Utopier og dystopier
Dystopier om overvågning:
George Orwell: 1984
Kommercielle interessers overvågning. Ex: Hari Kunzru: Raj Bohemian, The New Yorker March 10, 2008. Overvågning i reklamebranchen. En mand har været til et selskab i et bohememiljø og opdager senere, at han er blevet fotograferet og indgår i product placements til salg af alkoholiske drikke. (engelsk, medier, samfundsfag): http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/03/10/080310fi_fiction_kunzru?currentPage=all
Overvågningskameraer og andre typer af overvågning ved demonstrationer (f.eks. COP15 og Climate Camp Britain. Politiets overvågning af demonstrationer og aktivister. Med kamera og undercoveraktive: Ex: Mark Kennedy: A journey from undercover cop to ‘bona fide’ activist The Guardian, Monday 10 January 2011 . Den første af en række artikler i The Guardian om det britiske politis overvågning af klimaaktivister ved hjælp af betjente, der er gået undercover ind i miljøet. (Samfundsfag, engelsk)
Den værst tænkelige case. Nordkorea som eksempel på overvågningssamfund. Adskillige videoer på nettet, f.eks. BBC (skriv BBC North Korea i Google). Kan f.eks. konfronteres med 1984.
Surveillance i samfundet generelt. Mange links til surveillance society artikler og problematikker hos BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6108496.stm En officiel rapport om the surveillance society ligger på nettet (også på CD-rom’en)Hvordan overvåger medicinalindustrien vore kroppe og sind?: George Saunders: Escape from Spiderhead. New Yorker Dec. 20 2010. Novelle om medicinalforsøg, hvor forsøgspersoner overvåges af forsøgsledere med henblik på eksperimenter, hvor der skal udvikles nye psykofarmaka til medicinalindustrien Gloser til novellen. Novellens tematik kan relateres til Herbert Marcuses teorier om styring af mennesker via skabelse af kunstige behov og repressiv absublimering, f.eks. i One Dimensional Man.
Film: Minority Report and Enemy of the State
GOOGLE OG INTERNETTET: Overvågning på nettet kan ske via søgninger i Google: Søgeveje og de cookies, folk efterlader. Det kan man finde artikler om, og det kan undersøges.
FACEBOOK OG SOCIALE MEDIER: Hvordan fungerer de sociale internetmedier også som mulige kanaler for overvågning (data slettes måske ikke og kan blive liggende og således blive inkriminerende for folk)
Film: The Social Network om Mark Zuckerberg, og hvordan han skabte Facebook.
SELVISCENESÆTTELSEHistorien om Jade Goody. Via Big Brother Reality-TV til Celibrity – og tidlig død. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Goody . Historien kan analyseres fra mange vinkler, f.eks. populærpressens behandling (medie-/kommunikations-/tekstanalyse af britiske tabloidaviser), dels medialiseringen af underholdning i de nye medier, dels multikulturelle clashes (diskussion med indisk Bollywoodskuespiller). (Engelsk, mediefag, samfundsfag, dansk).
Identitet i den digitale tidsalder: Sherry Turkle: Life on the Screen. 1995. Sherry Turkle: Alone Together 2010/11. i De to bøger beskriver Turkle Internettets rolle som gående fra Postmodern Playhouse til noget, der truer med at tage identiten fra det moderne menneske, idet vi sidder ”lænket til ” de digitale medier i alt for lang tid. Bøgerne er beskrevet her: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/books/review/Lehrer-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=turkle&st=cse
Overvågning af reality participants: Ex: Ben Loory: The TV: Novelle om en mand, der vågner op en dag og finder ud af, at han deltager i de programmer, han ser i TV. Til sidst kan han ikke finde ud af, hvad der er reality, og hvad der er reality show. http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/04/12/100412fi_fiction_loory
Er Verden konstrueret? Film: The Truman show with Jim Carrey (nævnes på CD-romen)
Bloggen som genre – selviscenesættelse, meningsdannelse eller nyhedsformidling. Hvad er en blog? Forskellige typer af blogs.
Rap på Internettet imod diktatorer. Hvordan tunesisk rapper El General, Internettet og Wikileaks var med til at få den tunesisk diktator Ben Ali væk fra magten : F.eks. beskrevet her: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/01/31/110131taco_talk_coll
Iscenensættelse i britisk politik op til valget i 2010. Første gang partilederdebatter blev sendt over internettet. The first election debate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk5HvJmy_yg&feature=player_embedded# kan f.eks. analyseres og grundtrækkene i britisk politik op til valget kan analyseres (sammen med samfundsfag, historie).
Gordon Brown og bigoted woman sagen (youtube videoer: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gordon+brown+bigoted+woman&aq=8 kan anlyseres, hvordan kan det gå til, at en britisk statsminister er ved at tabe et valg på, at han kluderer i det med kommunikation og nye medier (kan analyseres med brug af medie-/kommunikationsanalysemodel) (med samfundsfag, mediefag)Konstruktion af det feminine i medierne og reklamen: The Skinny Model being Photographed. Scene from the movie Blow up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wygqlfUoJEs The image of women in electronic media. Gender analysis. Media analysis. http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm#feminism
X-mas
A Christmas Song
by Norman Williams
Norman Williams
“A Christmas Song” from Poetry Foundation.
This site contains a lot of modernist poetry from the 30′s and later, for instance Basil Bunting. There are poems on such “unpoetic” themes as poverty, the world of finance, work, unemployment, money, etc. The Guardian calls attention to Bunting and other poets who have written on the theme of poverty.
Sibling Rivalry
A.M. Homes’ short story Brother on Sunday is an interesting read. It deals with the problems of sibling rivalry in our intensely competitive postmodern society.
The plastic surgeon Tom is expecting a visit from his dentist brother Roger. We’re on a beach somewhere in the US. Tom is married to Sandy, and they are part of a group of friends holidaying together. Tom is a bit insecure existentially, and he has an extremely narcissistic personality. Right from the start we meet him when he is examining himself in the mirror and making small corrections in his skin with Botox.
Tom is “in awe”, “mesmerized by the human body”. He is constantly taking pictures of people on the beach. In short: A kind of voyeur, the voeyrism compensating for his lack of trust in other people and his deplorable lack of communication skills. Sandy, on the other hand, is a very consummate communicator, and she has to deal with his almost childlike tantrums, which occur when Roger comes along.
He has a big minority complex to Roger, a minority complex which apparently originates in early childhood, and which has been perpetuated by a mother who seems to prefer Roger. Roger is a love child. Tom prehaps should have been a miscarriage.
Perhaps the interpretation is too easy and obvious:
“Was your father really a butcher?” the visiting sister of one of the friends asks.
“Yep. And he really talked about women’s bodies like they were cuts of meat. ‘Boy, she’s got good veal cheeks! That girl would make one hell of a standing rib roast, trussed, bound, and stuffed.’ And then he’d laugh in a weird way. My mother thought of herself as an artist. She signed up for a life-drawing class when I was eleven and she took me with her, because she thought I’d appreciate it. I just sat there, not knowing where to look. Finally, the instructor said, ‘Draw with us?’ I’d never seen a bare breast before—drawing it was like touching it. I drew that breast again and again. And then I glanced at my mother’s easel and saw that she’d drawn everything but the woman. She’d drawn the table with the vase, the flowers, the window in the background, the drapes, but not the model. The instructor asked her, ‘Where’s the girl?’ ‘I prefer a still-life,’ my mother said. ‘But my son, on the other hand, look how beautiful he thinks she is!’ ”
“Was she being mean?” He shrugs.
It could end in a fight, and the two brothers are nearly on the point of splitting up, but Sandy’s clever conflict management prevents this. In a way it peters out at the end. The author lets it end in the brothers “pummelling each other on the sofa”. “Butcher and an artist”, Roger says at the end. Two brothers living in the long shadows of their parents, living through a process of adverse identification and character construction – far from the ideals of the post modern time they live in. A. M. Homes is capable of doing better than that!
Dave Eggers
Den amerikanske forfatter Dave Eggers er snart ved at udvikle sig til lidt af en huspoet hos The Guardian. Han har tidligere skrevet short short fiction (i 2005) til avisen, og i dag har The Guardian en længere artikel om hans nyeste opus Zeitoun (Zeitoun by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton in hardback on 15 March, £18.99) .
Det er den fantastiske beretning om Abdulrahman Zeitoun, der efter oversvømmelserne forårsaget af orkanen Katrina padlede rundt i sin kano for at hjælpe sine naboer. Det vurderes, at det lykkedes ham at redde ikke mindre end 10 af dem. Nu skulle man tro, at han fik Carnegies fortjenstmedalje for det. Men nej. Det kom til at gå stik modsat. Han blev arresteret af det amerikanske terrorpoliti og underkastet forhør i flere dage af agenter fra Homeland Security, formentlig ene og alene p.g.a. hans navn. Hans nærmeste familie var i lang tid uvidende om, hvad der var blevet af ham. I lang tid var han indespærret i “Camp Greyhound”, et interimistisk fængsel bag ved busstationen i New Orleans. Det var opført i al hast for at tage sig af kriminalitets- og altså også formodede terrorproblemer vedrørende Katrinakatastrofen.
Zeitoun er altså ikke en roman i gængs forstand. Det er nærmest et non-fiction produkt, men dog fortalt med en forfatters sans for at vinkle historien, så den er spændende at læse. Det kaldes narrativ non-fiction:
Zeitoun is a work of narrative non-fiction; it tells a true story but with a novelist’s eye, paying attention to such things as character and suspense.
Eggers har brugt tre år på at lave research til bogen.
The Guardian kalder i en anden artikel Eggers for “the conscience of liberal America”. Han tager de forfulgtes og downtroddens parti. Som i dette tilfælde en hverdagens helt, der bliver udsat for den beskrevne reaktion fra myndighedernes side, bare fordi han har et arabisk navn (syrisk baggrund). Bogen er også en hudfletning af den trussel mod de borgerlige rettigheder, som hele guantanamosyndromet, og herunder krigen imod terror, er ved at udvikle sig til.
Haiku poems on Twitter
The Guardian has the story of Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, who announced his resignation on Twitter with a haiku. “Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku,” he tweeted earlier this morning, going on to apply the five/seven/five-syllable rule of the Japanese poem to his situation:
“Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more.”
Schwartz doesn’t include the seasonal reference which is key in the traditional Japanese haiku but The Guardian thinks he should be forgiven for this – and, as the paper notes, “perhaps there’s a hint of winter in the gloom of the financial crisis stalling those customers, in the finality of his last line, drumming in its point with a flurry of single syllables”.
The paper exhorts others, for instance British Gas, to follow the example. “Instead of a dry announcement,
British Gas could have told us it was”:
“Warming up winter
With money in your pocket
As gas prices fall.”
Maybe these poems apply to the formal rules of Haiku, but compared to other Haiku poems they still have some way to go. For instance, consider these poems:
The spirit of death is one,
the spirit of life is many,
When God is dead religion becomes one.
The blue of the sky longs for the earth’s green,
the wind between them sighs, “Alas.”
Day’s pain muffled by its own glare,
burns among stars in the night.
The stars crowd round the virgin night
in silent awe at her loneliness
that can never be touched.
The cloud gives all its gold
to the departing sun
and greets the rising moon
with only a pale smile.
He who does good comes to the temple gate,
he who loves reaches the shrine.
Flower, have pity for the worm,
it is not a bee,
its love is a blunder and a burden.
(Rabindranath Tagore)
They do not adhere strictly to the formal rules, but are nonetheless of considerable beauty in their imagery.
And here some classical japanese ones (Basho):
The first soft snow!
Enough to bend the leaves
Of the jonquil low
Fallen sick on a journey,
In dreams I run wildly
Over a withered moor.
Poverty’s child -
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.
No blossoms and no moon,
and he is drinking sake
all alone!
So you thought Spin was Invented by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell?
No, it wasn’t. Just look at your Shakespeare, – Mark Antony’s speech in defense of Caesar.
Tragedy of Julius Caesar Act 3, sc. 2 (Excerpt)
In the Forum: Citizens 
eace, ho! let us hear him.
ANTONY
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones; (interred: begravet)
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault, (grievous: Meget beklagelig)
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– (under leave: Med tilladelse)
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome (captives: krigsfanger)
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill: (ransoms: penge for fanger. Coffer: off. Kasser)
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: (sterner: strengere)
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal (Lupercal: En slags årstids ceremony)
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
First Citizen
Methinks there is much reason in his sayings.
Assignment:
1 Make an analysis of Mark Antony’s speech for Caesar. Hint: Why does he repeat certain phrases many times?
2 What does the stage set-up mean for the functioning of this speech in terms of communication between actors and audience?
3 How would you estimate the text’s readability index (lix)? Why is it so?
Iran – fra teokrati til demokrati?
Det ser ud til, at de folkelige protester imod præsidentvalget for nylig har svært ved at slå igennem. Iran er præget af en voksende middelklasse i byerne, der ikke længere vil finde sig i det repressive præstestyre. Iran kalder sig siden revolutionen i 1979 en islamisk republik. Hidtil har det dog især været det islamiske i navnet, der er slået igennem. Det republikanske har haft vanskeligt ved at vinde igennem. Dermed står også demokratiet svagt, som det er demonstreret ved sidste valg, som er endt med, at oppositionen kræver genoptælling af stemmerne eller omvalg. Deres kandidat, Moussavi, repræsenterer sammen med Ayatollah Rafsanjani i det øverste præsteskab, en reformfløj.
Det er karakteristisk for styret, at præsteskabet, og det vil her sige den øverste åndelige leder Khamenei, har godkendt valget af Ahmadinejad.
Links: Iransk-amerikanske blogger: Tehranbureau
Brooding Persian , the Twitter revolution
Social networks spread defiance online.
Spin – the scourge of modern democracy
Perhaps it is not so new. Perhaps there has always been spin – also in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. Shakespeare writes about politicians being capable of quite a lot of spin, for instance in Julius Caesar.
Spin is generally considered a useful tool of politics. It is generally believed that without spin New Labour would not be able to gain power in 1997. It was inspired by the famous book by Phillip Gould “The Unfinished Revolution”, and both Tony Blair and his spin doctor Alistair Campbell used this book and its advice quite extensively. But spin may turn sour when it’s revealed. This is what has happened to the disgraced Downing Street aide Damian McBride, who helped another one of Gordon Brown’s press aides Derek Draper to produce smear material against the Conservatives.
Labour was bothered by campaigns against it made by Tory websites like ConservativeHome, and another, more smear like site called Guido Fawkes run by Paul Staines. The latter got hold of e-mails written by McBride to various Labour notables. In these mails McBride suggests how smear campaigns may be launched against leading tories, among them the Tory Leader James Cameron. It is not known who the whistleblower is. Labour planned to set up a competitive smear site called Redrag. Labour already has a website called Labourlist, a “grassroots E-network” that somewhat corresponds to ConservativeHome.
The smear story has had catastrophic consequences for Labour. The party is now lagging behind The Tories by some 17 per cent in the polls.
McBride has been fired. But it is hard to tell whether the catastrophic smear campaign will stick to the party in the electorate’s minds. There are probably still some skeletons in the closet – if hints given by Staines are to be believed.
Brown has distanced himself from the sordid story:
Is this trustworthy? The voters don’t seem to believe him. Did he know all along that McBride was crossing a line?
Anyway, spin is the scourge of modern democracy. It makes people distrust the political process and politicians. The spin doctors insulate the politicians from spontaneous contact with the voters. This is harmful to the authenticity of democratic politics. The voters have a right to know what politicians think and believe in, without it being filtered through the sordid channels of spin and media.
Here is McBrides resignation statement.
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