesan of pop-culture satire, has an episode where the Internet stops working, an outlandish concept but an incredibly interesting scenario. In the episode, society crumbles as life grinds to a halt, people freak out at not being able to email each other, and men all over the planet are disappointed that they can’t get their daily dose of online porn. People in there thousands go on a Great Digital Trek to Silicon Valley, to ‘Caleforney Way’, where there is rumoured to be some Internet. People have to turn to normal post, and hark, the telephone, cobwebs and all, to communicate. Amusing, but strangely accurate in a weird sort of way.
While South Park pretty much takes the piss out of everything, and everyone for that matter, the message it was sending is loud and clear: have people lost the ability to interact with each other without the added incentive of there being an online fallback plan?
Even the way people write has changed due to the increased influence of communication technology. First we had to deal with the abbreviation of the English language for sms’s or texts. That was horrible enough, but now with SEO (search engine optimization) becoming an ever-increasing part of business on the web, certain language will always be favoured just because there is a higher chance that Average Andrew will type it in to their Google bar. I’ve even heard some colleagues ‘lol’ at each other after a joke since they are too lazy to go for a ‘haha’ or actually laugh. Language, it would appear, is becoming increasingly abbreviated, de-valuing it of meaning and sustenance for a discerning mind to pick part.
The upside of being un-contactable as it were was that I wasn’t bothered by the incessant wants and fors of people I didn’t feel like dealing with. The mobile telephone has almost in this sense become a curse, invading the public’s sense of privacy, making people contactable 24/7 which surely isn’t healthy? There is the view from certain cultures that when you are photographed, a piece of your soul is stolen by camera, one little flash at a time. The same could be said for phones. I never understood the need for a person to have two separate phones, with one being private and the other for business. Now, after entering the working world, sometimes people just do not want to be contacted for business reasons. Work sucks, which makes the practise even more sensible.
There is no greater communication than a face to face conversation, because when you in the presence of a person, it is possible to read more from a person then just the words they use. Body language, the ‘vibe’, whatever term you want to use, is often a far more effective means of communication then sending a sms. That is way too abbreviated to say anything meaningful, unless accompanied by a previous personal history, say between friends. As much as people believe heir Facebook/Twitter worlds are on par with the real one (World of Warcraft players know this feeling well I assume), where they believe joining a protest group singling out some cause or person will actually make a difference (it doesn’t mean jack), sometimes the only thing that can do and should do, is the real, the see-able, the physical.
Did I feel naked being disconnected? You bet, but as Darryl Kerrigan says in the film Australian film‘The Castle’ while admiring his ramshackle of home, ‘How’s the serenity?’ We could all use a little bit more of that.
Online communication certainly has its pros: you can communicate with different people from all over the world, re-ignite old flames from your youth and blog about the most inane things (hypocrisy is something I’m not averse to).
First, it was the email/sms (texting) revolution that got the ball rolling for online language. Then instant chat become the next champion, with social networking (read Facebook) being a gradual off shoot of that. The snow ball got rolling, and where it will stop, who knows?
The Queen’s English, on the other side of the proverbial urban dictionary (great website by the way), is something that is slowly being condensed by lolz, fyi, asap, number for letters (eg: gr8…what’s great about shite spelling?) and other abominable experiments on the English language.
Email, especially, has become the bastion of business and email speak. Puke. Whole companies have been created to maximise the use of email technology and email language. Again, someone hand me a barf bag.
There is nothing more ridiculous than someone updating their status on Facebook, without actually speaking any language whatsoever. There is that trick whereby if the correct letters are in the word and arranged in any other manner but the correct way, it is still legible. An example: I’m going to have a great weekend VS A gr8 wkend is on the kards etc (that was a shit example but you catch my drift).
Even with the introduction of e-books, and things such as the Amazon Kindle (my dad has one…I’m not plugging it), reading has gone even more online than it used to. with a button titled ‘Next Page’ replacing the minimal amount of effort it required an old-school book reader to turn a page.
While the Kindle firmly encompasses whole books, the fact that the presentation of the literature itself has gone electronic is a bit warped. I was raised, and I’m only 23, to enjoy a good book and while reading stuff on the Internet is cool, nothing helps a person’s language better than reading a lot.
The world is a bit different isn’t it? Even so, I still like picking a book whenever the need strikes me. No batteries required! Fuck yeah…
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A staple part of American politics seems to be the very clear (really?) difference between left and right wing. The right represent a bunch of rednecks bent on getting rich, love guns and don’t like people getting to liberal on their own patch of earth. They are often seen as the most patriot-style Americans, even though there country is built on the labour of immigrants, including themselves. They just conveniently forgot about the genocide of the American Indians.
The left are meant to be the people that love education, are bent on turning their country into a European style socialist state (why that’s a bad thing I don’t know. The US doesn’t offer any form of government insurance, and with it being projected that 16% of their entire GDP will be spent on healthcare in 2020, they got some issues), and are wasteful spenders of hard earned tax dollars.
There are a whole bunch of other stereotypes, but I won’t delve into that. The thing that vexes me is that instead of one being blue and the other red, they are both actually yellow in that essentially they believe in the same things (almost) but still act like agreeing with one another is paramount to siding with the devil.
In South Africa, we are faced with the same retarded lunacy of policy and ideological distinction between capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, revolutionaries and political plots targeted at individulas. Give me a fucking break.
The issue rests that if politicians actually gave a shit about the people they are meant to be representing, they would find a way of working around their differences. But as we all know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Far be it from their title of being ‘public servants’ to actually be accurate.
Can we ever trust politicians? Some how I have my doubts.
A buzz has arisen in Cape Town after a student gave a President Jacob Zuma motorcade the finger, only to be subsequinelty arrested.
This makes me say this: what the fuck?
In a country that has come so far, and still battles with problems of poverty, such an over reaction to what can be classed as free speech is extremely pertubring to those living within these borders.
With cronyism no where better defined then in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s neighbours up north, surely the president’s security team knows who and what constitutes a real threat? Certainly not a student surely? They even held him for 24 hours.
With there being bigger fish to fry, surely the president’s men have more important things to do? Give me a break, and go suck some grapez…
Have you seen Avatar? Hey miss, yes you down there, have you seen that Avatar movie?
Many people will be asking each other this obvious question, and have been doing so since James Cameron’s first film since Titanic was released about a month ago. It has become the highest grossing movie of all time (A friend informs me Gone With The Wind, if one accounts for inflation, is the real champ) and the seeing public are, officially, losing their shit over it.
I’ve seen Avatar (yes, hypocrisy stains like no other) and in 3D, so I can count myself knowledgable on the subject to a certain degree. I enjoyed it, but I know of others, sane people with brains, who put on their Twitter feeds and Facebook that ‘Avatar is life changing’ or ‘I’ve just seen the best movie ever made.’
Seriously, what the fuck? From a visual point of view, it was spectacular, I will give it that. However, who was the best actor in the movie? My vote goes for the Colonel…at least he was sincere and awesome when destroying his perceived enemies. The film’s themes of earthiness, and being one with the earth, green is awesome etc. are noble (and important int he current global context), but from a plot point of view, it’s very passe.
While there have been many deities of commercialism that are actually a load of ass (90s pop music being an example along with George W Bush), the more important question is why so many people get suckered into becoming one of the herd even when the reasons for doing so do not go beyond exatcly that. It’s commercial peer pressure, and especially Western orientated societies, are suspectable to this type of brain washing. Those who sit on the extreme right in the US might say the same of Obama, which might sound cracked but at the moment he fooled a lot of people considering how he has been performing (the bar was placed to high perhaps?).
Avatar, while championing the environment, was approved by the studio for filming because it would do one thing and one thing only: make money. It’s a case of irony to the largest degree. The film states that we are one with the environment but the film would never have seen the light of day unless a profit could be made.
That, essentially, is the contradiction in terms popular media is facing today: ship in or ship out, otherwise go get fucked.
It’s all a load of sour grapez to me.
South Africa is a country that is constantly evolving as a society, with the same being applicable to institutions of state, along with the semantic restraints of those institutions.
During apartheid, state institutions were the home of the apartheid official, one that did not question party ethics and party approaches to difficult yet fundamental questions such as the role of the media and what the media were actually allowed to stay.
The SABC especially was an institution that was dominated by National Party thinking. News was orientated towards government views, with the national broadcaster being pertinent on the airwaves as much as on the ‘box.’
Even the print industry was dominated (and still is to a certain extent) by Naspers, which houses most of the top selling broad and single sheets in the country.
Fast forward 16 years since the reins of government changed and nothing, really, has changed. Instead of a quasi-Afrikaans bias to what we were told, now most news information issued by the broadcaster needs to be filtered through non-ANC eyes. The Mbeki years were an example of placing loyalists in positions of importance (like the ridiculous Snuki as head of news. puke].
Now, while South Africa can be considered a land of the free press, an interesting watershed has arisen thanks to the independent broadcaster, e-TV. While M-Net has been going solo for years as well, e-TV takes a special place in the South African media landscape due to the fact that they have a 24-hour news channel on DSTV and offer an alternative news service to the SABC.
The story in question was an interview conducted with two would be ‘criminals’, who were saying that the 2010 World Cup would be a profitable time for them since they would commit more crime. While the story from a journalistic point of view isn’t very credible (in fairness I haven’t seen it, only read about it), using circumstantial evidence as the basis for a hard story (very dodgy footing there), it has suddenly risen to prominence because one of the alleged criminals has since committed suicide, writing a letter to the reporter who conducted the story blaming him for his decision.
The government (read ANC) have cried foul, suggesting e-TV are protecting criminals from the long arm of the law, defeating the ends of justice and other such accusations. e-TV are staying firm with the issue now going to court etc.
The outcome of the case will lay down an interesting precedent for the future, especially with the in-direct consequences being the effects it will have upon the ability of news organisations to protect the identity of their sources.
Interesting times in an interesting country.
The passing of a year into another is always marked as a time of celebration, a time of reflection and a time to get wasted of your face. While there are many who prefer to have a quite New Years (most likely those over the age of 30), in a 24 hour period approxiamitely 37% of the world’s population are smashed, on the hour every hour. The reason they invented the Concorde (with the Greens having seen to its destruction, or more correctly, the Suits masquerading as Greens since it was fucking pricey to operate the damn thing), was so that really rich people can fly around the world, and get shit-faced for 24 hours and live, like, one day longer (not sure about the maths but if you fly around the Sun and return to Earth you supposedly 3 and a bit minutes younger. Eistein and those guys knew their shit.)
So, what do we have to look forward to in this year of 2010, the year of Ke Nako (It is time) in South Africa for the World Cup (sorry…FIFA World Cup…douchebags), a time where Gordon Brown’s ministers or former ministers, its a bit blurry now, are calling for his head, terrorists exclaim how much they hate everyone, Robert Mugabe continues to live, even though he is insane (and has been so for the entire Noughties [is this a kak name?]) and the world continues to lurch from the recession, much to the amusement of the bankers, who fucked everything up for everyone else but are now reaping the rewards of an ucluttered financial market. Dead wood slows down profits.
Climate change is still an issue, especially since sweet nothing was achieved at Copenhagen in the grand scheme of things. Everyone blames everyone else, much to amusement of the Suits who get richer the longer industry stays Gray instead of Green.
It’s going to be a great frikking year! Woohoo!
As we sit here, 192 countries have sent representatives to Denmark’s capital to tackle a problem that has long been considered not important enough to merit a conference of such epic nature: global warming.
It is here, in Scandanavia, that the future health of our world will be decided by the leaders and governments, that we (in the most part), elected to represent us. There has been much talk from NGOs, respected leaders, industrialists and environmental activists about the importance of Copenhagen.
The feeling I get from way down south (since this blog is based in South Africa) is that while everyone is happy to get together in a room and talk shop, if anything actually decisive is arrived upon I would be very surprised. The problem, inherrent in gatherings like these and something that has shown the UN to be weak and defunct in its mandate to prevent global conflict, is that the table is loaded in favour of the developed world (as usual).
While the US and China alone represent at least a quater of the world’s pollution, will they consider slowing down? Hahahahaha…that is the response you will get. President Obama will be in Denmark, but while he has good intentions, the intentions of the US Congress are a completely different kettle of fish.
While China doesn’t suffer the same bureaucratic hang-ups (the advantage of a totalitarian society), their willingness to get involved is equally suspicious. Like their American counterparts, certain Chinese nationals have gotten very rich through the use and the abuse of the land.
SA has said it will cut back emissions by 34% in 2020. Other countries have also vouched to do the same, throwing percentages at eachother like a grand game of poker, where everyone is trying to represent something that they actually don’t have and have no idea if they will be having it in the future.
It all appears a little headless to me. They all commit to dates well in the future, where critics can be told “How do you know what we do in the future?” The uncertainy is underwhelming me, while the people most under-threat, such as the Maldives (who held an under-water session of parliament recently to highlight rising sea levels), don’t seem to register on anyone’s radar.
If this is the amount of action and in-action we see when the world gets together, boy, does international relations have a long way to go. All the while the planet gets hotter, oceans rise and people suffer.
If it’s not my problem, why should I care right? Go suck some grapez…
There is a ruling that will have an interesting impact on preparations for the 2010 World Cup. The Pietermaritzberg High Court (in KwaZulu Natal) will be ruling next week whether or not the court sees the ritual slaughter of a bull as a cultural right as guaranteed by the Constitution or as an instance of animal cruelty, which is granted provision, also in the Constitution of South Africa.
The Makhonya Royal Trust stated their desire for a cow to be slaughtered on each of the fields of the new stadiums to be used during the 2010 World Cup to ensure that each of the stadiums are blessed in a “true African way”.
While ritual killings are reported to be very rough on the animal, such ceremonies form an important part of, in this example at least, Zulu culture.
There is a link on this site to the forum SportsLeader, which is the brother to ThoughtLeader, a place of ‘intellectual discussion’. There is a post on this very topic where the gloves have come off with a feminist white chick saying such practises are outdated and cruel, with a black guy replying by suggesting that the feminist is racist blah blah blah…
SourGrapez doesn’t know about you but we are sick of the goddamn race card, the last refuge for an ignorant argument in many cases (We aren’t saying it isn’t valid, when if you feel you are losing an argument, a quick whip out of the RC is a low-blow move since its a mire to deal with). Take a step wrong in challanging a culture and wo betide, you are a racisssssssssst. In this instance, there must be a middle ground where the ceremony can be performed by the animals involved are humanely treated and put to death in one go to ensure no pain etc.
This is a South African based blog hence the content is often about what is happening beyond the Equator, but SG wonders if other countries suffer the clash of culture versus modernisation (which is often the case). What has been decided by, let’s say, the Americans in the case of the Native Americans (who were, in a word, genocided by their foes, the white man). The same can be said of the Aboriginies in Australia or another culture that is challanged within a country’s own borders.
It’s all a load of nonsense, with people talking hot air. Someone get in there, kick some ass, and find some compromise (that all too difficult rememdy to concoct). Because, really, all this whinging makes SG want to chow down and suck some grapez…because some has to give a shit.
The financial turmoil that embraced the world market’s over the past year and a half made a serious dent in the world’s economy, saw the disappearance of billions of dollars of net value and the disolution of some of the world’s leading financial branks, such as Arthur Anderson and Bear Stearnes. The US government is now the primary shareholder in AIG and finds itself involved in several other companies as well, a stark contrast from the early part of the decade and the 1990s when US capitalism seemed unstoppable after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Several of the world’s leading investment banks were seen to lose billions and had to be bailed out by their respective governments, with most of this action taking place on US soil.
After the turbulance of a year ago, the same banks that were proclaiming bankruptcy are now greasing their coperate wheels with the profits made in part on the back of the American tax-payer.
Even President Obama has railed against the greed and lack of sincerity shown by Wall Street, with it appearing that banks have yet to learn their lesson in relation to payment and profit.
Merryl-Lynch, Goldman Sachs and others are looking in robust financial shape considering how the US financial landscape has changed. The US auto industry is a miracle job on its hands to bring their field back into the black.
The financial crisis represented a golden opportunity to change the financial landscape for the betterment of both the corperate and real world, but it appears that his opportunity has been squandered as once again, Wall Street and their European cousins to a lesser extent fall into the same trap s last time: greed. While the financial ramifications will take years to work themselves out of the financial markets, the moral cost is becoming catastrophic: do the banks actaully give a shit? No is the most likely answer.
What crash they may be asking? Either way, they can go suck on some King Midas-tinted grapez…
