Will Some Cultures Leapfrog the Industrial Age?

I was just taking a walk and listening to an NPR podcast about an Afghan version of American Idol that recently finished its first hugely popular and wildly controversial fist season on what I assume is the bravest television network in Afghanistan.

The emergence and popularity of this show in a country often portrayed as America’s polar opposite says a lot about how we are all more alike than different.  However, that’s not the point of this post.

During an interview with one of the Afghan show’s creators, it was mentioned that the SMS voting in final rounds was so intense that it literally overloaded the network and temporarily shut it down.  The creator said he wasn’t surprised since this was the first time Afghan audiences had had the opportunity to participate in a show in this manner and that many were not familiar with sending text messages.

Well, no shit! As far as I understand it, Afghanistan is still largely an agrarian society.  While some of the innovations of the industrial age are present, this is not a part of the world that ever made the true transition that we saw in the United States and Europe.  This means that Afghanistan, along with numerous other cultures from places like China, India and throughout Africa, will be simply skipping the Industrial Age altogether as the Digital Age takes shape.

We are already seeing amazing examples of how the Digital Age is able to be adopted by each culture in unique ways that tend to support and expand on existing societal foundations.  Think of how rural farmers are now able to use cell phones to check on the price of produce at markets a two-days walk away, allowing him to cart the proper amounts of the most valuable items.

While the Industrial Age certainly created sweeping changes in the Western world, it is going to be fascinating to see what happens to those cultures that simply skip it altogether.

India Tries to Patent Downward Dog and Warrior Two

Image via Wikipedia

Looking for signs that the entire notion of copyright has simply gone too far?  You’ve come to the right place:

If you’re one of the millions of people practicing yoga for mental and physical health, you may soon run into legal trouble: a lot of the traditional poses are being patented and trademarked by Western yoga teachers.

So, India is fighting back: it has set up a team of yoga gurus and scientists to identify and patent all ancient yoga positions or asanas to stop “patent pirates.” (via)

Think about this for a moment.  People are fighting over the right to “own” the positions in which you might choose to hold your body.  It is difficult to imagine how anyone might actually enforce this kind of copyright and the idea that Indian officials would want to suddenly put legal limits on the spread of their own ancient form of physical expression is equally baffling.

As to how/why Western Yoga teachers are able to claim some sort of copyright, you’ve got me.  I’d love to hear the legal arguments that have allowed this to happen.

What’s next?  Baseball players patenting their swings?  New York City Ballet patenting a pirouette?  Celine Dion owning the rights to a high-C?

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Mumbai Madness Captured By Digital Citizens While CNN Was Blocked

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Like many others, my Thanksgiving joys were tempered by the madness in Mumbai.  While the major news organizations struggled to get information out to the public it was the public themselves who were telling the world just what was going on.

Services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and even good old fashioned email, combined with the massive proliferation of “smart” phones capable of capturing photo and video and transmitting it nearly instantaneouasly meant that the flow of information out of Mumbai was simply not going to be limited to what CNN was able to access.

In fact, if it weren’t for the rise of what is being refered to as “citizen journalism” who knows what the world might have missed:

“At the end of the day on Friday, CNN’s license to transmit live video in India expired, forcing the network’s correspondents to report via telephone. CNN and other channels in the United States relied on live coverage and taped reports from Indian networks.

The cameras and phones carried by people swept up in the attacks were not subject to any such rules. Mr. Shanbhag photographed one of the fires at the Taj hotel and the wreckage outside a popular cafe that was attacked on Wednesday and posted them on his Flickr stream. Some people transmitted video from inside the Taj hotel to news networks via cellphones. And reporters used cellphones to send text messages to hotel guests who had set up barricades in their rooms.” (via)

While governments spend more time and money than ever trying to monitor their citizens it is at least a bit comforting to know that some citizens are doing some monitoring of their own.

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