2 posts tagged “traditional”
Dear readers of Hi Tricia, hello again! I've been traveling around the world for two months and finally am now back in the states. I have lots of posts to write about my work and play in India, China and Sweden - and some cities in between - but honestly i've been so overwhelmed with all the stories I want to tell that I just haven't been able to pull myself together to do it until I had all my thousands of photos uploaded to my flickr!
Now that I am almost done with uploading my photos, I came across one of the photos that I had uploaded earlier this summer on my way to India - and this photo pissed me off so much when I saw it that I knew this would be the photo that would get my blogging ass back into the webosphere! So more posts will now!
So I saw this Canon advertisement of the Maasai (Masai) - a group that sustains their way of life through tourism business in Kenya - on a photo light box my 500 hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany (actually it was 12 hours but it did feel like 500). When I saw this photo after deboarding the plane I immediately I took the picture and at the same time some stupid German boys came up to me and said, " that's a pretty cool picture huh!" I tried my best with my jet lagged brain to penetrate their eyes with daggers of complete filth and disgust shooting from my forehead. I didn't have the energy to say anything back.
THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS WRONG WITH THIS CANON LIGHT BOX ADVERTISEMENT!!!! WHERE DO I BEGIN! hmmm help me on this one if I miss anything! I am too upset to even write in full sentences
1.) portrayal of Africans as "tribal"
2.) invasion of the African body through the x-ray
3.) the capitalistic and exploitive use of African bodies for Western consumption
4.) problematic boundaries over the visual and symbolic exploitation of AFrican male's genitals (referring to the male in the front with the x-ray over his pelvis)
5.) technology as triumphing over more "traditional" lifestyles
6.) technology as more revealing and useful than indigenous knowledge
7.) highlighting the notion that Westerners bring englightening technology to backward-nature-hunting Africans
8.) a return to colonial relationships and images
9.) exoticizng the "tribal" through technology
it was only today - Day #4 of the San Diego fires - did my friends on the East Coast start calling me to make sure I was not on fire and that my house was not burning down. This map demonstrates how truly catastrophic this 1 fire (of 8 other large fires) is- not because it shows how big this 1 fire is is, but because it shows how it compares to the city of Manhattan. Oh my NYC-Centric friends - the world doesn't make sense unless it is put into the context of your world? (I am not being 100% sarcastic, I am one of those NYC-centric people)
The stupid media has only been focusing on LA's celebrities up until today - and then they realized - wow the Malibu fire is sooo miniscule compared to the fact that the ENTIRE COUNTY OF SAN DIEGO IS BURNING DOWN!
Even my friend Roger in Sweden knew about San Diego's fires before my friends on the East Coast. That's horrible! He said the video he watched of the SD fires on Day #2, Monday - reported that the SD fires were worse than the LA fires. This is SWEDEN!!!!!! Can you believe that?
What's worse - I and many other bloggers in SD have been posting about what we are going through - so it's not like we've been silent. This clearly shows a need for more sophisticated and different levels of information reporting - if I and many others have been flickring and voxing about this for days and the large media conglomerates failed to pick up on the seriousness of this - it is clear something is wrong with how certain news is highlighted while some are ignored - and this also shows that we need a different outlet that focuses on first-hand accounts from bloggers and etc.
This happens all the time around the world - bloggers were posting about the recent Myamar/Burma killings of civilians - but it took a while for "official" news outlets to pick on it. This happens all the time in Africa and China. Just because people are writing about it online does not mean their information will get picked up. We need a new kind of media outlet that will be good at doing just that - specializing in first-hand online accounts. There is nothing democratic about the internet. hmm this sounds like just the kind of service Kenyatta has been talking about creating!
You can read my other thoughts about the distortion of wildfires here, emphasis of LA over SD here, and what a Sociologist would do during a fire here.
this was photo overlay was created by tim
