5/29/2002: Spidering American culture
 

http://cellar.org/2002/spiderculture.jpg

This isn't really an outstanding image of the day, but it's on my favorite subject: the cultural invasion.

This guy is Indian; he's in New Delhi. He comes from a remarkable culture. He's been there while Gandhi taught his people nonviolent revolution to reach independence. He's watched his country slowly pull itself up from its bootstraps, as they de-nationalized the farmers and learned to feed their people.

But that growth was slow, and so, other nations have grown right past India -- and beyond.

As a result, a country with four times the population of the U.S. watches a film generated from entirely within the American culture. The economic power of the west spawned cultural power as well -- and now, it simply bowls over cultures that aren't as productive.

Yesterday CNN had a report on bootleg tapes being sold from a Kabul market stand. Including... you guessed it, "Spider-man". It's out three weeks and kids in Afghanistan are watching it.

What will the long-term legacy be? I don't know; shamefully, I haven't seen the film yet. <i>Yeah, that means there are thousands of Afghanis who are hipper than me.</i> But I'm betting this does incredible good. I bet it introduces pro-freedom concepts to societies that never saw such a thing before. At the very least, they're suddenly seeing a super-hero who wears a burqa.

On the other hand, I saw Bollywood-produced "Monsoon Wedding" a few weeks ago. And I saw it here in Philadelphia.

Ive only ever seen one bootlegged movie (Office Space) and the quality sucked. I will never waste my bandwidth again downloading such crap.....the audio track was a full 3 seconds off the image on the screen.

I hope they realized that the only good part of the movie was seeing Kirsten Dunst soaking wet. But would these people appreciate movies like We Were Soldiers, which are US-centric?

It's constant imagery like Kirsten in a wet t-shirt that gives non-North American cultures the belief that North American women are easy and can be pawed at... I've travelled through India, Nepal, and South America and have seen it first hand many times.

An interesting note however, is that the Indian movie industry produces over 800 films a year... far more than what comes out of Hollywood, but of course there is no marketing campaigns of $25+ million. No special effects either, and if I had to watch 2 hours of the screeching singing of Indian women, I'd opt to see Spiderman too.

It's constant imagery like Kirsten in a wet t-shirt that gives me a reason to live. :)

Amen, brother. :)

I had a chance to see an Indian film not too long ago. Granted, I couldnt understand a word of it, but it was cool. It was one of those dance ones, and although it had jack squat special effects, they had about 200 people dancing the same thing, in a tiny little room. Quite cool. I wish American films had that kind of creativity.

Hey - I'm not saying that Kirsten in a wet t-shirt is a bad thing... not at all, I can't wait to get my hands on a screen capture and make her my wallpaper... :)

Speaking of wet t-shirts... found this link on Fark the other day... whoa baby... my college wasn't like this. <damnit!>

http://www.wheredaparty.com/drunk2.asp?party_id=48

Bad quality bootlegs? Sometimes, often damn good though. There is a 2 hour delay between a movie coming out in the US and it being availiable to the majoirty of the world on the net. Literally.

Wow! Literally? Is there actually any proof of this number, or are you pulling it out of your ass and tacking on "literally" to make it seem real?

I think he means it is actually, virtually available in roughly two hours ... literally.

So, as pure hyperbole, Jag has used the word correctly, though unnecessary in the context. :p

Actually, I think he literally pulled the stat out of his ass.

Neal Stephenson
 

I doubt it's just a 2 hour delay. First they have to watch it (your 2 hours), then they have to get home and upload it to their computers.

Then it will take a while to disseminate enough for it to be easy to download (aka widely available).

As for cultural invasion, you should all have read "In the Beginning was the Command Line " by Neal Stephenson. (If you haven't, you should also read Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snowcrash, etc... ). Shamelessly stealing a few paragraphs here, but you should read the entire thing:

"We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences."

Literally, i think you feel you can be a jerk to people because you know there are no social repercussions on the Internet.

God is watching you, though.

Re: Neal Stephenson
 

Because of our global communications and transportation networks, this is inevitable and unavoidable.

I don't really see merging cultures as a bad thing, either. Cultures change and assimilate into one another. It's just the way it is. Perhaps in several hundred years, when we can all speak the same language, we'll have a much larger pool of human resources to draw from when we need to tackle problems.

Yeah - well if God has a problem with anything I say or do, then God should come and tell me about it - just like anyone else.

So far I've had no complaints from he/she/it...

-- Pete.

I was only kidding -- i'm agnostic.