anti-babel – sanjay sharma

The shambolic, illegal occupation of Iraq by Western powers has resulted in countless deaths (murder) of civilians.

The ‘war against terror’ is as much an info-war as it is one involving brutal death and destruction.

Enter Wikipedia into the affray. It’s an amazing resource. While controversy exists over the accuracy of its contents, a more interesting question is how it contests the authority of conventional (expert) knowledge. Moreover, what Wikipedia reveals is the politics of knowledge itself. A significant example is how the contents of a page about Iraqi “resistance” has been edited to “insurgency“.¹

If you are unfamiliar with the principles of a wiki, it enables readers to collectively edit a page, and the page’s edited history is stored. In the case of Wikipedia, if controversy arises, the page can be locked disabling any further edits.

Click the thumbnail image below to compare how the key terms over the entry about Iraq have been edited/altered. A case of rewriting how we are meant to grasp war and violence in Iraq?

Notes
Originally posted on the darkmatter Journal
¹For the latest Wikipedia entry now entitled ‘Iraq and Insurgency’, click here. (And has the article reverted back to include the term ‘resistance’?)

There are many ‘web2.0′ video sharing/hosting sites these days, though YouTube (YT) reigns supreme. Now owned by Google, YT is becoming the search site for video.

However, if you’re intending to upload your own video, there are some serious restrictions when using YT. Not only is there a limit to the length of material, but YT’s Terms & Conditions (see especially point 6) leave a lot to be desired.

A comparison between different video sharing sites indicates that YT doesn’t allow Creative Commons licensing and has way-too-liberal rights to reuse your content. (Though according to this post it’s possible to use creative commons with YouTube, though this hasn’t been made public?) More specifically, as argued in a boing boing article – which has now been deleted?¹ – by Xeni Jardin, the intentions of how YT may use uploaded content is questionable.

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Should we care about privacy? Much privacy talk can come across as anachronistic bourgeois individualism, seemingly getting in the way of what social networking is all about: the flow of information - sharing and multiplying social connections between users.

So when a recent report by Sophos security highlighted that facebook’s privacy practices remain suspect, both in terms of its default settings and common member behaviour, will it affect the average fb member?

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Book review of: Ellis Cashmore (ed), Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, London: Routledge, 2004

What are encyclopaedias good for?

In an age of information over-load, the implosion of meanings and forever sliding signifiers, has the imperious authority of such texts been undermined? Or conversely, precisely because of our amnesiac contemporary culture caught in a perpetual presentism – particularly in relation to failing to grasp the contortions of ‘race’ – is the role of such an encyclopaedia needed more than ever?

Cashmore’s legitimacy and scope of his expanded text is made explicitly clear in the introduction: the 4th Edition has now matured from a dictionary to a full-blown encyclopaedic status. The sheer size of the volume is impressive, and with a list over eighty international contributors, he has laudably edited an array of substantial entries which extend the boundaries of ‘race’ work towards an interdisciplinary agenda. Entries such as ‘Mike Tyson’, ‘Central Park Jogger’ and ‘Consumption’ are unlikely to appear in conventionally narrow sociological dictionaries of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Read the rest of this entry »

Some notes based on a talk I gave at the Bhangra Symposium, School of African and Oriental Studies, 15 Sept 2007:

I’m interested in how we can tell the story of Bhangra. The majority of accounts about South Asian life in Britain have been invariably reductive: either an immigrant story of doing ’shit work’/racism or a predictable tale of community/exotic celebration

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art and police — http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1007

“The relationship between art practices and the state apparatuses of the police and judiciary has always been a tense one. In the criminalization of activist artists of the Critical Art Ensemble and the PublixTheatreCaravan, in the growing number of cases of the censorship and legal prosecution of artists and curators in the post-communist region, or in the application of terrorism paragraphs to critical scholarship as in the recent case of the Berlin sociologist Andrej Holm, there are more and more indications of an exacerbation of this relationship. Instead of seeing this new quality purely as a means of social subjugation, this issue of transversal seeks to grasp these phenomena in an expanded concept of policing (especially in a confrontation with the relevant theorems of Foucault and Rancière).”

Text from the translate mailing-list http://www.eipcp.net