first ever blog
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
I talked to a class mate and realized that I was supposed to just do two blog on the last class. So here is my second blog. The guest speaker last class talked about a wide variety of topics. One thing that I found quite interesting was her stories about the technology conference in Europe. The very notion that The Europeans are willing to fund technology and design experiments for the pure want of knowledge is mind boggling to me. In the west is always seems that any thing that is designed is design first for the purpose of sale for profit and then for any other function it may perform. I think that the Europeans will be more likely to find unique uses for the technology and in doing so change the way we think about it. The piece of technology that the speaker designed sounded awesome. Before this point I would have questioned the purpose of a sociologist on a committee whose goal is technological in nature. The map t-shirts and tourist cubes that she told us about however severed a sociological purpose. Both inventions are meant to change the way in which locals and tourists interact. Tourists always go to foreign countries expecting to get ripped off and are apprehensive because of it. The locals need the tourists dollars and there is a power imbalance because of it. With the two inventions money is taken out of at least some of the interactions between tourists and locals. Both sides interact without the apprehension that money creates, and find that the process is rather pleasant. I was really impressed with this, and it gave me some confidence about the usability of a sociological background. All in all I thought the guest speaker was really cool.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Amanda Wiens 281415
I couldn’t find the web site with this weeks readings on them so I’ll just post this blog about the last class. First of all I think that the way the guest lecturer ran the class was excellent. She had us all pick two words off a table randomly. We then without preparation discussed what they had to do with urban centers. One thing that caught my attention was the way that technology can create space within a city. Not space as in a physical sense but space as in the arenas in which we communicate. Technology has the capability of making distances short or wider. For instance, when communicating with someone on the other side of the world over the computer it may seem as though they are right there. The opposite may be true as well. When talking over the internet to someone who is just in the next cubicle technology is putting space between them. The space that the internet creates has the capability of bringing us together, but also of putting us apart.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Amanda Wiens
The other article that I read for this week is “The performance of Citizenship” from the book Nomadic Identities. I have to be honest I found this article extremely challenging. I have read it but I am sure that I will get a lot more out of it after we have discussed it in class. One thing that I did pick up was the notion of the foreigner and the struggle to integrate into a new culture. African-Asians struggle to be accepted in Uganda. Joseph May, the author, talks about being made fun of for his mispronunciations of the Swahili language. After reading this article the personal experience that he went through did not seem that unlike the situation that the Canadian author Choy narrates in his fiction, The Jade Peony. The novel is about a Chinese family living in Canada during the Second World War. The children struggle to fit in with their class mates. Their Chinese identity visibly sets the apart form the other children. The children like May do all they can do to become integrated, consuming the pop culture. In The Jade Peony this then creates a second rift at home, To the elderly the children are no longer considered really Chinese, because they do not speak that language fluently. The children are left without any really niche in which they belong. What happens when a person gives up one citizenship to move but never really gains full acceptance? I think that this creates a unique and interesting sociological problem. One that is probably increasing as more and more of the earth’s population gain mobility.
Amanda Wiens
“Culture Spoken Here”, this was the first article that I read this week. The theme that jumped out at me from this reading is the problematic nature of language. This is probably because I just finished an article for another class by Bryant, in which, he makes the same statement. Unfortunately I don’t have the title of the article with me, but I’ll write it in at the top of my next blog. In “culture spoken here” there is mention of a book by Kroeber and Kluckohn that cites 164 definitions of culture. The problem that Bryant points in his article is the values that are attached to these words. We can never study these things objectively or categorically if we cannot first agree on a definite meaning. “Culture” as a word is constantly evolving and changing so what is observed and right one second may no longer make sense in the next. Even what exists in the same moment may be noted differently by the same people. I think Shields put it best in his article: “Culture is thus defined emuneratively as an inclusive concept in terms of an infinite series of elements”. In order to understand culture, we must view the culture as a discourse. Single words are problematic. This is however just one of the themes in the article. I chose it because it tied in well to the other article that I have recently read.
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Amanda Wiens
281415
I have a sociological background. I have taken many courses in which we studied all sorts of things that are subject to change at the hand of policy. I have not , however, studied how specific policies can affect any of these things in real life. So I am a little apprehensive to being this blog. One thing that came of no surprise to me is the lack of consensus in the future policy that will affect our cities on the part of the officials and citizens alike. It seems to me that out of the four frame works a city needs a little of each to work. In the last paper that I read “the atmosphere of a city center”, the main point was the presence of diversity. Although diversity is crucial to the growth of a city, it may contribute the disagreements in policy. I was talking to my Mother the other day, she said that politicians may have the best intentions but in order to successful they have to be willing to tread on people’s toes. No matter what they do someone out there will be affected negatively. I think that this may be able to give us some insight as to why there is, despite agreement about the importance of cities, a lack of consensus as to their futures. Given the nature of cities it just makes sense that the policies are always hotly debated.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Amanda Wiens
281415
There were many interesting and new ideas presented to me in the class on the 4th. From the reading “The atmosphere of a city center”, something you said really jumped out at me. That is, the idea of the city as a place where many things come together that would not normally be there. In the documentary, there are of all types of people, from people rushing by to the man who flashed the camera, to the presents of the camera man himself all belonging on the streets of Amsterdam. All these people have been drawn to the same place for on reason or another. In being there they have the in common the experience of being part of the crowd.
I think there is a lot to be said for the allure of a crowd. I think people want to participate and be apart of something. This same phenomenon was seen with the Rolling Stones concert this summer. Thousands bought tickets to see the show when in fact for many the only view was on a screen. People bought the tickets not just to see Mick Jagger but also to be apart of something larger than the event in it’s self. Could it not be the case that many people live in cities not just to work but to participate and be a part of something?
