Development, sustainability- mutually compatible?

Collier: Bottom Billion
I feel like the Collier reading gave some me perspective on the other side of the trade coin (I have been exposed to mostly literature against "liberal" free market trade agreements/policies with developing nations, but maybe that's just my own bias towards what I want to read and not necessarily what I should read, namely, texts that explore multiple dimensions of international trade.) After I read the sections we were assigned, I have to admit that I did feel like a bit of a false expert in International and Public Affairs and Development. I wonder if all literature in I.P.A and that kind of writing is as "bullet-point" as Collier makes it to be: he creates a catchy term, the "bottom billion", and classifies the problems of developing countries into four common-sensical traps, like conflict or being resource-rich. It was refreshingly direct in its prescriptions, shall I say.

Collier gets down and dirty by advocating external control- essentially occupation- of rogue states. Do I agree with this? Some countries, like Somalia, or Sudan, are completely out of control and have been in civil warfare for decades. Should there be more multilateral effort to control places like this? Collier rightly points out that his position might be interpreted as a neocolonial one. The word "security" is such a damned word at this point, especially in light of the idea of a secure Iraq or other countries with semi-functioning governments that were later intentionally destabilized. Iraq was secure in some sense, before the war. The countries at the bottom billion are not- they seem to be zones where there is little to hope for when people are threatened left and right by robbers and by paramilitary organizations with no interest in a stable government.

Appadurai: Fear of Small Numbers
I liked how Appadurai constructed his argument with the idea of minority, in the context of representative democracy, with its positive political intonations, and the idea of a "substantive minority" as a group that could be politically destabilized or marginalized because of their small, vulnerable status as citizens or residents that might have some kind of sub-citizen or lower social status.

The targeted killings of distinct populations is something I never considered as a mass, that is, cross-country or cross-cultural, phenomenon. Appadurai puts these killings into a framework that is global, a phenomenon of large-scale minority elimination. Although there's something tricky about generalizing these murders and crimes across the contexts of various countries, perhaps Appadurai is right in stating that there are certain tactics targeting minorities (use of media, for example, as in the Iraqi beheadings) that are cross-cultural and globally penetrating. He argues that these tactics have been appropriated to create a fear of the minority, a fear of political instability in a world that is unstable in too many ways to enumerate.

Minority takes on a larger meaning in our world, as Appadurai mentions, when we consider the migrations of various ethnic populations now far-flung on the globe. In comparison to several hundred years ago or thousands of years ago, populations still migrated, but the total global population was much much smaller. Minorities have increased in number over the centuries and millenia- both in terms of how many different minorities have been created (as artificial political entities, in the opinion of Appadurai), and also in terms of quantity, if we examined a single "minority" population.

Global Population Stats from World Bank via Google

The stove article in the New Yorker:
I had to look up a photo of the stove, as I often do when reading descriptive texts about objects or appliances that I know nothing about. The project to create an inexpensive, useful and safe stove is indeed an important one that should be financially supported and publicized more, at least in mainstream media.The Buckminster Fuller Institute is one example of an organization that disburses financial awards to projects that are designed with sustainable processes and/or materials, and have potential global impact. Other projects that are inspiring to me in this way are ones where researchers are developing building materials that fit the needs of a particular climate or region, with sustainable, locally produced and/or easily transportable materials.

Finally, a word on the word "sustainable development" - are these terms mutually compatible? We hear sustainable development" being used all the time, and across these various readings and lectures the word "development" was used a lot, as was "sustainable", but not together. Is the project to engineer and distribute a better stove for countries that need them an example of sustainable development? I would say so.

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part I

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."
-St. Augustine

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor… While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
-Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google

From the early days of the printing press to our present day experiences with electronic media and Internet publishing, ideas of space and time are directly related to the way they have been expressed, preserved and circulated through physically reproducible artifacts, like printed books, as well as more recent "immaterial", electronic forms. In this essay, I would like to address some ideas relating to the spatial and temporal consequences of two communications technologies, namely, the printed book as it might have been circulated and received after the introduction of the first printing press; and the popular and educational adoption of the electronic web log, or "blog" in the latter half of twentieth-century. Writings by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Benedict Anderson offer two different perspectives on book reading, writing, and reception, while Manfred Steger’s definition of globalization and my own personal experience of maintaining a blog inform how I consider the latter type of media.

Before discussing the texts, however, I would like to define “technology” as a concept that is not limited to definitions of "hardware" or "equipment", or any kind of "material" construction devoid of human interaction; nor is technological development or understood as a linear process of scientific research, technical innovation and public adoption. Rather, I adopt Pinch & Bijker's idea of the social construction of technology, and their description of a sociology of technology as the "explanandum, not the explanans" for "the success of an artifact" (406), as a way of thinking about the book and the blog. Technology should be considered from an understanding of "a body of knowledge and a social system" and embedded in multiple historical processes and discourses (Layton 210). Lastly, in the spirit of Eisenstein’s conjectures, I would like to put forth some conjectures of mine regarding blogging as a social practice, and “doing history” with the blog as an intellectual one.

Benedict Anderson and Elizabeth Eisenstein present interpretations on the consequences of the printed book with somewhat overlapping historical and geographic foci. Eisenstein concerns much of her study with differentiation and divergence across the Western European populations who read, authored, published, governed or oversaw the process of print and distribution. As a historian, she attempts to overturn prior historical tendencies of generalizing the standardization and accessibility of print shortly after the invention of the printing press. Using innumerable and often contradictory examples, Eisenstein argues that the effects of print media did not necessarily impact the general population of Europe on an even, measurable scale. Many of the events and perceptual shifts she describes happened as “a large cluster of relatively simultaneous, interrelated changes” (2). In her research, she postulates that printed media led to the development of regional networks of printers and their various clients, and to diverse populations of the literate and casual book-reader throughout Europe (Eisenstein 5). Typographical fixity, image reproduction and the cross-cultural exchange of ideas and information allowed for scientific maps and texts to be distributed, cross-referenced, and standardized in format or content; at the same time, new hybrids of texts from old and new books came into existence (Eisenstein 8). New kinds of workers, such as compositors, were needed to meet the demand for printed works, and new categories of readers and writers, such as the writer-aristocrat, were also becoming apparent in the “age of incunabala”. Many of the groups of people involved in the creation and dissemination of texts, such as printers, scholars and priests, experienced dimensions and consequences of print media that were not applicable to book-reading populations. Literature intended for very specific audiences, such as texts on childrearing and etiquette, law, and esoteric religion and philosophy, was produced at much higher quantity than before (Eisenstein 40).

In comparison to Eisenstein’s examination of the variances, subgroups and networks of readers, writers, publishers, and other populations involved in the supply and demand of printed texts, Anderson offers up a novel interpretation of the printed book and the beginnings of print capitalism as agents of burgeoning national consciousness. The narrative world of books and what he calls “print-language” is presented as a linguistic innovation and a psychological paradigm for populations to imagine themselves as part of the emerging community of the nation. As Anderson states, “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed in their secular, particular invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community” (44). Print-language preserved in a portable, visual and somewhat unchanging form, and distribution of books to a reading public (however segmented in occupation or socioeconomic strata), created fields of commonality and shared identity. New forms of narrative shifted temporal perception from ideas of omniscience and “simultaneity-along-time” in the medieval period to “empty, homogeneous time…measured by clock and calendar” (Anderson 24).

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part II

To read the first part of this essay see the previous entry entitled Part I

Another formulation relating space, time and communications technologies might be: how have the printed book or the electronic blog changed our notion of travel and accessibility to other cultures and ideas? In my blog for class, I write about how electronic communications technologies allow for an increased awareness of both location and dislocation because of their capacity for increased connectivity to physically distant and unknown people:
Our subjectivities and ideas of relating to one another have grown paradoxically larger and smaller. We may know more about our online friend in Southeast Asia who we have never met than we do our local politicians or neighbors. Or else we might conceive of global community as something exclusive to a certain group of people (by this I mean the Muslim concept of “umma” in the Steger reading. Or we might never leave Manhattan but spend all day trading stocks on the international market via the Internet.

Before making any generalizations about electronic media, however, it is important to emphasize that much of the world’s population who do not have access to computers, let alone the Internet and browser capability. Additionally, many people are still illiterate and cannot make use of these new forms of communication that still require reading and writing skills. Any study of the consequences of blogging and the socio-historical aspects of interactive communications technologies should bear these contexts in mind.

The awareness, perception, or mentalité, depending on which historical or phenomenological framework I am choose to use, relates to temporality, the Internet, World Wide Web and acceleration of information and material transactions: we can access real-time information on weather, news, blog entries and commentary all over the world. The convergence of communications platforms such as mobile phones, GPS satellite data, databases and networked computers allow for synchronous communication with people next to us or in remote areas, akin to Anderson’s imagined community of the nation, that we will probably never meet. The nation, however, is not the entity that is used to describe the space of these events – instead the metaphors we see and hear are ones associated with the “world” or global entities, such as the “World Wide Web” or to use an earlier term that we have encountered in class, Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” in the electronic age. Some of the geospatial visualizations and technologies available to us as business or educational tools, or voyeuristic opportunities, are both local (Google Street Maps/View) and global (Google Earth/remote sensing satellite images).


Using a combination of technologies such as the Web, the personal computer, mobile phone, and blogging platforms, we can read, write, and edit while moving from one place to another, and see feedback from our posts, if our blogs are popular, and respond within moments. We are able to communicate with these technologies in a way that decontextualizes our physical location, if we choose to remain anonymous. Alternately, we reveal our location and ideas, intentionally or unintentionally, to people using local idioms and references. When we publish our blogs, we anticipate our main audience to be speakers of our language; however, how are we to know that our readership is not limited to our friends and family or our local networks? We may not know this unless we choose to publicize our blogs (or have others do so to our knowledge or ignorance), tag entries appropriately, and track the demographics of our readership. One can argue convincingly that the exchange global goods, services and ideas is more readily available to people with portable purchasing, publishing, authoring and searching technologies than to prior readers and writers of the printed book or newspaper. Manfred Steger describes the sense of compressed and elongated notions of space and time that has characterized periods of world history in his definition of globalization:

“a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality...movement towards greater interdependence and integration..an uneven process...with four qualities or characteristics:
1) the creation of new, and the multiplication of existing social networks and activities that cut across traditional political, economic, cultural and geographical boundaries
2) the expansion and the stretching of social relations, activities and interdependencies
3) the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges & and activities
4) globalization processes do not occur merely on an objective, material level but also involve the subjective plane of human consciousness.”

Part of me wants to avert generalizing the experience of using high-speed communications technology, since there are so many issues of financial and geographical resources and timing that make communication possible on the networks that we use; however, the experience of using these technologies and learning from them is real for many of us at Teachers College, as evidenced by the computer-based demands of this particular class and the kinds of feedback and exploration afforded by our course wiki and individual blogs. Blogging, like book-writing and reading, is becoming a normalized practice in the everyday life of people who have access to these technologies and use them for information, entertainment, education, or therapy. Recent statistics from a Pew Research Center survey report that 33% of Internet users read weblogs and over 12% of Internet users maintain a blog (Smith, “New numbers for blogging and blog readership”). Maintaining a blog or wiki to elaborate one’s ideas with colleagues, students, or members of the public has become, in many parts of the country, an important part of collaborative academic work and to some extent, normalized in our day-to-day life.