A few years ago when SL (Second Life) was the focus of the latest hype, Clay Shirky wrote a great post explaining nothing is new about it and it’s just the old MUDs and MOOs graphic comeback. He was right. Even the furry weren’t an original. However, some things are very different when you move from textual environments to graphic ones.
In textual environments cybersex and mediated romance were based on intellectual attraction or abstract imagination aroused through words, whereas graphic avatars draw upon similar identification mechanisms activated by cinematic experiences: our avatars, like movie stars, function as our imago and alter egos and while we control their moves we also consume them from a viewer’s/voyeurs’ point of view.
Freud’s original concept of voyeurism fed on the lack of control, replacing actual control with the gaze, but what is interesting about SL and possibly some other computer games, is that we enjoy voyeurism even when we control the avatar.
We move between control and lack of control willingly, making our avatars play scripts during which we watch their experience passively. After all, there’s little pleasure in being in control and knowing what’s going to happen all the time, right?
When I first entered SL I took my avatar to a club and let it perform a scripted sexy dance on a dance poll to earn my first Lindens (SL currency). I remember looking at that poorly pixilated representation of a woman that looked nothing like me, aware of the constant thought that tells me “it’s me, she’s me”; able to make her do things I’d never dare do with my own body and surprised this has an emotional response in my body.
How does this even work? I’m not sure psychological theories of identification can explain that because it’s hard to identify with an animation without an agency. It felt more in the realm of mystic, like a voodoo doll I control.
The chauvinization of sex
Feminist Media Theory claims the viewer point of view, consuming the images on screen for visual pleasure, is a masculine point of view. In her famous book “The Beauty Myth”, Naomi Wolf dedicated a chapter to sexuality, claiming this media constructed point of view positions female sexuality as being consumed and desired. Women are educated through media to look at their bodies like voyeurs, to like themselves being looked at from a man’s point of view. We don’t even know what a true female active point of view is because it was never represented.
In a lesson on feminist cinema at Hebrew University, the professor suggested such angle is represented in films like Antonia’s line, but I realized they didn’t present a new angle on female sexuality; they just switched the roles so that the women were the ones to gaze at the men now.
The more I thought about it, I concluded female sexuality cannot be visually represented. As female sex organs are internal, so is the sexual experience. I guess that’s why we kiss with our eyes closed in the first place. We can only learn about this inner experience from what a woman chooses to externalize (body movements, sounds, etc.) but a visual representation of this experience from the character’s point of view will be non digestible to viewers.
So maybe, cybersex in textual environments was as close as we got. These textual spaces were a rare construction free of visual aspects, enabling women to explore and express a different approach to sexuality based on verbal communication and abstract imagination.
Second chance? Equal opportunity in SL sexuality
Graphic environments like Second Life put a stop to all that by reinforcing the normal, standard, male dominant visual point of view. Sex is the most successful SL industry and it draws the same audience and recreates the same circumstances as any other online porn consumption site. Although there is a human consciousness behind the avatar, people I spoke to regard it as a form of individual masturbation, drawing on the visual pleasure of consuming avatars as media images.
However, participants in these graphic environments still communicate mainly through text. This opens up an opportunity for an equal and more complex sexual experience: participants are free to text while their avatars are performing a “scripted fuck”. It is an opportunity to form relationship or at least enrich the poorly pixilated porn-like experience with verbal exchanges that might be more meaningful and fit to the female sexual experience.
Among my future research plans, I plan on more formal interviews with SL avatars of people who have sex in SL and ask for their SL IM logs to explore the relations between text-based and graphic-based cybersex. For now, I think this feminist angle on sexuality is my own idea based on too many hours of feminist cinema theory and I even gave a preliminary paper on it last year in a local Academic Fantasy conference. But if you know of any similar research or if you think the idea is absurd, please let me know.
The flight book I read on my way to China in 2002, claimed there is no Chinese word for privacy. Chinese understand ‘personal’ but not the concept of private as one’s need for privacy, explained the Chinese-American writer. Indeed, the lack of privacy taken for granted in daily life, proved to be one of the ingredients that made Chinese culture so bizarre and difficult to adjust to.
A few random examples that come to mind: I celebrated my birthday in a SPA in Shanghai, and it was incredibly crowded and noisy although we were just two clients that morning. Being in a private room with a sense of peace of mind wasn’t recognized as essential to the massage, so we were treated next to each other although we were strangers and the workers kept giggling and chatting in Chinese over our heads.
There were so many workers there: one was just brining towels, the other was just opening the Jacuzzi tab and another girl just stared at me while I was taking a bath in case I needed something… Jesus.
In Chinese restaurants everyone shares, they don’t even know how to deal with one person; it’s outside the definition of a meal. I remember meeting a European tourist on the bus in Chengdu and without even introducing ourselves we confessed we’re hungry and too tired to go through the restaurant routine so we got off the bus and went to eat together, just so we won’t’ be bothered. In addition, I had to pay him for my part later because they couldn’t handle splitting the check, like any other task that involves individuality.
No Shit! killer application for the shy
But the worst nightmare of the non-private Chinese experience was the toilet experience. Traveling in China is a killer application for the shy. If you thought you’ve seen the worst when you had to poo in a dirty pit on an Indian train, imagine performing the same task alongside other people that stare at you. Yea, that’s the idea. Most Chinese public toilets don’t have doors and often are not separate, whether they’re a pit or a western toilet – you got company.
I can’t imagine anything more private than using the toilet and I admit I didn’t posses the necessary social cues to peer-peeing. In some rural toilets the pits were so close my knee necessarily touched the knee of another girl, while a third girl waiting for her turn just started at me because of my light skin and all. I took the position seemingly cool reminding myself this is normality here, but I froze, just couldn’t pee in these circumstances. All I could think of was: “thank God this isn’t unisex toilets!”
Some of these public toilets came with huge scary “no shit!” signs in English, that made you wonder what’s in the soil underneath that cannot take your shit and if there is a shit inspector that could walk in here in any given moment to enforce the no shit policy by kicking you off the pit…
More toilet genres: the ditch and the pig pen
But that was a haven of privacy compared with the public toilets in the train and bus stations. These “toilets” were merely a steep ditch and people would line up along it. You would want to be the first up in such a line, otherwise you’d be watching other people’s pee stream flowing below you on its way to pile up on the lower side, waiting for someone to clean it up in the absence of a drainage hole(!)
Much stinkier than the rural eco-toilet pits built over pig pens. The Chinese Lonely Planet tells a story of a tourist that fell into one of these pits in the dark of night and 3 days of showers barely erased these memories. In light of that, it was really hard to blame the poor tourists that peed at the corner of their rooms or pooed in the shower at nights…
Ever since that trip, the most horrible public toilet in the western world feels like a piece of cake: hey, at least I’m by myself!
The ultimate Olympic toilet experience
When I got back to Beijing after two months of rural toilets I felt like a tantra graduate, able to take off my pants naturally in the company of other people. But China is a country of extremes: the big cities look up to the West and Beijing was practically changing its entire infrastructure starting 2002 in order to host the 2008 Olympics.
Toilets were among the first things to change and so one day, as I stepped off the metro and had to pee urgently, I found myself in front of a mysterious cabin that could be opened with a Chinese quarter.
After suffering those rural gatherings at the stinking pits, a private cell with chemical stinks felt like SPA so I went for it. To my surprise, inside was a true SPA indeed: a small and clean western toilet with sink and soaps like in a hotel room or business class airplane, I could almost spend the night there.
A closer look at the toilet interface revealed an impressing piece of engineering: the toilet was padded with a transparent bag and whatever you did fell into the bag. When I got up I pressed a nearby button and then the bag disappeared into the toilet making farewell mechanical noises and a new wrapped toilet seat came down from somewhere above, opening the cell door so I could get out in perfect timing. A true Olympic wonder
So if you have too many wacky Western phobias and conditioning, China is the perfect retreat for you. Losing one’s sense of privacy could be a great relief too, reminding us of the primal nature of our species and allowing us to fall back comfortably into it
I sold my car today and I don’t intend to buy a new one, although I can afford it. I’m giving up my car because I came to trust the notion that abundance isn’t to have and hoard, but to have exactly what you want when you need it. No more, no less and no longer than you need it. No need to own it or hold on to it, it’s just a matter of flow, access and flexibility. That is why in addition to public transportation I shall occasionally use car2go, a car sharing service which is a new concept in Israel.
Having your own stuff is so industrial-revolution
Many services we use are based on shared resources. Take Internet bandwidth for example. We live under the illusion we “have” a really wide bandwidth because we paid for it and it’s ours, trapped in our cable modem. Well, we know it isn’t. The bandwidth is a shared resource automatically diverted to different people on different hours according to their present use. It’s the same with cashing money from the bank and many other less tangible services that flow as long as we don’t panic and try to hoard “the more the merrier” at the same time.
But here’s the thing: In the post-industrial globalized world we’re required to take this one step further and start sharing our material resources too. Having your own stuff, units of manufactured products, is so industrial revolution….Our next evolution stage is to transcend our obsessive possession fears and start trusting the idea that if we take other products the same way some services are allocated automatically to us – only what we need when we need it – others will do the same and abundance will flow. That is how car sharing and other sharing services work.
After a history of zigzagging between inequality and a twisted oppressive concept of equality (socialism), we are about to learn real natural sharing and the Web is our lab. We practice on non tangible copies in order to gradually trust this principle on consumer goods.
Lions don’t keep deer in the fridge
That’s how nature works too: Lions don’t hunt all deer and put them in the fridge. They take only what they need for dinner trusting Mother Nature to send something else next time they’re hungry. Now that is the real “jungle law” and anyone who uses this metaphor to describe cannibalistic competition misunderstood nature, and should reread Adam Smith too.
Smith was a medic and a religious man. He had great instincts about that ‘invisible hand’ – a harmonious force that auto-balances the flow into function- but it worked for body cells, not for people with free will, who still search their true place within this “organism” and need to overcome many fears. However, after hardcore capitalism gets a ‘green wash’, human nature might get closer to nature.
We’ll call it neo-capitalism or eco-capitalism, probably. Just like we finally realized what the Web was about in the first place, so when it started living up to its potential we had to call it “Web 2.0″ to mark a new generation.
This reminds me of the biblical story of the “Man”, that special food God dropped from the desert sky and warned us not to hoard it. But we didn’t believe there’ll be another drop tomorrow and tried to take some more for breakfast. Have we evolved since? This entire global resources crisis may be our second chance to trust the abundance jungle law. And maybe, just maybe, this abundance realization will gradually help us release our hold on territory too and stop fighting for it.
Carless but not careless or how I almost blew up on a bus
On that note, giving up my car and going back to public transportation is a unique leap of faith for me, given the circumstances that led to my having a car in the first place. This is the part where we move to the unique Israeli experience and tell a story I never told:
I was an undergraduate student at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem in 1995. It was a few months before PM Rabin was assassinated, but what people tend to forget is that the other side’s extremists were terrified of this peace too. That year, Palestinian terror organizations hit Jerusalem on a weekly basis, normally blowing up a bus.
One summer morning I stood at my regular bus station wondering if I should go to the municipality office for an errand about my city tax or go to campus first and do that later. I decided to decide according to the first bus that’ll come. Bus 26 to campus came first and I boarded it but before I bought the ticket I had a quick thought: there’s going to be a crazy queue at the municipality and they might even be closed by noon. I should really get this over with and go there first.
So I stepped down and told the driver I’m sorry but I got another errand to run first. I took the other bus to city center and by the time I got there everyone spoke about bus 26 that exploded a few stations before reaching Mount Scopus campus.
Later I saw the driver on the news and I realized it was the bus I was on. I would have been dead for sure. This wasn’t the only time I was close to blowing up in Jerusalem but this was the closest. And after this one, my parents decided to buy me a car. I’ve had a car for 14 years now and it’s very hard to give up the freedom it enabled me and trust the safety of public transportation again. But if people don’t take a chance and try to practice what they preach, how will change happen?
I always assumed there’ll be a great economical or ecological crisis that will destroy the foundations of our society and force us to build a more sustainable one. But maybe Mother Nature still has patience for us to gradually evolve, regulate consumerism and change the way we use what we already have.Sharing services are a great start. Stop building it, and they will come.
In the world of print writing was a virtue. People who would write and publish were the ones who had something interesting to say. A text would have to be worth a read. Similarly, an image would normally be art, it will be upheld to an aesthetic standard and convey a message. However, online conversations and picture sharing cannot be treated the same way because they’re not texts or images anymore, but the building blocks of (virtual) reality.
Many bloggers bash teenagers for creating foolish colorful blogs with dozens of pictures of them goofin’ with their friends, whereas their writing resorts to “school is boring” complaints or “got nothing to say but just wanted to update and say hi” posts. I’ve often read bloggers wonder: with all due respect to the long tail concept, why would someone read something so remotely interesting? And why would you even blog when you’ve got nothing to say?
everyone has a right to produce and reproduce
As texts in print culture, most of our online content would be inconceivable; no one would bother publishing such texts and images under any circumstances. But in digital culture everyone writes and photographs not because we’re all artists, but because this is our new realm of experience and our new inhabitance space. We’re all entitled to a body, to breathe, to be present and occupy space. People don’t have to be interesting in order to deserve a place in the world; they could just be and we would never wonder why they exist in the first place.
In the beginning of the 20th century many people appeared in movies as extras and loved watching themselves appear on screen, they felt everyone had a right to be represented, mechanically reproduced. it is no coincidence that our biological right to reproduce uses the same word as our freedom-of-speech “right” to produce and digitally reproduce images and represent ourselves in the new medium.
It is the same with online presence in digital spaces only that our embodiment in these spaces is through texts and images. We don’t have to write something worthy of reading, since writing is like breathing. We’ve already recognized online writing as speech but what is speech if not a form of breathing? Through your online activity you say or show “I’m here” and it’s enough, you don’t have to communicate anything but your presence. So much of our online conversation is pathic but i argue that a good portion of our content is too.
Your writing can be impulsive and unedited like your spontaneous speech, your spelling can be a disaster in the same way you’re not obliged to be beautiful and perfect. Letters are your avatar now so they mean much more than speech; they’re how you move and perform yourself in this space too.
it’s no longer documenting experience, it is IT
Every once in a while someone says the net is boring and the majority of its content is crap, and I say: of course. So is life. And life is on the web now. We experience it not only through our bodies but also through technology: we tweet during an experience and take a picture and share it, as part of experience. it’s no longer a documentation of it, it is IT.
We all deserve to occupy space online, to breathe. Thus, Evaluations of quality of any sort are completely irrelevant. The only relevant question for online content is if you care about someone enough to witness his experience, as boring as it may be.
How many of you who read this through, did it because you assumed I’ve got something interesting to say, and how many did it because they care about me as a person and enjoy the thoughts and experiences I share?
Two weeks ago Jasmine Feingold nearly drowned in the Yarkon river in the middle of Tel Aviv. People saw it happen and were afraid to jump into the river infamous for its pollution. Instead, they took out their cell phone cameras and documented the drowning and the courageous act of one guy who actually jumped to save Jasmine.
This will not be another post that scolds these people for doing nothing to save the girl and documenting it as snuff for YouTube, because I don’t think that’s the issue here, so bear with me.I truly believe they were acting upon their best knowledge of participation in our society. In our media absorbed society, media practices are recognized as political practices and a form of activism. So if you blog about something that bothers you, you’re no less an activist than someone who attends a demonstration. The media space is no less and sometimes much more influential.
Therefore, I truly believe these people that took out their phone cameras weren’t cynical or egoist bystanders. They were documenting and reporting as a form of caring, staying involved and engaging in media practices as the best form of participation they could come up with, better than walking away indifferently or passively staring. They were doing something about it:notifying others, warning them, giving them inspiration. That, too, is a social role.
the authority of the report stems from the reporter’s humanity
As the internet transforms into a platform of citizens’ media, all of us face some of the norms and ethical dilemmas of media professionals. Professional Journalists and photographers are well familiar with this dilemma: should we stand by and document the events, or are we first and foremost human beings, and if there’s something we could say or do to save lives, we should?
In Israel we have a law taken from the bible that is part of the journalism ethics regulation act as well. The bible verse translates literally to “you shall not stand on the blood of the other”. You cannot just stand by when someone is in danger, you MUST act. Even if you’re the whole Godamn CNN missing out on your Godamn scoop. That role, like any role, comes secondary to being a human being and our little role playing collapses in the face of real experience, real life, and real danger.
The best journalists are the ones who draw upon their humanity first, who are not afraid to be emotionally and politically involved and care for the people they cover. If we wanted the mere documentation, we would have wired the world with webcams and consumed news composed by algorithms. Paradoxically, the meaning and authority of the journalistic report stems from the reporter’s human experience and perspective that precedes his or her professional role.
choosing to act in a society of reporters is not normal
Thus, we, amateur reporters, have no excuse to hide from our feelings behind a report and use documenting technologies to mediate our experience in ways that alienate us from our emotions. I remember doing that in Ronjiang market in China, when dogs were stripped from their skins in front of me, and taking pictures was the only way I could lift my eyes to meet this scene and pass through the market. I had to mediate the experience to quite down my emotions.
But documenting life as a routine could become a very emotionally dry place. If so many of us are into documenting life and twitting about it, who’s left to live it, to actually act on it? I have stopped blogging more than once in the past because I felt my documentation and reflection preceded and framed the experience. I felt I spilled out too fast and too soon barely chewed ideas that didn’t stay inside of me long enough to be digested, denying myself of the growth of inner processing and decreasing the impact of that essence when shared as a fully baked focused idea.
When constant documentation and mediation of the experience alienates us from our feelings, we’re on the verge of the dystopian fear of a cold technology taking over human values. Only this threat manifests in the virtual level: offering to mediate things for you and protect you from the intensity of your feelings, promoting the notion that the objective precise and cold technology is better equipped to deal with reality than the rich hyper sensual being you are. We trust technologies so much we actually start working for them instead of using them.
And this is how we end up looking at Jasmine Feingold drowning in the river through the lens of our cell phone cameras, and this is perfectly normal. The guy who jumped to save her is not normal. He even got a prize from the Israeli president for this peculiar act of heroism, marking the extraordinary nature of his choice: to act in a society of viewers, to respond in a society of reporters, to experience in a society of witnesses.
update 23/5/09: maybe it’s just the new way we experience, it’s part of experience. we experience through technology as well as through our bodies now. hmmm.
I arrived in Phnom Penhin 1999, half a year after the last Khmer Rouge standing was brought down by the fresh democracy. The city was in the midst of cleaning up its act, collecting all the weapons from the streets and getting used to going out at night again, hungry for some consumerism, globalization and technology.
The motorbike-taxi stopped by a big CD outlet in the center of town, where a sneak peak became an hour of browsing music CDs and movie DVDs priced between 1 to 4 US dollars. All pirated copies, naturally.
“How much?” I turn to the English speaking salesperson, waving Ricky Martin’s newly released album.
“2 dollars. Because it’s new” he adds, apologetically.
“how much is the original CD”? I ask, out of curiosity
“The original CD?” the salesman repeats in disbelief and looks at me as if I was a freak. “You mean the master copy from the recording studio? Why would you need that?”
“What? Oh, no, that’s not what I meant” I’m beginning to wonder if the salesman knows enough English to save this conversation. “I mean an authorized official copy of this CD, issued and distributed by the record company, as opposed to this copy which is, well… Pirated, right?”
“Oww, so that’s the ‘original’, eh?” he laughs and turns his back on me getting back to his business as if the problem was solved.
“Yea, that’s what everybody refer to as original” I say, confused.
“Who’s everybody? American record corporations?” he surprises me. “The copy you are holding is as original as their original that costs five times more. It is the exact same copying technology”.
According to BSA reports Cambodia is a country of 100% software, music and movies piracy. 100% means that even the “master” copy that’s being reproduced is a pirated copy coming from Malaysia, as the Cambodian salesman explains to me later.
I returned to my guesthouse with a couple of such CDs and a handful of thoughts. How could I have even used the word “original” in the age of digital simulacra? 3 years earlier I visited the Louvre for the first time and I was so disappointed by the “original” Mona Lisa: by then, I’ve seen some reproductions or artistic parodies that were much more exciting than this small framed cliché. Does originality mean anything anymore?
The salesman was technically right: it’s absurd to attribute originality to a digital reproduction, as Indeed, there’s no essential difference between these pirated CDs and their iTunes version, for instance. All that a record label has is the legal right to the content since it invested in its production, but ‘legal’, ‘official’ or ‘authorized’ are nothing like ‘original’, a concept that implies authenticity, thus presenting the existing economic model as the natural order.
So if the original has no authenticity claim- it is but an ideology- are we obliged to it morally? Is that particular form of piracy merely a theft or a post colonial counter-ideology?
During my three years of ethnography of teenage girls’ blogs, I found a couple of posts written as a direct speech to their parents or teachers who apparently found the blog and read it: “Dear history teacher, roll your mouse and hit the back button cuz you have no right to be here!” or “mom, get outta my blog! Now! This is private; I don’t want you snooping around here”.
I was intrigued by these posts as well as other incidents in which bloggers were terrified by the possibility some journalist will link to their blogs and expose them to a larger audience than their little “long tail” community.
At the same time, many other bloggers see the blog as a form of journalism and can’t understand why people that write publicly would expect privacy. It took me quite some time of research and reflection to realize what lies at the core of this dispute and this is what I found…
Adults treat blogs as texts while teenagers treat blogs as spaces
One of the main differences in the use of blogs between adults and teenagers is that adults treat blogs as texts while teenagers treat blogs as spaces. If a blog is a public text than indeed it is ridiculous to ask your mother to avoid reading it. It’s like asking her to boycott a section of the New York Times.
But if it is your web space where you create and hang out with your friends, than it makes as much as sense as it does when you ask your mom to leave your room when you have friends over, or expect the teacher not to follow you around school during the breaks. It’s a simple matter of perception: what teenagers produce isn’t’ “reading material”, it’s conversation, it’s life. Of course it’s “in public” but not in mommy’s presence, and visiting one’s blog is a form of presence.
Furthermore, when text is space, linking that takes your text out of context, is an intrusive movement in that space.
Kids didn’t give up on privacy, they just re defined it
Privacy is defined as our right to be left alone and control the information others know about us. Adults assume that we want to share with our close friends and hold out information from strangers, but it seems kids reversed this idea.
When I interviewed girls I was surprised they didn’t care about exposure to strangers that have no tangible effect on their lives. They loved having a popular blog directed at mass audiences and the control they wanted to exercise was in fact on their close friends and family.
They wanted to be popular yet couldn’t’ stand the fact many kids from their school read the blog and were embarrassed when their posts were referenced in real life conversations. They wanted the right to hide from their loved ones while attracting the masses.
So we shouldn’t say kids lost their sense of privacy. They have a very sharp sense of it but they want to exercise its control mechanism in a different way. Danah Boyd seems like the only other researcher that noticed something similar when she followed Myspace profiles.
New privacy strategy: literacy barriers replace tangible locks
Another common myth is that kids are not aware of the meaning of public, thus live their online lives out in the open. Watching teenagers online and talking to them made me realize they do exercise privacy strategies but once again, they’re different than the strategies adults are able to identify and define.
Adults understand the concept of privacy only when they hit a wall: a locked door or a locked (password protected) web page. Kids, however, take the loss of materiality concept one step forward and use new media literacy practices as locks:
* they hide in public within chaos, assuming their parents are no googling experts and the likelihood of being found in the oceans of online information is very small. They also tend to blog on big blog hosting websites. In these noisy communities they could be both visible to the crowds and hard to find for the family.
* to avoid Google-savvy parents they keep using nicknames and avoid using their full names, although they are fully identified by private names and by the photos they constantly upload.
Literacy barriers are less tangible than computer code barriers and may not be noticed and respected (yet) but often they work and keep the parents and unwanted friends away. In addition, if “code is law” than new media literacy norms and practices should be at least respected as ethics. In other words: mom, you’re not a reader, you’re a stalker. Stay out.
The most independent powerful cynical and atheist people I know can surprise me sometime with forwarding a nasty chain letter that threatens I will die in 4 days or at the very least never marry, unless I too forward it to 12 other people.
Such fear of superstitions, curses and evil eye is rooted so deep in our consciousness that no rational thought can calm it down, and we would rather fwd than be proved wrong. Because even the hardcore rationalists know life isn’t a rational thing. Life is crazy, a complete chaos. So who can blame us for trying to minimize the chances for bad luck, bad vibes and chains of misfortunate coincidences, just in case? (Knock on wood on cue)
A curse is the oldest trick in the book to achieve a desired goal. Two recent examples come to mind:
Have you ever heard about the Ethiopian Rosetta stone engraved by king Azana of Axum in Greek, Sabetean (?old Saudi Arabia dialect) and G’aaez ( Ethiopian sacred books and prayer language) describing his victory over the king of Yemen? Of course you haven’t, because unlike THE Rosetta stone of the British museum, this one remains in its original location in Axum Ethiopia.
A small hut was constructed around it and you can visit this amazing ancient monument any time, like I did 3 years ago. The reason no one dared to move it to a museum lies in the last line engraved on the stone by king Azana: “he who shall move this stone from its place will be cursed”. This general statement was apparently enough for the British museum or any other museum people.
Two years ago when I was in Glastonbury I spent a lot of time inside the Goddess temple which had no toilet of its own and required the visitors to walk around the corner for the public toilet. Alas, on the same floor of the Goddess temple there was this yoga studio with a shiny toilet that immediately stood out to the passer-by. And it was very tempting to use that toilet instead of taking that walk. But absolutely nobody used that toilet, although the yoga people were normally in class and wouldn’t come to catch you with your pants down.
Their solution was simple, as a note on the toilet door said “this is a private toilet. There is a public one around the corner. If you should use this toilet without permission you will turn into a frog”. Every sane person knows it’s just funny, and you can’t really be turned into a frog. (or can you?) Yet, this funny little hint of a curse worked the magic that many other desperate serious pleas of no trespassing couldn’t perform. It’s because it works on this deeper level of fear of curses engraved in our genes and creates some kind of energy field we’d rather not risk breaking.
Back to the chain letters, if rational is useless to tackle these pre rational threats, I’d like to suggest a post-rational spiritual approach to fight fire with fire:
1. Courses, evil eye and superstitions work on you only if you believe in them. Seriously. If you’re not open for business they don’t stick around. Believes and fears create mental pictures that behave like a magnet, giving the curse something to hold on to and work its magic manifesting as trouble in your life. If your inner self is strong and self relying, if you know you create your own destiny and everything else can drop off, and if you’re beyond the seed of a doubt that you might be victimized by someone else’s psychosis – you’re safe. I mean, you wouldn’t seriously blame an old broken chain letter for being single, would you? Try it. Break a chain letter by simply deleting it with a smile. Humor is the great elevator for melting fears. And taking your life in your hands feels great, doesn’t it?
2. I heard from people who were extremely orthodox and have secularized, that the first time they used electricity on Saturday or didn’t attend the morning prayer, they were terrified the sky will fall on their heads. As you know nothing happens to many people who live this way to begin with, so you should know this about chain letters too: A real blessing is unconditional. No real blessing comes with a threat so you don’t really need a blessing that turns into a curse if you don’t obey. Don’t work for this blessing, don’t accept its conditions to begin with, you’re totally beyond that. Go back to procedure 1 and finish with a smiley delete.
Having said that, if you don’t forward this post to at least 10 people within the next 10 minutes, your mother in law will call you tonight and announce her sudden visit for an indefinite period of time…. Would you really take that chance? : – )
One day I got a stray email from a lawyer with an urgent contract awaiting someone else’s signature. I decided to be nice and save these people some anxiety by reporting the email has reached me instead of its original destination. In his next email the lawyer thanked me for this courtesy and added a plea: “the contract attached to that email deals with a very discrete matter, I would be very grateful if you could return it to me”.
For a minute I stared at the screen speechless before I started laughing. As a digital media specialist I seriously considered writing back a short article on the meaning of the loss of materiality in the age of digital reproduction, as the best I could offer was my word that I’ll permanently delete the copy without peeking. All I could think of is how Marshall McLuhan would have loved this example of narcosis: using a new technology through the filters of the old norms, unable to grasp the meaning of the change.
Than I grew empathic and thought how creepy is the idea of a copy, of infinite copies distributing themselves like cancerous body cells, out of control, without a claim of originality. I can totally see what scared Theodore Adorno when he felt a reproduced copy erases some of the essence of its original. A digitally reproduced copy is a creepy idea for the material man, as photography is scary for some African tribes that perceive us collecting a representation of them as peeling off a part of their soul.
Finally I sighed and emailed the good ol’lawyer his copy “back”, by forwarding him his first email. I didn’t want him to get a heart attack and feel out of control on his secret materials because of me. I didn’t want to be the one to break to him that his materials are non material now thus can be molded and spread like Ebola viruses. The illusion of control on our lives is pivotal to our sanity, and who am I to rush his digestion process of the transformation from bits to bytes.
I'm sorry i haven't been updating for a long time. I changed hosting and joined my Hebrew blog here, and it's been hectic in general. will be back to writing soon. meanwhile you can follow me on twitter @carmelva
