The UN had a report come out on the global sanitation crisis. It was almost impossible to find the original story but I did. I think the thing that made it so hard to find is that rather than leading with the global santitation crisis, most news outlets apparently didn’t get past the first sentence. Or they did, but that was the lead for the story:
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today launched a call for urgent action to end the crisis of 2.5 billion people without basic sanitation, and to change a situation in which more people worldwide have mobile phones than toilets
So… the Time version of the story, titled “More People Have Cell Phones Than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows“, has a photo from Getty. The image stopped me.
I mean, I totally smiled. The photo is beautiful. It perfectly captures how I would imagine what this sanitation crisis, I mean plethora of cell phones, must look like. Here are the keywords Getty has it listed under the photo.
| Keywords: | Communication, Technology, Horizontal, Outdoors, 30-34 Years, 35-39 Years, Africa, Mobile Phone, Kenya, Indigenous Culture, Animal, Domestic Animals, Mammal, Cattle, Day, One Person, African Tribal Culture, Masai, Color Image, Herder, Large Group Of Animals, One Mid Adult Man Only, One Man Only, Native African Ethnicity, Animal Themes, Westernization, Photography, Science and Technology, Livestock, Using Phone, Developing Countries, Wireless Technology, Adults Only, Warrior, Herbivorous. |
Lots of stuff about animals and indigenous african culture. A few on technology. Westernization and development make an appearance. Vocational information. Location. And… nothing about why the UN report was actually written.
The UN piece has a slightly different title than the time piece, “Deputy UN chief calls for urgent action to tackle global sanitation crisis“, and a very different image:
Living amid waste. Photo: IRIN/Manoocher Deghati
The phones are a wonderful hook, and they are mentioned one more time later in the piece to give the numbers:
Of the world’s seven billion people, six billion have mobile phones. However, only 4.5 billion have access to toilets or latrines – meaning that 2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, do not have proper sanitation. In addition, 1.1 billion people still defecate in the open.
But the call to action later in the article:
“But the effort succeeded not by building latrines; it succeeded by getting people to recognize and to talk about the problem,” he stated.
Seems like it may be lost. I know that if I didn’t have time and I saw the headline, clicked the article, and saw the beautiful image of the Masai Moran warrior on his cell phone, out with his animals in an uncluttered field, I’d probably think “good for them”, and then move on… but maybe I’m more apathetic than most.
In terms of what this means with regards to how we talk about the digital divide cannot be understated. But… our need to gloss over. The fact that most of the articles that have come out over the past few days do not link directly to the UN piece nor do they lead with the sanitation crisis means that the bigger, messier issue is being glossed over and beautified for western/global north consumption and page views.
Is this a problem? I think yes, but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just me.
So, I have an idea that is really a request. When we talk of society, we talk as though mutual recognition was a possibility that existed at the time of slavery. I think sure it did, but it didn’t. Exploring this was the purpose of the Letter post. Slavery is a complex system of seeing bodies as cyborgs, which to me, on some level means sexually viable for humanoid reproduction (at the cusp of recognition), yet not fully human. So, it’s about bodies that are resources of reproduction, both in terms of the almost human and labor, especially manual labor.
So slavery was abolished in the west. I want to say not exactly. The slave trade, the need for slavery to be so focused on the bodies as technology, each with its own individual value, and skills is gone. But it is so ingrained in our culture, it has become such a point of articulation that slavery doesn’t need to exist as such anymore.
Slavery is a technique. As a result, we have situations like the Emory president speaking of the 3/5ths compromise and not realizing he’s made a horrible mistake… only not really, because in this system we have now, this slavery as technique mode of labor production, there are people who are 3/5ths. They are not in power. But they do the labor that ensures those with access to power and wealth stay in their positions. We have comments like the tweet below that instigated this post:
Slavery as technique. RT @sinboy: “We are ruled by people who think $250k/year means you’re poor, but the minimum wage is too high” – Atrios
— Jade D. (@jadedid) February 28, 2013
We all buy into the idea of “Human Resources” without realizing what we are saying when we speak these words. Hint, if Human Resources was really about serving the people that worked at the company/institution etc, I maintain that it would be called the “Office of Humanity”.
Even more than the things that are happening here at home in the states, we have people working in virtual slave positions around the world. It is the dark side of globalization and global connectivity through media devices. We can buy our cheap goods while the labor that went into creating them and bringing them to us remains invisible. Their labor is our pacifier. We are coddled by our ability to attain more than others. But, that’s part of the technique as well. Those with the bigger planation, or more stuff, are imagined to have more power. So we work to attain more. With that, I guess I should drop the link so we can all look at our slavery footprint.
The thing about understanding slavery as a technique is, techniques are in the background. We don’t have to think about them. They are built into how we move through society. The biggest issue for me is, as long as we get stuck focussing on and speaking about slavery as technology, we won’t be able to move it beyond the black body. As a technique, it is all encompassing. We all have a hand in ensuring the technique remains a part of our societal makeup. And as long as we live in the fancy big house, we seem to ignore all of those people in the global fields who are making sure we get our next fix of cheap goods… And I cannot forget the mostly black and brown people that clean the halls of my own University for lord knows how much money, but only in the middle of the night, when they can’t be seen.
Carl Hagenbeck
In attempting to understand the origins of racism, it is important to avoid removing it to a historical past or displacing its sources onto the oppressed. Any investigation or representations of [otherness], then, must take a critical look at Euro-American whiteness to understand the construction of race as a category. As critic Coco Fusco has insisted, “To ignore white ethnicity is to reduce its hegemony by nautrualizing it”
Brian Wallis, Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerrotypes, in “Only Skin Deep”, p. 179
In the original quote, “otherness” was “african-american blackness”, but as we move out towards Euro-American ideals of seeing “types”, it becomes the other. This is post is a reaction to a recent post that was featured on Sociological Images, Human Zoos at the Turn of the 20th Century. The post featured this mans quotes and appeared to be in response to a Speigel Online article on remains being returned home. The article featured a small photogallery. Instead of using the image of the man behind the terror/horror, the only images that accompanied the article, and article that led with the trigger warning on the image above, only featured images of the “victims”, not the man. I think the trigger warning should sit with the man holding the gun. If we are going to face it, we should see the proper faces of the violence. Not the metaphorical remains of their inhumane actions. That strips those people and their descendants of their humanity, over, and over, and over again. The new term I learned this weekend from my psychoanalysis reading was “soul murder”. I’m starting to think that is what the displacement of oppression does.
The image above is my attempt at properly facing the trigger warning, because he was not one of the ones who stayed so behind the scenes of the people and the photographs that we do not have his name or quotes or (hi)story, and because his name is still spoken, anytime someone wants to go to his zoo, the one that bears his name.
I have a question I’m trying to think through. Does the speed of digital media allow for the creation of history/historical encounters?
I am not in a history based field anymore, though my M.A. is. It is just a part of my formation, and an area of interest for me so there’s that…
Basically, we understand history as the passage of time, as something embodied, and as a before time/before now. The temporal aspect of history makes us and it contingent. However, the advancement of speed, that is, things moving at the speed of light due to the digitization of so much of our communication, interactions, and even our memories, has made it so the traces of new histories are vast and disjointed. In the past there were a few people gifted the ability to set the historical narrative and affirm it’s faultlessness, and reinforce its disciplining capacity by placing it in specific, recognized, archives. Often we talk of history as being written by “the winners”. Now though, people are constantly creating searchable, reproducible across time and space, public archives without the commitment or politics of what we previously marked as the Archive, and without being on the winning team. The archive isn’t as obviously being scripted by the power structures of society (though obviously there is power written into the code of the platforms we use etc., and nothing is created outside of society).
Still, I can’t help but think maybe there is no more History except for the history that exists in the browser.
The last big historical event that comes to mind before smartphones were the norm was September 11th.
My counter example is May 2, 2011. When I search that date on google what I am looking for comes up as the first result among 816,000,000+ other results. It should have been a major historical event.
The speed at which things happen now means there is no longer a future point in time where we go back and write the past. The past is written in virtually real time. we go back and look at the archive. I am thinking specifically here of the death of Osama bin Laden. In the past, the news of his death would have gone through a 24-48 hour news cycle, with those in power giving out the information to official sources who then passed it on to the journalist at most probably the New York Times. From there it would be on page 1, pass through other communication systems, and then be on the front pages of other papers, or on internet news sites within 12-48 hours. Instead, it was leaked, then officially announced, at which point the realization occurred that it was live tweeted by a random person nearby. People celebrated that night by tweeting pictures of their celebrations and posting those across social media while simultaneously being broadcasted live on 24hour news channels. Within two days, instead of the news just getting to people, people had already moved on.
When things move this quickly, I can’t help but wonder what the history will look like once it is codified and agreed upon and disseminated, and how all that will be done.