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erience sorry it s just casual blogging like in the old days so i m going retro either i ll revert to the old editor which is an easy option apparently or else i ll try out a few different external editors that connect to the wordpress com api this very post is brought to you by blogbrowser it s a simple interface made in dave winer s inimitable outlining style for exactly my use case write a quick post then go and do something else i hate to say it but at this point it s maybe a little too simple do you dear reader have any words of advice on this matter how do you show your words to the world without succumbing to this particular kind of writer s block posted on oct 16 2023 oct 16 2023 categories cultural theory notes leave a comment on simpler editing for wordpress wordpress now available twenty years of wordpress amazing https wordpress org news 2003 05 wordpress now available posted on may 28 2023 oct 16 2023 categories notes technology leave a comment on wordpress now available this is not a game religion in the 21st century from time to time this blog gets preoccupied with religion which is hardly a digression since we live in seriously religious times furthermore mary douglas the eminence grise behind the exploration here of cultural theory had a religious intention she developed her grid group typology at least partly to counter the mid twentieth century claims that catholic ritual was empty ritualism in need of modernising qua vatican ii she was also concerned in her anthropological work to challenge the idea that primitive societies including their religions were somehow being replaced by less primitive societies and their secularism now i want to explore something written about previously here the concept of religion as play here s the issue as secularisation theory takes numerous king hits from the remarkable political persistence of religion in the modern world it is nevertheless evident that religious organisation is in flux if not comprehensive decline like a balloon being crushed by a determined toddler it shrinks in one part of the circumference only to pop up unexpectedly in another but the proponents of the post secular seem to jump from a focus on the decline of religion straight to a fixation with its persistence without really examining the other curious phenomenon its revitalisation in constantly new forms the forms envisaged however look a lot like the old forms proponents of the economic rationalist analysis of religion claim that america unlike europe has had a relatively free market in religion with competing sects as firms aiming to meet demand for religious goods and services they seem to assume however that such goods and services like washing powder and spam are relatively static and unchanging it is as though all that was required was to take the old box of detergent and write new improved on it continue reading this is not a game religion in the 21st century posted on may 25 2023 oct 16 2023 categories articles atheism religion technology leave a comment on this is not a game religion in the 21st century what comes after sustainability resilience according to rob hopkins of the transition movement and following david holmgren the co creator of the permaculture concept sustainability is not enough and we need to move beyond it but what comes after sustainability the answer it seems is resilience how successful has the paradigm of sustainability been at achieving its aims it makes an interesting thought experiment to try to assess what your corner of the world would be like today were it not for all the many initiatives that have taken place over the last twenty or so years under the rubric of sustainability and its older sibling sustainable development in spite of some clear differences springing to mind i m thinking especially of waste recycling and maybe the end of lead in motor fuel and some notable biodiversity conservation gains to set against all the losses in fact this deserves an article in its own right on the whole it surely wouldn t be all that different would it travelling everywhere by car unless a plane will get you there quicker check buying huge amounts of stuff then throwing it away check so much of what we do now we were going to do anyway and the concept of sustainability has not been a particularly effective tool at getting us to change direction or even to slow down but is there any alternative here is a quote from a relevant article sustainability hopkins recently told me is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society but that assumes our industrial society will keep running by contrast hopkins said transition is about building resiliency putting new systems in place to make a given community as self sufficient as possible bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive climate change intensifies and maybe sooner than we think industrial society frays or collapses entirely what are the key differences between sustainability and resilience whereas sustainability implies a steady state conception of the world living within our means indefinitely resilience recognises dynamism and volatility change for resilience science is of the essence resilience is not about halting change but about maintaining those things that really matter to us in the midst of great change sustainability has ostensibly reasonable but in practice vastly ambitious aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and it is unclear that this is achievable at any scale on which it has been attempted in contrast resilience has more modest aims and can be defined as the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain its functions and controls and may be measured by the magnitude of disturbance the system can tolerate and still persist wallington hobbes and moore 200 4 sustainability has a somewhat integrated concept of the way the world works the three pillars of sustainable development are widely understood to be the social the ecological and the economic and it is the interactions between these that drive the system without denying this resilience is more integrated because it sees and tries to study only one system the social ecological which operates at many different levels of scale so that it makes sense to conceptualise social ecological systems however it does not make sense to split off the social from the ecological this interaction is the sine qua non of the resilience approach from the outset sustainability was a social political concept in search of scientific confirmation it has achieved confirmation spectacularly successfully with the scientific models of anthropogenic climate change the biggest example of market failure in history as nicholas stern put it in contrast resilience is a scientific approach specifically an ecological approach based on the work of ecologists such as buzz holling and lance gunderson in search of social political applications these distinctions are of course hardly cast in stone since no science is value neutral and ecology certainly isn t but resilience arguably carries greater scientific precision that sustainability there is a key difference of focus broad versus narrow between the two concepts if you want to improve sustainability there is an almost endless list of actions you could carry out all of them could be said to make the world more sustainable since social ecological and economic covers just about anything resilience is more narrow it proposes that a sustainable social ecological system is simply one that is more resilient rather than less resilient so by focusing on the resilience of system components rather than other features the long list of actions that could take priority is somewhat reduced there are differences between sustainability and resilience but is it really as simple as seeing the one replaced by the other bossel 1998 sees resilience as only one important aspect of sustainable ecosystems i can t help thinking that the replacement of one worthy concept by another equally worthy concept is a distraction from the main event which is ongoing accelerating destruction in the name of progress or of profit to take just one example of many i would like to live in a world where koalas weren t threatened with extinction but even such a modest aspiration is made to appear unreasonably ambitious i don t think either sustainability or resilience will get me there what would it be called then this deep desire to live with other species without eliminating them living within our means not exactly i think part of the problem is that my culture doesn t really even have the words much less the possibility of co habitation in its repertoire sustainability resilience we re clutching at straws more on resilience a month of resilience posted on oct 30 2022 oct 16 2023 categories articles resilience tags david holmgren resilience rob hopkins sustainability sustainable development leave a comment on what comes after sustainability resilience cultural theory communication and the power of new media frantz fanon psychiatrist writer and anti colonialist frantz fanon has much to teach about the power of new media technology in transition during the covid 19 lockdown everyone i know was using their webcam to meet via video conference or not many had poor internet access and others wanted to resist yet another attempt to steal their privacy for some the pandemic opened a new era of working from home and made video conferencing normal for others the jump to zoom teams and the like just widened the gap between tech insiders and outsiders this situation of rapid change got me thinking about the complex ways in which adoption of new technology impacts society the drive to do so much more online in 2020 is having very significant impacts in the longer term both for the participants and for those excluded we ve crossed a transition point where technological adoption is accelerating beyond our collective capacity to grasp the implications such transitions have happened many times before and one of the more recent shifts took place in the early 2010s there has been plenty of interest in the role of social media in that series of revolutions known as the arab spring 2010 2012 it was a time when reformist values seemed to travel extremely rapidly via the mobile phones that had become ubiquitous in the middle east and everywhere else but the focus on the role of media in times of rapid social change goes back a long way in the arab world the algerian war of the 1950s was a key period for understanding the ways the media influence the course of history radio and independence a key text is frantz fanon s essay this is the voice of algeria fanon wrote about the changing understanding of radio in colonial algeria during the 1950s at first the indigenous algerian population saw the radio as a foreign entity destructive of traditional family relationships back in france the image of a family gathering around the wireless set at night was a cosy socially reinforcing one but in algeria it was widely seen as socially suspect because it threatened to mix genders and ages in non traditional ways to overcome this the french colonial broadcaster identified certain radio programmes as particularly suitable for family listening this strategy did not work in the population at large radios were neither bought nor listened to meanwhile the radio diffused news of unrest to the colonial farmers for them the radio was a voice of security and normality the only way to still feel like a civilized man it was a bulwark fanon claims against going native the wireless a cosy socially reinforcing image ironically the european farmers would hear the news then gather their workers to celebrate victories against an insurgency of which the workers being without radios themselves would otherwise have known nothing fanon s argument is that the classic sociological rationale for a lack of radio listening among algerians was a mass of errors the standard line was that traditions of respectability are so important for us and are so hierarchical that it is practically impossible for us to listen to radio programs in the family fanon s gloss on this is here then at a certain explicit level is the apprehension of a fact receiving sets are not readily adopted by algerian society by and large it refuses this technique which threatens its stability and the traditional types of sociability the reason invoked being that the programs in algeria undifferentiated because they are copied from the western model are not adapted to the strict almost feudal type of patrilineal hierarchy with its many moral taboos that characterizes the algerian family so what changed contested hierarchies fanon claims this argument about family traditions is bogus the evidence as soon as a nationalist radio station appeared it was so popular that all the radios sold out in a matter of weeks and batteries for them were almost unobtainable if this was really a matter of traditional family values how could these values have been abandoned so comprehensively in the space of a month or two only with the start of nationalist radio broadcasts did the radio become a tool of decolonization the french authorities strongly objected to the german supply of radios from the telefunk company the germans ignored the french so the french colonial powers jammed the unauthorised broadcasts whereupon according to fanon families would actively listen to the static and imagine the news of nationalist victories that were surely what the french were trying to suppress he had to enter the vast network of news he had to find his way in a world in which things happened in which events existed in which forces were active through the experience of a war waged by his own people the algerian came in contact with an active community the algerian found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news one interpretation of this version of history is that the real hierarchical distinction the radio emphasized was not between traditional family relations such as man and woman father and child there was to be sure fanon pointed out hierarchy in algerian society but it was first and foremost between colonizers and colonized between the oppressor and the oppressed this dominant hierarchical relationship was actually what the new technology foregrounded and made even more problematic another interpretation of this situation might be that technology finds its own uses as the saying goes at first the algerian nationalists had no need of the radio if all it could tell them was the french were in charge they were already painfully aware of that information it took a while for the algerian nationalists to realise that radio previously the voice of the oppressor could instead become the voice of the independence mov...
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