Skull and crossbones in cyberspace

There's safety in numbers. Think again! And no thanks to the online pirates who prove that money is where they can play monkey with their stealthy business savvy. Go figure:

   
Infographic by- Beijing Web Designers

Advertising the odd

Fun is fine, but it’s crossing beyond the line of well-meaning amusement into the morally dubious zone of condescension when laughter echoes around the reckless representation of the “other.”  

For a while there, Ashton Kutcher does appear swell in his four-character skit in the Pop Chips commercial as if he were trying so desperately to surpass Meryl Streep’s chameleon instinct for uncanny accents in her larger-than-life characterizations.  And then one starts to feel queasy seeing Kutcher’s antics, specifically his impersonation of an Indian guy named Raj, lapsing into lousy caricature.  It’s pretty understandable that Pop Chip’s advertiser wish to grab attention through eye-catching parody, but it leaves a foul taste in the mouth when the mirth of the marketing spiel comes at the expense of another ethnicity.

By reducing Raj to the level of a buffoon, the advertisers have reinforced the historical sweep of the Western gaze since the dawn of empire-making, looking down at non-whites as inferior race whose exotic ways are worthy of a chuckle and waiting to be civilized.  Indeed, any notion of one race being superior to another is potentially and inevitably spawning the evil of racism.

The downgrading blow was further delivered in the concluding shots when the real Kutcher appeared, acted disgusted by the preceding character sketches, and muttered a punch line that dismissed the whole caboodle as a “freak show.” With an apparent repulsion, Kutcher asked: “Are we all in the same category?”

That question, I say, sums up the advertisement’s disdainful attitude masked in hilarity. The Raj character particularly sticks out not only with its exaggerated accent in sing-song but also with its  “brown face” make-up. For me, Raj’s face recalls the one-dimensional characters of “blackface” performers in minstrel shows circa 1830-1890 when America’s bigotry fomented lowdown perception about African-Americans.  Although other immigrants were specifically easy targets for stereotyping on the stages of music halls, the black people were more vulnerable to sing-and-dance comedy of blackface performers who provide a literal face to the mockery—shaped by ignorance and intolerance—toward the black community.  

If there’s an upside to the outcry over the Pop Chip controversy, the marketer’s decision to pull out the commercial spot indicates the advertising and TV industry’s sensitivity to the power of social media. When the hullaballoo made the rounds of Twitter and Facebook, the marketers know that alienating the demographics that reflect the social network is recipe for bad business. And that, certainly, can never be a laughing matter.

In the line of Iran

Hell on earth is easy. No sweat, indeed, if one were a journalist in countries where the exercise of individual rights and freedom of expression are concepts that are literally and metaphorically far from heaven. One such country is Iran.

Where the Islamic theocracy imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini remains a monolithic entity, Iranian media practitioners are bound to have hell to pay if they dare to transgress the state’s tenets of control. It has become cliché to cite the mechanisms of domination that damns the media either into a monotone of parroting the official line or total silence. Self-censorship, therefore, becomes a matter of survival even if it means writing a suicide note to a time-honored journalistic principle: holding a stark mirror to society and its structures of power to uphold the truth.

At the outset, it is obvious that the very notion of theocracy, which implies that the rulers of the state or government enjoy the moral privilege of divine guidance, runs counter to the concept of democracy. After all, it arrogates upon itself the assumption that only the authorities—no matter how fallible they are to human caprice and whims of absolute power—have the absolute right and the unerring wisdom to know and to impose what’s best for society. This theocratic complex, therefore, tolerates neither variety of opinion nor vagaries of individual choices. By playing god, the leadership of Iran’s clergy has ironically spawned the evil of intolerance and oppression that condemns free-thinkers and truth-tellers, such as journalists and artists, to infernal deprivations or even death.

Despite the elaborate dynamics of repression, the Iranian regime continues to face flurries of resistance that erupt every now and then. This impulse to assert against the injustice of the state reveals Iran’s rich tradition of self-expression that flowered from its opulent cultural ecology.  Historically, we know that Persia (or ancient Iran) used to be one of the world’s greatest empires, which thrived by dint of innovation and exchange of ideas, commerce, etc. with the outside world.  There was a time in its not-so-distant past when Iran under Mohammad Reza, the Shah's eldest son, revealed a sophisticated society imbued with Western ease and openness, which is manifested in its willingness to extend the right of suffrage to women.

Apropos to the process of Westernization within the crosscurrent of globalization, the constraints of an outmoded Islamic republic persist to be challenged by the compulsion for freedom and for engagement with a reality larger than the theocratic shadow. In a rapidly changing world, its rigid leadership is facing constant defiance by the impetus for exposure and interconnection, which is facilitated by modern communication. Even during 1979 Iranian Revolution, communications technology was instrumental in expediting its objectives. Recall, for instance, how Khomeini’s Islamist followers disseminated cassette recordings of his sermons to consolidate its campaign in overthrowing Iran’s monarchy long ruled by the Pahlavi dynasty.

Another instance of Iranian resistance against authoritarian assault of free expression in a global age involves the international controversy over the house arrest of critically-acclaimed filmmaker Iranian director Jafar Panahi.  Renowned for his stark rendition of contemporary Iranian reality and his cinematic focus on the victims of social marginalization, Panahi has been banned from creating films, writing screenplays, and even granting interviews. But he called global attention to his fate and to his country’s leadership when one of his friends smuggled out a visual document of his plight called “This Is Not a Film.” Hereunder is the trailer of Panahi's documentary:

Blogger power: Or how a Filipino professor extends her expertise as a global investigative journalist

A whole new world awaits the adventurous journalist who would dare to ride the rising advances of technology as it impacts social media and the pro-democracy movements in societies long shadowed by restrictive regimes.  

“From Bahrain to Burma, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, savvy muckrakers are using blogs, mobile phones, Google maps, and social media to expose the excesses of the powerful,” writes

Sheila S.Coronel. “Watchdog sites have taken advantage of the Internet to report about corruption and organized crime. Moreover, journalists overseas are mining information from online public records and databases to uncover stories that would previously have been buried in secrecy.”

Tapping the power of social network, Coronel has cranked up her skills for looking beyond the surface of events. Her acumen have been proven since she became the founding executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) up to her current post as the director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism of Columbia University in New York. Calling it her chance to explore “the changing landscape of global investigative journalism,” Coronel has started her own blog called Watchdog Watcher.

“This blog draws from my work, both past and present. It looks at how watchdog reporting is being done around the world; it also contains reflections on what I think is a golden moment for investigative reporting, but also a moment fraught with challenges and threats,” explains Coronel who has trained journalists from “Asia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere” at one of the world’s premier journalism school. Coronel adds that journalists have to “take advantage of all these opportunities to collaborate across borders and tap into databases that have long been out of reach.” 

Media-savvy morality: Vatican spreads the good word

In this modern age where secularization appears to have gained the upper hand, how can Christianity affirm its moral ascendancy?

The higher ground can be accessed by means of social media. Or so believes the Vatican as it goes about reaching a wider audience beyond the pulpit to convey its message. Indeed, it's proof-positive of the Papacy's openness to debunk the doubtful perception that the Catholic is wary of change, especially the blessings of new technology. Recently, the Pope made news as he revealed its new crusade for the church to achieve "an unprecedented level of interaction with Catholics all over the globe."

Now that the Pope is taking and sending messages via Twitter, aside from availing himself both to his flock of devotees and non-believers alike through Vatican's Facebook page, one upside over this attitude is the opportunity to open more widely the possibility for engaging dialogue across a variety of religious faiths, thus extending the chances for ecumenism and world peace in a time when there's nothing more alienating than detachment and exclusivity: fundamentalism and such narrow-minded notions borne out of parochial nationalism.

With more openness, perhaps the Vatican can get more sunlight and dispel the darkness over controversies it tends to hide from the public, such as sexual abuse perpetrated by priests. There's hope, too, that this sense of transparency could stretch the elbow room for discussion on such taboo topics as women finally finding a place under the Vatican sun and becoming priests.

Let there be light, indeed.

Italian media and its image of women

Perception is reality, according to a popular adage. As far as Italian media is concerned, how does its view on reality--or, the real experiences of women--impacts public perception?

Not too long ago, pornographic performer Ilona Staller, more famous as Cicciolina, hogged global headlines as she flaunted her sexuality en route to a position of power in the Italian legislature. As much as it offered an opportunity for the marginalized in society--such as women and commercial sex workers, etc.--to make their voices heard in the hierarchy of Italian governance, it remains debatable if Cicciolina's fame and influence has dignified the social status of Eve’s daughters since Adam.

In the Italian context, women still have a lot to complain and commiserate with their counterparts elsewhere in the world long woeful with its age-old constraints in enlightenment and equality. This reality, purveyed by popular media, still looms with shadows—largely distorted or lamentable with disproportion that whittles down the dimension of female experience to the level of fiction.

In fact, as feminist scholars argue with theories on “gendered mediation” and “symbolic annihilation,” Cicciolina’s antics may only impede the process of progress toward fairness in media representation. Last the Italians looked, Cicciolina seemed to have spawned an electoral peculiarity that fuses pornography with politics.

Invisibility still defines the issues of women, and their concerns/viewpoints remain characterized with a lack of layered and more nuanced news coverage. Formidable, indeed, is the male-dominated beast of bias. In the 2002 elections, for instance, Italy’s six television channels spent less than 80 hours (7.5%) of focus on female candidates compared to 999 hours (92.5%) on male contenders. Another Italian report in 2004 indicated the extent of imbalance that tips the favor for the preservation of gender stereotypes in infotainment talk shows: “Female presence had primarily a representative value of at least five or six men versus one woman in a talk show… Women were both underrepresented (quantitative analysis) and marginalized (qualitative analysis) compared with men in the category of “potenti” [the powerful] that included politicians and political and spiritual leaders…”

Hardly surprising, therefore, that Italy ended up with the worst ranking (84th out of 128 countries) within Europe in the 2007 Global Gender Gap drafted by the World Economic Forum. In the face of inequality, some Italian women decided to stand their ground against the sexist image in Italian media as they amplify their protest against the "commercialization of Italian women...and a model that damages female identity."

One of the most vocal advocate among these women is Lorella Zanardo, a management consultant on equal opportunity and diversity, who came up with a documentary called "Il Corpe delle Donne" (Women's Body) to show there's more to women than their obscurity and their onus of shame under the status quo or in the framework of patriarchal chauvinism.

Beyond the North and the South, Or How Telenovelas Become the Tie That Binds the Two Americas

“We are committed to localized content becoming global and global content becoming localized," declared one of the top executives at Disney-ABC as she explained the company’s objective to extend and expand the relationship that Disney Channel has fostered with families and their children.

From the magazine article on Disney’s marketing strategy of “embracing telenovelas,” the executive’s explanation is easily one of the salient points in our class, especially in relation to our discussion on telenovelas and how this particular genre has been propped up by media giants and prodded by the impulse of globalization.

Clarifying the notion of counterflow, the seepage of telenovela as a Latin American or Hispanic product into the U.S. market definitely washes away the idea of geography as a cut-and-dried entity. In a world rendered borderless by digital technology, geographical mindsets are up for a repositioning or reorientation to the inexorable tide of cultural crosscurrents.

Indeed, as conveyed by Telemundo and Univision—the major Hispanic networks that encompass the culturally constructed regions of South America and the United States—McLuhan’s message is loud and clear with a Hispanic accent that is never lost in translation. Yes, the world is a global village. And this is where the viewers of Betty La Fea and Ugly Betty find themselves comfortably close even if CNN is recurrent about its reports about alienation, inequality, and antipathy as the constants of the human condition.

No longer defined in the rhetoric of conflict or divergence, the North-South dynamic evident in the convenient and mutually beneficial circulation of telenovelas is proof-positive of the emergent trend in the media—the medium of television, specifically—toward convergence.

Indeed, this phenomenon of distributing media products internationally from the periphery to the core of America defines the interconnected complexity of cultural identity even as it defies the customary notion of cultural imperialism. For me, this reality undoubtedly widens the elbow room for raising the stakes of democratic ideals and global economy. It exceeds the usual expectation when we talk about such topics as dominance and diversity.

This development also offers a possibility for America to swallow or internalize further its image as a “salad bowl” of cultures. Considering that Hispanics in America have exponentially made their presence felt as they reached at least 50 million to mark a new census milestone, it makes a swell business sense to cash in on the demand of the Hispanic consumer, as recommended by the YouTube video below. Nothing is more practical than to accept the convenience of continually adapting and integrating itself to the realities of a world where the center is getting changeable and ever shifting.

Why Hollywood Holds the World In Its Thrall

To call Hollywood “a world all its own,” as one actress once did, is to factor in the fact of America’s ascendancy among nations around the planet. Given the military and economic context of America’s dominant status, the shadow of the eagle—the symbol of Uncle Sam’s might and its flight of fancy where it wishes to land—unavoidably influences not only the reality of international affairs but also the fantasy of people across an array of climes and cultures.

Along with the systemic spread of colonialism, America has inevitably expanded its imperial power, which foments the perception—shaped by the ideology of supremacy—that creates a consciousness of awe steeped in subservience among citizens all over the globe. That America is almighty—with its ethos of democracy and conquest against all odds as embodied by the epic taming of the frontier by its early settlers—has also lead to the mythic presumption that everything it does is not only a function of might but also a fool-proof validation of its appropriation of what’s right. The assumption that America is invincible in its abilities and indisputable in its virtues is rendered even more marketable to people in other nations who buy the ideal of America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

For those who are struggling with nightmares of Third-World circumstances and totalitarian regimes, nothing is more transcendent than the idea of individual salvation wrapped around high-minded notions about the star-spangled banner. Such subliminal conditioning, conveniently sustained by the market forces controlled by America, has spelled the success of America’s multinational enterprise and its export-oriented goals. To the extent that it has harnessed Hollywood’s machinery in fast-tracking and spreading the international appeal of American sounds and images, Hollywood’s messages and its West-centric rhetoric of power will continue to be a force to reckon with. Then again, as the impulse of multiculturalism persists to resist America’s one-size-fits-all vision of the world, this question is quite resonant enough to drive American executives out of dreamy stupor of its complacency: "Will Hollywood continue to thrive in today’s competitive global marketplace?"

While Hollywood and its formidable dream factory remain irresistible for many, marginal voices are raising the stakes for a reality check:

Globalizing the local, localizing the global

"We don't want to be all the same, but we do want to understand each other." So says Sheikha Al Mayassa of Qatar. A cultural worker on behalf of painters, storytellers and filmmakers, she affirms the role of culture and art in communicating a country's identity, making it possible to connect and share its uniqueness with the wider world.

Clarifying the concept of contra-flow

Trite but true: There’s nothing more constant than change. This process of transformation, of course, redefines the notion of the status quo as something infused with a fluid characteristic, whether in the realm of government, media or cultural establishment.

To the extent that the coordinates of influence are shifting in a state of flux, the power of media to shape perceptions and subjective interpretations of social reality stemming from a complexity of interactions—self and society, the nations and the world, etc.—can be described as dynamic and hardly monolithic. This way, meaning can be multi-layered and polysemic. In this paradigm, therefore, the concept of control as unilateral and unleashing a politics of monoculture would entail an overhaul.

In my Sociology lessons, glocalization is among the theories I find fascinating. This neologism obviously reflects the crosscurrents of globalization and localization, implying a cyclic continuum pretty much like the movement of the tides. As defined by George Ritzer, glocalization means “the integration of the global and the local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas.” In this regard, glocalization indicates the way communication—a function of power—can create identities and communities as cultural spheres marked by hybridity or heterogeneity.

Thus, Ritzer’s glocalization can be deemed as a conceptual reiteration of Thussu’s “contra-flow.” These intertwined ideas pack the potential of disentanglement from the tentacles of cultural imperialism that occurs wherever and whenever “authentic, traditional local culture…is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products, mainly from the United States,” according to Jeremy Tunstall in his book The Media Are American: Anglo-American Media in the World.

As an example of contra-flow, in the context of upheavals in geopolitics, the phenomenon of “people power” revolution (in the Philippines, Romania and other communist nations in Europe as well as the recent events in the Middle East) offers an astonishing example how their media had inspired and energized the people into consolidating their collective strength against their despotic regimes.

Where a considerable segment of the American press is plagued with tawdry sensationalism, their counterparts in other parts of the world have shown how democracy as well as meaningful and peaceful change can be achieved and vouchsafed through vigilance and advocacy for the truth, regardless of the risk to liberty and life. Indeed, American media can also learn how to become agents in enlightening the citizenry—like providing more nuance to the news about the Occupy Wall Street protest—by taking their cue from the courage and enterprising spirit of journalists in other nations.

Waking into wholeness

How do we widen the scope of our awareness beyond the borders of a West-centered world, especially in this era of high-tech transformations that impacts our notions of identity and destiny? This website called Worlds of Difference may provide us with a clue as it "presents stories of people facing critical decisions about who they are and who they want to be."

There's more than meets our myopic perception, indeed. Here are three voices worth mulling over to make us more sensitive and sensible as mediators/communicators in a planet where progress as an idea often cramps our capacity for enlightenment:

"I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity."
—Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques

"The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life."
—Octavio Paz, Mexican poet

"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."
—Audre Lorde, American poet

Globalization blues

Unity ought to be a foregone conclusion in light of the universality of the human condition and the common fate of peoples regardless of diversity. Especially with the innovative and transcendent capacity of digital technology, cutting-edge communication should have rendered it convenient for nations and races to understand, to empathize with each other, and to forge a fellowship that breaches the borders/walls of stratification along sociocultural and economic fault lines. The dark ages of intolerance should have been passé, and the tragedies of the past should no longer cast a long shadow of ideological disquiet.

Then again, though science has cracked the codes of the human genome and has propelled a conquest of outer space, the earthlings remain shrouded in the smoke of prejudice. It’s a no-brainer how the news continues to broadcast the pall of ethnocentric ignorance and arrogance. Even the blind can see how ideological divisiveness persists in driving a wedge across the world.

To the extent that ideology influences both the shifting tide of geopolitics and the crosscurrents of market forces, the reports have rendered it obvious ad nauseam how power packs a tidal wave of repercussions. Consider how the beliefs of Wall Street executives—steeped in selfish materialism and the culture of consumption that could hold water to sharks’ cold-blooded appetite—continue to have far-reaching effects beyond the shores of a recession-riddled America. Consider, too, how the economic values of the US-controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF) have long been imposed on exotic-sounding countries at the expense of their own ingeniously indigenous agenda for development.

Consequently, this ideology of greed has spawned problems in the local setting where disastrous levels of inequity have risen on a global scale. Think of the effect of ecological exploitation in the Amazon forest or the ocean around Japan, for instance. Truly, it’s staggering to contemplate the fallout from a depleted ozone layer—not to mention the unquantifiable loss of pharmacological possibilities—due to trees and shrubs reduced to ashes. The scarcity of marine resources has become a headache not only for hungry local fishermen but also for the rest of us dying to have a healthy diet of seafood.

Where discontent arises, so does violence. Similar to environmental horror, the heartbreak caused by terrorism definitely demands international cooperation. More than a sleepless issue of homeland security for Americans, it is also a nightmare for people elsewhere. Who’s to say, for instance, that an air raid that bombs a whole generation of Afghan villagers to extinction is less harrowing than planes slamming against buildings?

No man is an island, one poet stated while another echoed an unsettling conclusion why we’re all in this plagued planet together: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”