Interesting use of cell phone?

New Zealand man vexed not sexed by text message
Tue Dec 11, 2007 10:39pm EST

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A New Zealand woman who sent a naked man to the wrong house on the promise of a good time has been charged with misusing a telephone, local media reported on Wednesday.

The 17-year-old woman sent the man an enticing text message offering him an early Christmas present in the shape of two friendly women and suggested he take off his clothes to save time, the Manawatu Standard reported.

The 31-year old man wasted no time in arriving at the house, and took off his clothes and threw them through the window before entering.

But it was the wrong house and the householder did not see the funny side. The police were called and the man arrested for being unlawfully on a property.

The woman, who sent the tempting but deliberately wayward message, was also tracked down and charged for misusing a phone.

Both the man and the woman escaped prosecution and were cautioned and put on good behavior bonds.

Fittingly, the Front Page of the NYTimes Website Today

Forest Loss in Sumatra Becomes a Global Issue

“What can we possibly do to stop this?” said Pak Helman, 28, a villager here in Riau Province, surveying the scene from his leaking wooden longboat. “I feel lost. I feel abandoned.”

Mark Lombardi & Cognitive Mapping

Just to re-open the discussion on cognitive mapping and diagrammatic representation, I wanted to bring up Mark Lombardi, a "neo-conceptual" artist (according to Wikipedia) whose finely rendered "maps" diagram the people and systems involved in many corporate-political scandals. A classmate of mine in another class recently brought up Mark Lombardi as a figure of radical media, but I think he has even more relevance to course on imagined networks and global communities. A current traveling exhibition of his work is titled "Global Networks." Lombardi's diagrams, cleanly drawn with French curves and finely written titles, present often complex scandals of recent corporate-political context in a lucid and simplified manner. Like an elegant equation (and there is certainly something scientific about Lombardi's art) they present a system of causality, with one node leading into others, and creating complex yet entirely legible networks of event production. Some of the drawings are ordered along timelines, relating individuals and institutions to linear time progressions, while others aspire to a more global consciousness, wrapping around spherically (like the diagram above) to produce a sense that no one individual or institution is the original cause but that all are responsible, and collectively part of the same community. Ultimately, I do not think that these diagrams are what Jameson meant by "Cognitive Mapping" but like theyrule.net, it ponders the consciousness of corporations and their actions which Tsing has argued aspire to the global.

A Final Question

I had the thought recently that our collective imagining, longing for, and fantasies of the universal - the Borg in Star Trek, or the Matrix, or even 1984 - are a modern phenomenon. I couldn't think of any imaginings of the global from before the modern epoch. But as I widened the scope of what I considered, I decided that the Christian and Islamic empires of the past centuries, and particularly the religious ideologies they created around an ideal world, the afterlife, and judgment day, may as well be Luddite versions of the Borg - a collection of unthinking, unindivduated, enthralled humanoids united by a single consciousness. This refutes my previous conceptions that the conflict between the global and the local, the universal and the specific, was a recent consequence of an increasingly inter-connected world. Does the desire and fear of the universal, the unresolvable tension between the global and the local, stem from something more existential, something inherent to the human condition? Or can it be traced to more modern developments, the perceived increasing "sameness" of the world, and the growing conception that we are all one species sharing a small planet?

angry asians

okay. so i am scrapping the bigger plan of discussing a whole asian american community thing cuz that's too much work. I'm still in the works on the proposal, it will either be one of the two topics, or a fusion or ..:

1. AngryAsianMan.com is a blog i've been visiting since i even knew what a blog was in grade school. (okay, maybe not that long, about the past 6-7 years). it is a blog where a guy named patrick -- , a usc graduate posts anything and everything that affects the 'asian american community' in america. Using this web site, I want to address, using Anderson's theories about community and Appadurai's theories on the global community, how ethnic communities get created and thrive online and in the mass media today. also, how do these ethnic communities in america get along with the global community of wired asians across the globe? i know this is broad but i will cover theory with examples all from angryasianman.com. you should check it out.

2. I actually found this on AAM.

Secret Asian Man is the first Asian American comic strip to appear on a major American newspaper (sorry I forget which again ^^;;). Anyway, here i want to use the fanfiction stuff we covered in class as well as anderson's theory of imagined communities and horizontal-ness about how we (asian americans) fantasize asians by creating the anti-stereotype of asians through a comic strip like this one.

i know this is just a blah from my brain right now but whaddaya think? any comments/suggestions/questions to narrow this down/give it form would be helpful.

final

visualization, images, and the imagination are three principles that structure Tsings Friction. I want to engage with these concepts as a way of entering Tsings argument, but also as an excuse to discuss other theories of visualization proposed by Jameson, Keenan nad Appadurai. Ill definately be focusing on mapping (its a good way to get at the notions of travel, locality, landscape that are also at play in Tsings text, along with the whole vision aspect) but im not so sure on which particular instances of mapping ill focus on. id appreciate it if anyone had any intriguing examples of mapping they might share with me ... all Ive got so far is a story from This American Life, and The Million Dollar Block Project run by the urban studies program at Columbia... the question ill be trying to focus on: how are we trained to see, and how can we understand maps as mechanisms that aid this process of visual mystification.

Paper Proposal

I’m interested in taking a closer look at media and its uses in contemporary conflicts. Thomas Keenan’s articles might be a good starting point for this. The U.S. military’s use of, and reaction to, popular media in Mogadishu, the lack of a timely U.S. response in Kosovo despite media (and new-media) attention, and Jasish Ansar al-Sunna’s use of new-media in Iraq present several different and sometimes contradictory effects of media.

Fredric Jameson’s model of the cognitive map might be useful analytical tool. This is not to say that any of the media above provide anything like a cognitive map, but it might be useful to investigate the place if different kinds of media in a larger scheme, and how the individual/subjective informs larger structures and vice versa. Along these lines, Anna Tsing’s concept of ‘friction’ might also be useful. Specifically, I’m interested in her ideas regarding the generation of a “universal”: the establishment of an “axiom of unity” that standardizes difference, and convergence of incompatible differences to create a universal of contingent collaboration. How do competing voices, such as Jasish Ansar al-Sunna, U.S. mainstream media, and the blogs of Iraqi and U.S. soldiers converge to form a universal picture? Do they create a universal at all, or are they an aggregate of subjective fragments?

There’s also plenty of material to examine that we haven’t looked at closely in class, such as the blogs of U.S. soldiers, the online forums that host material from Islamic militants, or youtube videos from conflict areas. (There are highly-local videos on youtube such as those made by British Ghurka brigades – units made up entirely of Nepalese nationals fighting for Britain, a left-over from the colonial era – showing grinning Ghukas on patrol and at leisure in Iraq, all set to central-Asian pop music.) Bearing Jameson and Tsing in mind, the questions are: how do these individual pieces of media work to inform a global (in Jameson’s sense) or universal (in Tsing’s sense) understanding? What influence does the global have on the individual, and how is the global visible in individual? I more concrete question would be to ask if these examples of new media have any influence on policy, and if so what and how?