Παρασκευή 21 Οκτωβρίου 2016
Κυριακή 16 Οκτωβρίου 2016
Ο κόσμος μου - Το smartphone μου: Ένα ακόμη άγχος στην μεταμοντέρνα εποχή μας - “the anxiety of the disconnected”
Has this ever happened to you: you accidentally leave your cell phone at home, and it feels like your soul has stayed there with it? Your nerves crackle, you feel short of breath – in short, you panic. The specific reaction to a forgotten device depends on the individual, but in the end it’s basically separation anxiety: you find yourself far from something that’s really important to you.
In today’s technology-driven reality, we are seeing the emergence of this new symptom – what I call “anxiety of the disconnected”. It may sound trite, but the phenomenon is real enough to have been studied.
Teachers see it all the time. Just recently, at the Instituto Michoacano de Ciencias de la Educación, the teachers’ college where I work, one of my students started yelling, “S**t! S**t!”, surprising his peers with his profane outburst. “I forgot my …” He rifled through his backpack, taking out books, papers, emptying out everything. But to no avail: the smartphone wasn’t there. I could see the anxiety on his face, as if he’d lost a piece of himself.
So based on the psychoanalytical literature and philosophical truth, we know that the anxiety of the disconnected isn’t because one feels separated from humanity. No, the anxiety comes from the opposite direction: from feeling too close to humanity, too near to the other.
If the subject is disconnected, they have no choice but to face their spouse, their children, their father, whomever else. It is a hard thing to confront one another using words, to dialogue, make agreements, find peace.
That anxiety you feel when you realise you’ve left behind your smart phone? It isn’t about the object you forgot so much as what it represents: a social function that you must now perform in person.
No screen to sink into, like Narcissus drowning in his own image.
Δευτέρα 10 Οκτωβρίου 2016
Η γλώσσα χωρίζει ή ενώνει τους λαούς;
According to a series of newspapers, immigrants will apparently change the English language in Britain beyond repair over the next 50 years. TheDaily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express have all run alarming stories on this topic. Language will change “because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce” certain sounds, such “th” as in thin or this.
[...]
The answer lies in the way languages are understood, especially in the West. Consider the names of European languages such as English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, for example. Now consider the names of the countries where these languages are spoken: England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. And now consider, also, the names of the people living in those countries: the English, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish. All these names suggest that there is an obvious and entirely natural bond between specific languages, their speakers and the territories that they inhabit.
Old-school thinking
[...]
So, towards the end of the 19th century, at the height of European nationalism, histories of languages were created in order to demonstrate their primordial existence. For example, it was in the 1880s that language historians began to use the term “Old English” to refer to the assortment of languages used in Britain before the Norman Conquest. The obvious advantage of “Old English” over, say, “Anglo-Saxon” is that it clearly suggests that what is spoken now and what was spoken well over 1,000 years ago is fundamentally one and the same language.
The fear of multiculturalism
For this reason, as many in Europe are looking for a firmer re-establishment of national borders, language is once again being used instrumentally to mark boundaries between people. And this fits perfectly well with the anti-immigration agenda of some newspapers. Their A-B-C logic goes something like this:
a) The English language is the language of the English, and it has been so since time immemorial.b) Now, suddenly, it’s changing, and that can only be caused by non-English people (immigrants).c) Consequently, by living here and speaking English (badly), immigrants are changing not only our language but the very essence of our national identity.
[...]
This hard-headed association of language with national identity was at the core of an extreme version of nationalism that led Europe to two world wars. But we can turn this on its head: if we understand how fluid languages are by their very nature, if we appreciate the way they evolve and mix, we will also find it easier to live together and multiculturalism will no longer be so scary.
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