[net]textualities
 works by Yvonne

Having seen the posters of the CinemAfrica Film Festival throughout Stockholm recently, the layout’s similarity to the cover of Rider Haggard’s fin-de-siècle novel She in the Oxford edition from 1988 struck me. The similarity is even more striking in the actual poster where the red is really red, as on the book cover. She is an adventure novel, an early Indiana Jones, of the colonial age. She is short for She who must be obeyed, a white queen whose name is Ayesha and the protagonist of the novel. In the novel, a Cambridge professor travels to the heart of darkness (yes, Conrad is here too) that is SHE. Jung thought of her as a female archetype, and yes, She can definitely be read as a journey towards the all-devouring Mother, the darkness of lust and power, a common image of Africa, of orientalism, or simply the foreign, as in Marlon Brando’s Vietnamese shrine in the Apocalypse.

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response (0) | filed under: the other :: cultural diversity and otherness

Looking at the UNESCO/WSIS Declaration of Principles for the internet, it becomes clear that the declaration rejects the bifurcation of, on the one, the information society as part of globalization on corporate terms and the subsequent increase in the digital divide and, on the other, knowledge societies that rely on affordable, free and open-source software and diversity in formats that enable global accessability regardless of the underlying technology.

Governments have been quick in picking up the information society and The Declaration claims that the governments of the first world are responsible for the ways in which the Internet will develop. The choice of software is a political choice. No matter how much you argue for measures to bridge the digital divide, no matter how much money you put into building new infrastructures, the fact remains that the choices made set the example.

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response (0) | tagged: cultural diversity :: knowledge filed under: the other :: cultural diversity and otherness :: information or knowledge?