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In this drawing, I wanted to try to represent the layers of maps that Manzanar sees, as well as the chaos that his orchestra is described as. I tried to incorporate “the very geology of the land, the artesian rivers running beneath the surface… the man-made grid of civil utilities… sidewalks, bicycle paths, roads, freeways, systems of transit both ground and air…” (Yamashita 57). Manzanar sees the world in a very unique way. Here, I attempted to combine Manzanar’s vision of the world with a realistic interpretation of it.

#globerlin

The internet and globalization

I remember when I was younger and computers were really just starting to get big there was this popular commercial on Disney Channel. The commercial was for a campaign the fruit rollups company was running, where they gave away computers to lucky customers, and then for every computer somebody won they would also donate one to kids in Rwanda. The person in charge of this campaign said that it was “a great platform for kids and parents to learn how to help children around the world. Those who participate in our Win One Give One promotion build on that platform and really do see that they can make a difference.” All in all, they ended up donating a little less than 400 computers.

https://blog.generalmills.com/2011/09/laptops-on-their-way-to-rwanda/

The discourse surrounding the internet is generally very positive. The internet provides a realitively quick, easy, and cheap way for people around the world to communicate. Because of this perceived accessibility, people tend to put a lot of confidence in the internet. It is seen as an equalizer and as a defender of the common man; anyone with the internet should be, at some level, safe. With the internet you can learn what I can learn, and you can see what I can see. This promotes the dangerous assumption that because everyone can say whatever they want, everyone else will listen.

The internet may seem like an impartial place for everyone to share, but we see daily that the economic giants who have always tried to control the majority of people use the internet as just another means to do so. In the past year we’ve had two major examples of how big businesses are able to curate what we see. Take Facebook, for example. During the election it’s news algorithm favored posting inflammatory and inaccurate articles instead of the more mundane truth, because the sensationalized versions got more clicks. Some people think this might have skewed how people felt about the election. Another example is YouTube’s sorting algorithm for taking down inappropriate videos. This algorithm was implemented to make sure that advertisers were happy with what their companies were being associated with. It ended up removing videos of war crimes in Syria. These crimes had been filmed by Syrian citizens, who had to resort to documenting the crimes themselves after the media had left. Agencies that look into the war crimes in Syria had previously used these videos to keep track of what was going on and as evidence for later prosecuting the crimes. One person who worked on this project said that “What’s disappearing in front of our eyes is the history of this terrible war.”

Ultimately, the internet is usually seen as some great means of connection, but really it’s not, and we end up seeing the power structure that has already been formed by globalization reflected in the internet.

#globerlin

Reflection 3

Class has been going well. I feel like I have been talking a bit less in discussions than usual, but I think that’s okay since I usually felt like I was talking too much before. Speaking less has also given me more time to process other people’s comments, and I think that they’re all very interesting.

I’m also excited about the group project. So far I’ve met with my group once to discuss what we want to do, and we all have a general shared idea that we will do something related to radical “news” writing. We don’t know what groups or what content specifically we want to look at yet, though.

Personally, I would like to analyze radical “news” articles to see if they have any distinguishing sentence structures or choices of word that are also common among other forms of writing, like advertising or other kinds of internet articles. I think it would be especially interesting to see if we could find a statistically significant distinguishing feature among all radical sites, regardless of left or right affiliation, that indicates that this is a genre of article that is distinguishable from just “news.”

This idea might be a bit of a challenge, though. Because this might be too hard, I also wouldn’t mind ending up doing a project that’s only tangentially related to this one. During our first group meeting, we all described a basis for each of our ideas, and everyone else’s seemed good, so I’m looking forward to whatever specific plan we end up doing.

#globerlin

Manifest destiny originated as the territorial expansion in the western part of the United States prior to the Civil War. Despite the presence of individuals already living on the land, the United States saw fit to “overspread and to possess the whole of the continent”, endowing the land with the culture and beliefs of the American colonizers while occupying and annexing Native American lands (Pratt 795).

In this research paper, I will be providing a history of manifest destiny as apparent in the United States in the pre-Civil War era, and will be comparing this to American neocolonialism in the modern day (for instance, the Iraq War and the United States military intervention against ISIS). The two time periods show remarkable similarity, with much of the motivation stemming in both cases from a desire for natural resources to benefit the United States.

I’m not sure what my overarching thesis will be, though I will likely argue that the comparison between the old and the new wars sheds light on globalization in modernity; rather than a shining picture of global acceptance, the response to a more connected world has been to assume superiority over countries who do not share a Western worldview. Globalization, through the lens of manifest destiny, is an attempt to assimilate the non-Western world, rather than accept and recognize diversity. The front of this ‘white saviour’ ideology hides underlying capitalist intentions of exploitation of countries with abundant natural resources. Therefore, the idea of Manifest Destiny is inherently tied to neocolonialist and neoimperialist expansionist ideologies.

Source:

Pratt, J. W. (1927) The Origin of “Manifest Destiny”. The American Historical Review 32(4): 795-798.

#globerlin

Reflecting on nearly half a semester

It would be an underestimation to say that this semester has flown by. Looking back, though it seems little time has passed, I am struck by how much ground we have covered in this course. I feel like I am finally moving toward a tangible grasp of a more “complete” view of globalization and how it takes form in different realities. Of course, gaining these perspectives has hardly been a linear process. Through elucidating the dynamics of globalization that produce contemporary realities, I feel as if we have gone on a journey within ourselves, challenging hegemonic systems of knowledge and thus being given the capacity to self-reflect on our own positionality in a world of conflicting identities. What is clear so far is nothing is as transparent as it seems. I am especially interested in contradiction as a key component of globalization, taking shape in binary oppositions such as developed vs. developing, or time-space compression vs. expansion. . Emphasizing the necessary importance of working outside binary oppositions may help to disentangle how these contradiction within the global cultural economy operate and how they take effect in the daily lives of those in various places around the world. It is clear that to most effectively accomplish this, we, through our work, must reject the bounded nature of knowledge and work to move beyond a two dimensional view of the world. Taking special care to evaluate the “sites” of contradiction in the global cultural economy (through our past texts and those to come) will hopefully continue to disentangle the complex web of relations that define our world today. I hope to use contradiction/“sites” of conflict as a framing point for my upcoming midterm paper (more details to be fleshed out).

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Reflection pt 2

As this course has progressed, I have certainly been able to develop and articulate more critical thoughts on analyses of the texts that we are reading. I have found that literary analysis through the lens of globalization is particularly interesting, as it is not often something that I have looked at when trying to analyse a text. I’m currently also taking a course on regionalism in Antebellum New England and New Orleans, and there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of regional thinking and globalization.

Globalization, as a whole, is still a bit of an abstract concept to me, in that it can be bent and stretched to fit various uses. For instance, I just recently used it to analyse politics, but it can be looked at in terms of so many other concepts, such as technology and modernization, as well as cultural identity and the idea of a homeland.

For the upcoming paper, I still am developing an idea of what I want to look into. I was particularly captivated by “White Teeth”, but I was also thinking of writing my final research paper on manifest destiny as the expansion of ideas and the normalization of culture through the lens of globalization. “White Teeth” does not seem to fit particularly well into that topic; therefore, I certainly have some thinking and re-reading to do before this coming week.

#globerlin

Reflection 2

My favorite reading in this course has definitely been White Teeth. I loved all of the ideas Smith explored in the novel, especially those centering around truth and honesty and coincidence and fate. I’m not sure if the midterm essay is supposed to be on the books we’ve read, or if it’s meant more for the readings, but if it’s okay to write about White Teeth I probably will.

If the midterm does have to be about an article we’ve read instead of a book, I think I might use “How Technology Disrupted the Truth” by Katharine Viner. This too takes on the concept of finding truth amidst a barrage of noise. I also find it interesting that Viner evokes this image of the hard-hitting newsroom journalist to contrast the present-day media. I’ve always gotten the impression that “true” journalism was as much about curating the truth to the public as it was discovering the truth itself. This distinction between what is true and what is valuable, like White Teeth, again brings up the importance of context in situating the meaning of a truth.

I’ve been learning a lot in this course. I love the topics we’ve been covering, especially recently. Analyzing the internet in terms of globalization is fascinating. Hearing everybody else’s input on the subject of technology and how we are all influenced by it is a lot of fun; people in the discussion are able to articulate the reality that I usually just live with, which feels like a strange blend of discovery but also familiarity that I really enjoy

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Zadie Smith on social media

(This is not for an assignment)

So I was reading a bit about Zadie Smith and I stumbled upon this article which I thought was really interesting, especially in the context of what we are talking about in class. Not only is this article relevant to our current topic, but it harkens back to the theme of coincidence in White Teeth, since I found this topic accidentally in my Googling of Smith.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/21/zadie-smith-says-using-social-media-would-threaten-her-writing

I think that her arguments make sense, but also some of what she says seems contrary to what most Oberlin students would believe. For instance, she told the interviewer “I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind. I don’t want to be bullied out of it.” This contrasts with the mentality of trying to educate others on the internet, which, in the best case scenario, would end with changing someone’s “feeling” about something. The one thing that reconciles her argument with the "woke” understanding of the internet’s purpose is that she’s only talking about herself and her feelings, not those of racists or trolls who are openly hateful on the internet. I also feel like her argument expresses her opinion on personal growth. From what she said, it seems that she believes other people can’t teach you what beliefs are right and wrong; you have to learn it for yourself. This is a very wise sentiment. If I ever have the time I’d like to reread White Teeth and see if this view of personal growth can tell me anything else about the characters and why they behave how they do.

She also said that “I understand it’s important to be appropriate in public life, in social life, in political life. But in your soul? No, this is a different thing.” This is also incredibly interesting; it seems that she’s saying that you can think whatever horrible things you want, as long as your outward actions are appropriate. Maybe she was trying to demonstrate this idea in White Teeth. It’s easy to dislike Archie or the Chalfens because we know what they think, especially in terms of race, but if they try their hardest to do what’s appropriate, do they really deserve judgement?

Bringing it back to our more current discussion, Smith also mentioned the radicalization of the internet, and how the most controversial and aggressive opinions are also the loudest. In reference to social media, she said, “Isn’t it amazing, the wells of hatred? It’s a shameful confession, in a way, but I’ve never looked at social media.” That’s an excellent way to describe the polarized groups, as “wells of hatred.” Radical internet groups relentlessly attack each other, and essentially shut everyone else down. Instead of being a safe space for everyone to share, the internet has become an aggressive place, that’s only truly accessible to those who are willing to join the fight.

Smith didn’t like the aggressiveness, the “hate”, so she left. She tells the interviewer that she doesn’t use Twitter or Instagram, because she thinks people “should be able to retain the right to be wrong.” Here, in a world where social media is almost a necessity, Smith refuses to be interpolated by what others say.

#globerlin