Jen Drago @ Hammering Man

Jen Drago spoke in front of the hammering man at SAM yesterday, and i was lucky enough to see a bit of it... rehetorical analysis - soon to come!

A Simpler Life?

A few days ago I was looking through the news when I found this story, in which I found a couple of issues which seemed to undermine the general integrity of the story and somewhat insulting to the individuals profiled.

He wanted a healthier lifestyle for his family, less anxiety, fewer 14-hour days. So he recently traded his deluxe apartment, the pickup truck, the dishwasher and $4.99 McDonald's combos for life in a place he considers relatively better: sub-Saharan Africa.

"Right now I'm no stress, no anxiety," said Odhiambo, 34, relaxing in his family home in this western Kenyan city along the shores of Lake Victoria. "Think of it this way: When I was in the U.S., I was close to 300 pounds. Now, I'm like 200. The biggest thing for me was quality of life."

While that may seem counterintuitive to Americans accustomed to bleaker images of Africa, recent studies have documented the flight of immigrant professionals from the United States to their home countries. Chinese and Indian workers increasingly say they see better opportunities and lifestyles at home. And diaspora associations of Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans and other Africans say their members -- mostly from middle-class backgrounds -- are joining the exodus, choosing life in the land of slow Internet connections and power outages over the pressures of recession-era America.

A quick search of Wikipedia reveals a country whos fraudulent elections have sparked waves of violence, bordered by Sudan, home of Darfur, the "Second Most Politcally Unstable Country in the World." Kenya is also bordered by Somali, the "First Most Politcally Unstable Country in the World." Kenya is not a paradise. While I can understand an individual family's desire to move back to their homes in light of the difficulties the current economic crises, I take extreme issue with the context the writer of the article places this occurence in. In another place in the article, McCrummen says

His family lives in his mother-in-law's tidy -- and paid for -- one-story, cinder-block house. There are no credit cards in Kenya, and mortgages are just catching on, so life mostly runs on cash.

"Here, you really can live on about $5 a day," Odhiambo said.

I feel this description of the people of Africa attempts to engage the reader in a sort of romanticism of African life which I think is simply insulting and undermines the authority of the writer. It is sad to think that a writer for the Washington Post thinks that the average reader will accept the notion that life in Africa is simple and idealized, hearkening back to easier times.

Corporate Flash Dance?

 In my opinion, one of the most fascinating realities enabled by the rise of the internet and the culture and community which emerged within it is very different ways it enables such new and subversive forms of protest such as culture jamming. Culture jamming is an especially interesting example because it is essentially an umbrella term for new methods of viewing existing corporate messages within themselves. In reading “Culture Jamming and Meme-based Communication,” I very much liked how the author defined a meme as “the basic unit of communication in culture-jamming.” Memes have always fascinated me for their virility and surprising bursts of creativity, and have always impressed me as indicative of the different standards of communication that exist in the post internet era. And, as Adbusters insists, they do make a very effective forum for challenging the aggressive status quos of dominating corporate advertising. However, I felt a very interesting aspect of this definition is to be seen in the ways that companies have begun to incorporate forms of culture jamming in their own promotion. Take, for example, T-Mobile and their new ‘Life is for sharing’ ad campaign. In this campaign, a major feature was a flash mob of 100 or so trained dancers brought together in the London Underground which ‘spontaneously’ began dancing for a few minutes to music played over the loud speaker. This was, essentially, a sympol of flash mobs being recongnized and consumed by corporations, because the London Underground was home to one of the first large flash mobs, which performed the same thing only without professionals, with portable music devices, and without T-Mobile being thanked at the end of the demonstration. T-Mobile has with this campaign essentially harnessed the power of the meme economy to perpetuate advertisement, hijacking public demonstrations meant to show a different underlying logic and something apart from traditional corporate and official influences.