Watch out for Cultural and Social Swine-flu!

Cultural and Social Epidemics

Did you know that there are social and cultural epidemics that spread in the same way as many biological and chemical diseases do? This is the overarching thesis behind the book "Connected", now making a worldwide buzz due to its groundbreaking approach on "networking".

According to the authors, the only way we can understand how certain attitudes or idea spread out is through the connections between people (Think  "The Tipping Point"). The structure of networks also helps us determine how it is that people interact, allowing for a deeper understanding of our surroundings and ourselves.

In networks with a high degree of transitivity (interconnections), innovation and creativity are barely ever present. The positive side is that in these groups there is a strong sense of identity and a strong support system: close circle of friends, family, tight-knight community, etc.

HOWEVER, due to the high level of connectivity within them, in these groups, gossip ends up spreading like a wild fire. If someone gets a social, biological or cultural disease he can spread it to the whole network in a matter of seconds. In Mexico we have a phrase to describe these types of situations:  "Small town, big hell". It’s the type of situation where everyone behaves the same, and sticks their nose in everyone else’s business.

Networks with a low degree of transitivity are characterized by the interaction of different social groups. If you happen to be a member of many social groups that are not connected to each other, you can be catalyst for creative change and innovation .In other words, you are a connector, and this allows you to have the human (social) capital that will enable you to create new projects and innovate in different arenas.

The downside of being a part of open networks is that  a bad idea, or a virus, can hardly be contained. Whereas in the close-knighted network members infected by the disease can spread the disease to members of the same network, in an open network you are constantly spreading the disease to new networks. Thus infecting everyone around.

We’re all living in the boom of what is called the "networking" generation (by me : ) ). Thus, having a clear idea of who you’re friends are and what type of network you belong to can help you understand what is your role in society at large.

Are you a connector or a gossiper? Do you help bring new ideas to close knight circles or do you retain those ideas to create support for future community development?

These are important questions to ask, especially in an age and time when information is epidemic and age-old traditions are opening up to the world at large, all of these being the results of hyper connectivity.

ps. If you want to find out more about the connections within your facebook network and what the structure of the connection actually says about you I strongly suggest using the "Friend Wheel" application. 

 

Bob Dylan answers interviews

Watching Martin Scorcese´s documentary film on Bob Dylan called "No Direction Home" has got me thinking about the way the media and press industry can de-humanize a person by turning him into an idol.

Dylan was aware of this, and in these series of interviews he masters the art of rhetoric by turning the reporters´ questions against themselves.
Enjoy.

ps. Bob Dylan´s real name was Robert Zimmerman.

Chick, as in Starbucks Chick...Posh, as in McDonalds Posh

                            

Before I even start this blog post I will assume that, even if most serious colleges have courses that reflect upon the problems of globalization, most of us have never stopped to actually analyze on how interaction between individual elements of different cultures (aka. value-systems) actually affect our everyday lives. In this post I will talk of how a very popular facet of every day American culture, fast food franchises, are received by Mexicans, particularly in big cities such as Mexico City.

Mexican culture devours American elements only to reframe them and insert them back into the mainstream culture completely changed. It idolizes them, completely robbing them of their original value and reinserting them within a completely different frame of mind. 

When the first McDonald’s arrived in Mexico City, about 20 years ago, it was a major event. Even now, two decades and hundredths of McDonald’s later, people in the city continue to talk about the inauguration as one of the great developments of the last decades: "Months would pass and there’d still be lines and lines of people outside, in the street. The lines would stretch for kilometers, blocks and blocks without end. People would spend the whole Saturday in line with their whole family. It was a full-day plan to get a Mcburger".

 First Mcdonalds in ex-USSR. 

You get the idea. 

This first McDonalds has by now turned into on the biggest one of the Spanish speaking side of the American continent. What could this mean? Surely the relationship of Mexicans with McDonalds is just a special instance of a particular form of extreme anglophilia. Surely there’s something particular about McDonald’s relationship to the Mexicans that doesn’t apply to all relationships of Mexicans with American Culture.  Sadly, this is not the case. 

In Mexico, American standards are among the only standards to determine whether something is classy or not. The standards for "good taste" have always come from the outside: Americans in Mexico are always "chick", Mexicans are not, American culture is the ultimate definition of "posh", Mexican culture is seen as low-class.

Mexicans have a special word that makes an explicit reference to the attitude by which one praises outside culture over one’s own. The fact that this word exists only in Mexico (and not in other Spanish speaking countries) is not a mishap; as Noble Price winner Octavio Paz mentioned in  "The Labyrinth of Solitude", the word "malinchismo" makes an explicit reference to the first local Indian woman in Mexican history to have sexual intercourse with the Europeans.   The Malinche was the first one to establish deep emotional relationships with the outsider, thus opening the way for a colonization that would constantly look down to any type of feeling of mexican-ness. 

The effects of this 300 year long intercourse,  the mestizaje, can still be felt in our ever day lives, here in post-colonial globalized Mexican society, it’s subject to discussion all the time. Now days, Modern day malinchismo is focused on a different outsider: The United States. 

Consider the following instances. Starbucks, once a shitty cafeteria where the working class could grab a quick coffee on their way to work, is known in Mexico for being a place to socialize and meet with the elite and the middle high-class. Krispy Kreme donughts, once considered a sort of middle class treat, are located in the trendiest of places here in Mexico: the doughnuts are very expensive, they considered as "gourmet food”. 

However, the most recent and extreme example of this cultural (mis) appropriation is the example of IHOP. Considered once as the "pit stop" of trailer and bus drivers of southern USA, one of the firsts IHOP to make it to the Mexican ground is currently located in the most luxurious corporate area of the entire city. This place is now the meeting place for Mexican CEOs and the like; it is actually considered a proper restaurant (the maple syrup comes in glass jars, the pancakes costs fortunes and are made with high quality dough, so they said). 

 Mmmm... Gourmet Food. 

If Mexican culture could influence American culture in the same top-down manner as American culture influences Mexico, the results would be so absurd that we could barely conceive them. Imagine a society in which tacos are seen as top of the notch gourmet food! Or a 5th avenue taco-restaurant with a queue of NY CEOS dying to get a high-class quesadilla!

Of course, the fact of the matter is that economic relations permeate cultural ones, and it’s hard to decide who influences who and it one ways. The fun thin is that these things happen all the time in our globalized world: if we see these expressions from the outside, we have no other choice than to sit down and laugh. 

"Oy va voy!": thai workers in Israel

It was the end of the Shabatt evening here in Tel Aviv and the main bus station was slowly but surely resuming it´s daily routes and schedules. Every single store  and alley of the massive 7-story bus complex was completely packed with people eager for the service to start once again nationwide.

Only 10% of the people in the building where actually israeli, the other 90% where definitely not.

Japanese performance in the streets of Tel Aviv

Not even the most tenacious of the founding fathers or the biggest ideologers of the State of Israel could´ve predicted that a migration of non-jewish immigrants would become a day-to-day concern for  the modern jewish state. Now, this problem is a fact.

Throughout it´s short history, Israel has  had to  cope with massive immigrations of jews from Europe, Asia, Arab countries and other places in the world. As a matter of fact, the whole idea behind zionism was that jews would seize to be persecuted if they became members of  a country where they would be accepted as citizens.  What the zionist didn´t envision was the problems that would come afterwards, when a prosperous jewish economy  in a zionist state would be an actual fact.

Now a days, a new wave of non-jewish immigrants looking for job opportunities and a better quality of life has sparked deep tensions within the society. It effects are yet to make their way into history at large.  

I took the communal cab to Herziliya, a city that´s known as the  hub for israeli start ups. The city´s center, and beach-front community, is known also throughout Israel as the home for multimillionaires that have thrived on Israel´s technology innitiatives and social ventures.

Fountain in Herzilya

Let me just say  that the people I was sharing the cab with were far from being this well-known high class business owners, or a technologically "savvy" employee; they where neither computer geeks  or CEO´s .
As far as I could tell, their work seemed to be a bit different: they where janitors, cleaning ladies, and the like.


Israeli comedian dealing with the immigration issue

A friend of mine, studying in IDC Herzliya, told me a few hours later that most of the thai immigrants work in Hertzselya are nurses for the elderly. They push these old veterans of war and talk to them when the rest of society has forgotten about their existence.

The funny thing about this whole situation with illegal immigrants is that jewish culture is actually influencing people from places that had barely been in touch with judaism at all. The video embeded in this clip is an satyrical example of how israelies and foreigners are trying to adapt to this new situation.

Sometimes these culture clashes end up being funny, other times they are completely absurd. In the cab ride to Hertzilya I heard thailanese women shouting in hebrew at the driver, telling him to stop. I heard another one screaming "Oy va voy!", a phrase that I hadn´t hear since The Fiddler on the Roof, a few years back. I thought I was in a Cohen´s brother´s picture, or in "Lost in Translation": turns out I was in modern day Israel, where you can curse in hebrew to locals and foreigners alike.

Tel Avivi

These are some pictures I took while taking a stroll through Tel Aviv.

 

"Every Kid´s Fantasy"

 

"Bunny making bubbles"

 

"Ethiopian making bubbles"

 

"Don´t Deport me!"

"Hassidic Graffiti"

"..next year in Jerusalem"

"Hope to see you next year in Jerusalem": This small but powerful phrase, said instinctively by religious Jews when saying farewell to each other whilst parting for yet another distant land, can be devoid of any actual meaning for secular Jews like me. Only now  I’ve begun to actually understand the deep meaning behind these words and the powerful binding aspect of them, wherever they are said. This is especially true when an actual face-to-face encounter takes place within the boundaries of this holy city.  

 A few months ago, I thought words such as "Eretz Israel" and "Jerusalem" were important in the context of religious Judaism only within the framework of a diasporic setting. From what I could tell, there seemed to be a spiritual connotation and symbolic power to the word "Jerusalem", but that was about it. For me, the word was always religious. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, it just wasn’t meant to be taken literally as a reference to a particular time and space. 

I used to think that, when used in a diasporic setting, the word "Jerusalem" did not have any connection to any geographical space. It was more of a binding term, a way to reinforce your identity as Jews when you met with others as a stranger in a strange land. Since Jews were scattered all over the world, they needed to feel connected to something distant and eerie but at the same time real and tangible in order to keep whatever identity they had left. Thus, "Jerusalem" became a binding term, a way of recognizing fellow Jews when traveling through strange places. And that’s it.

Now that I’ve been coming to Israel on a yearly basis, it has become increasingly clear to me that these words express a deeply rooted truth that’s not always recognized from the outside by secular people who have never set foot in this "holly place". This is only due to the fact that, in every single corner of its streets, this city shouts aloud it’s particular millennial history.

It’s now clear to me that Jerusalem’s role in world history has always been to be   a "meeting place", and that the wordss "next year in Jerusalem" can express the particular feeling one gets when traveling through here.

 In Jerusalem, one’s always a visitor.  Each and every empire in the world has tossed the city, and, in response to this kind of treatment, the city has opened its legs to let everyone in. This hard fact has infused Jerusalem with a sacred cosmopolitanism before Rome or New York even existed,  and this is a  characteristic that has actually paved Jerusalem’s personality and made it possible for it to be what it is to day.

I hope to see you  next year in the same place.