Monday, June 30, 2008

See Internet Work – Work Internet Work

I spent last night in a dark room hunched over a glowing computer monitor. While I’m sure that there are many more interesting stories that start this way, I’m not the one to tell them. I wasn’t hacking the CIA computers or sequencing the human genome, but for me last night was, in the words of Dylan, a fatal dose of salvation. It all started when I happened across a wikipedia article entitled “newspaper of record.” One by one, I opened and looked at each of the world’s major print news publications, and my findings were at once disheartening and incredibly uplifting. I started with those close to home – The New York Times, The Washington Post, yada yada. It was the same as always. Next I looked at the news from those parts of the world where I have family members. My sister lives currently in Berlin, so I looked at Der Spiegel, the famous German weekly, which most closely parallels the New Yorker. It was, of course, stylistically and grammatically fluent, and its articles covered everything from the submarines used by South American drug cartels, to the efforts of democratic subversives in China, to the waning influence of the Federal Reserve. Very Informative.  Next, I decided to look at Al Ahram, the standard bearing Egyptian weekly, which has been published since 1875. Here I began to notice an interesting trend. As with the online editions of many print media, Al Ahram allows readers to make comments on the news. These comment fields become a sort of public forum in which the subject of the article is the topic of debate. Here I began to find the broken, half-edited English of those to whom knowledge of the language is not merely convenient, but rather a very coveted trade-skill. The trend continued to the east, where India’s The Pioneer and The Times of India regurgitated articles that might have been found in a 1954 issue of My Home. “If you want to make your man spend a little more money, all you need to do is strut about in a bikini or other sexy outfits, as such things make men extremely impulsive when it comes to taking decisions either related to money or diet.” Hmm. On second thought that sounds a whole lot like Cosmo. Anyways, these user comments began to fill in some of the blank parts of my mental world map. On Haaretz comment boards, people lamented their Israeli leadership. On Al Quds comment boards, people lamented their Palestinian leadership. On Al-Ahram people lamented their Egyptian leadership, and on The Times of India, people lamented their Indian leadership. Around the world, people are desperately sending the digital smoke signals of a nation taken hostage. From the largest pluralistic democracy in the world (USA India) to the so called hearth of radical Islamic thought (Egypt) to Europe To China and back again to our seat high above our deluded-dream-vision puppet stage, we, the masses, are beginning to understand that it is governments who fight wars, and people that die. Though this may be old news to some, it was certainly reassuring for me to know that on all sides of the globe, people are cognizant of our shared humanity, of our common will to coexistence, and of the terrible plague of governments that simply don’t listen.
-Isaac Wilder