Transparency, Social Media and Cultural Patterns

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Essential book parts February 20th, 2012

This was the second time I read the metamorphosis but I still don’t like it. The story is in the sphere of magic realism where a traveling salesman gets turned into a giant cockroach and his family is forced to take care of him. Apart from this first metamorphosis nothing really happens, it’s a realistic description of how life would be like without thoughts on why this happened. One explanation might be that Gregor was living like a cockroach before, anti-social and just working his life away.

Gregor lives through the goals of others and doesn’t have any life plans himself. Taking care of the family this way makes them inactive and lazy. Once the metamorphosis takes place it forces the rest of the family to get active again. The sister and father take up work whilst the mother works from home.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the apartment layout. This is the closest I got.

Summary Through Essential Quotes: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Essential book parts February 17th, 2012

Oscar Wilde was a fascinating man. He was called “the first counter-culture celebrity” by some and was essential at parties with his epigrams. It seems as if he wrote for fame and to make money as he once confessed that “writing bored him”. Because of the type of person Wilde was it is hard to tell what was merely a facade and what was true. This is in many parts repeated in his book “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

picture of dorian gray

What I love about the book is not the content or ideas. The part that makes the book good, in my opinion, is the beautiful language. No better way of displaying this by showing some parts of the book for you. In this text I will summarize my impressions of the book by some favorite quotations from it followed by a summary of each chapter.

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins” (p.7)

“I have Grown to love secrecy [...] The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it” (p.8)

“The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul” (p.10)

“Lord Henry [...] plucked a pink-petaled daisy from the grass and examined it. ‘I am quite sure I shall understand it’” (p.10)

“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects” (p.13)

“He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there” (p.16) [Basil talking about Dorian]

“An artist should create beautiful things, but put nothing of his own life into them” (p.16)

“I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat” (p.17)

“The worst of having a romance [...] is that it leaves one so unromantic” (p.18)

“We are punished for our refusals [...] The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” (p.25)

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die” (p.34)

“Punctuality is the thief of time” (p.54)

“A ‘grande passion’ is the privilege of people who have nothing to do” (p.59)

“She did not listen. She was free in her prison of passion” (p.73)

“I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices” (p.87)

“The secret to remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming” (p.99)

“One should absorb the colour of life but one should never remember its details” (p.118)

“The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died” (p.120)

“If one doesn’t talk about a thing it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things” (p.126)

“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them” (p.126)

“It had been all that art should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote” (p.133)

“You forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite” (p.175)

“Felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life” (p.202)

“Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues” (p.225)

“I wish it were stopped forever [...] The whole thing is hideous and cruel” (p.233)

Ch. 1 – Basil & Lord Henry discuss art and Dorian Gray.
Ch. 2 – Harry transforms Dorian. Portrait is bewitched.
Ch. 3 – Harry finds out about Dorian Gray’s past. Big Dinner where Harry is the star.
Ch. 4 – Dorian Gray tells Harry about his new love: Sybil Vane.
Ch. 5 – Getting to know Sybil Vane, her brother and her mother.
Ch. 6 – Dorian tells about his engagement. Basil and Dorian have grown apart.
Ch. 7 – Sybil acts bad, Dorian breaks up with her. Portrait changes, a confused mind.
Ch. 8 – Decides to be good. Gets news about Sybil’s suicide, changes his mind.
Ch. 9 – Dorian callous and changed. Basil and Dorian discuss portrait. Dorian hides feelings.
Ch. 10 – Hides away the ugly parts of himself (portrait). Becomes more sinful (book).
Ch. 11 – Crazy monologue about how he sins and people change around him.
Ch. 12 – Basil confronts Dorian about his sins. Dorian shows his soul (portrait).
Ch. 13 – Revealing his soul to Basil makes Dorian kill him.
Ch. 14 – Entreats a friend, blackmails him to get rid of the body.
Ch. 15 – Goes to a boring party. Banter with Henry but sins eating him.
Ch. 16 – The lowest low. Describes his heroin trip. James almost kills Dorian.
Ch. 17 – Contrast with last chapter showing double-life. Visit at Duchess with many epigrams. Faints when seeing James.
Ch. 18 – A mess of emotions. Guilt feelings and scared of James. Man gets shot by accident on hunt.
Ch. 19 – Feeling bad about dead man, turns into joy when discovering it was James.
Ch. 20 – Realizes he can never change, acts of goodness were only hypocritical. Stabs the portrait with a knife resulting in a suicide.

[pic: CC-BY-NC-SA, poetas]

Bridging the Digital Divide, Why One Laptop per Child Fails

Rethink Your Concepts February 15th, 2012

Of the world population (6,840,507,000 persons in 2010) only about 2 billion have access to computers. This means that almost 5 billion people are technologically excluded = less informed, less inspired, less responsible. The digital divide in the world is becoming a huge problem, or I guess we should call it a “digital abyss” since 70% of the people are outside it.

Internet is not a luxury, it should be a right!

So how can we solve this divide? 1 Laptop Per Child (1LPC) tries to do this by transferring costs to the developed world to help out. Making cheap computers and finding supporters to help them donate these laptops. The problem with this is that to succeed there is still an insane amount of money required. Of the 5 billion digitally excluded approximately 30% are aged 10-24 so even by giving laptops to only children it would still require 145 trillion dollars(!) which is an extreme amount.

Another option to solving it could be utilizing an approach like the project by ‘The Fundacion Proacceso’ organization. Their project aims to give people access to computers by diluting the cost per computer and user. Instead of the 1:1 approach of 1LPC they manage to reach about 100 persons per computer that they have in their centers. Using a technique they call “urban acupuncture” to first map the geographic flow of people in a city and then use a “small needle” to change the city body.

To achieve this change there are 5 steps:

1. Infrastructure. Create welcoming, open spaces through modular construction with recycled material.
2. Connect. Not only with Internet but more importantly with human aid with exchanging information.
3. Content. Create digital citizens in 72hrs through learning them step-by-step. Computers first, then Internet and lastly Office software.
4. Training. Not only users but also the facilitators to be able to break digital barriers.
5. Benefit. Create a virtuous circle. i) Content -> ii) Training -> iii) Analyze user patterns -> iv) Improve content -> i) [repeat circle]

Technology won’t save the world but WE can with the help of technology. Human Energy can save the world!

Poetry of the Late 19th Century: Whitman and Rimbaud

Essential book parts January 29th, 2012

The 19th century was the top for poets within the Romanticism movement but it was also a time for profound change. Poetry moved to a more vaguely defined form containing more free verse and prose. At the end of the 19th Century the Symbolists emerged and stretched poetry outside the physical realm in search for new sensations.

good and evil in poetry 19th century

Whitman
Romanticism was much about beautifying nature which can be seen in Walt Whitman‘s work but he was also very influenced by Scientific Realism. Walt Whitman kept writing and re-writing his masterpiece, titled Song of Myself, throughout his life. Whitman sees himself as a Seer, he was religious and equalized all living things (even the mundane was important). With a provocative rebellious attitude (for those times) he stretched concepts on what was considered poetry and inspired many.

Whitman is too religious for my liking. He also maintains a slightly condescending tone and at sections he “hammers in his points” through excessive use of catalogs which I feel dumbifies his readers. He also doesn’t like taking sides but prefers always listing dichotomies to stay in the “grey zone”. I don’t like the overall tone in the poem where he acts as the wise man teaching “his children” a lesson of life. Some of the quotes I like:

“I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”

“The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them”

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

Rimbaud
The Symbolists worked with stretching reality into mental creations. Creating an ordered chaos to find beauty in evil. They take every sense into the extreme, making it very personal and close. Rimbaud was a very young poet who wrote all his work before he turned 20. He lived a very extreme life with plenty of drugs, sin, homosexuality and alcohol to reach the unknown. “The poet makes himself into a visionary by long derangement of all the senses”. In his poetry titled “A season in hell” he has a dyptic part between the sections named Delirium I and Delirium II. In the first delirium he mocks his own relationship through the voice of his lover where he compares himself to a devil. The second part is also a confession but this time mocking himself as a poet. The text utilizes a lot of parody, he is innocent but guilty. Rimbaud also stretches the imagination, how can Hell have seasons?

This poetry is more my style because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Utilizing a lot of black humor and seeing beauty even in evil which I like. Rimbaud also makes use of many strong contrasts next to each other like when he lists church latin, eroticism, grandmother novels and fairy tales after each other. Mixing and merging objects and ideas by creating beautiful poetry. I really like some of the small images he manages to create with just a few words e.g. “the slumber of virginity” and “I had been damned by the rainbow”. Not much more than this is needed. To me good poetry should take a while to understand fully which symbolism poetry definitely does.

“Beneath the bush a wolf will howl
Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl:
Like him, I also devour”

“I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.”

Edit: Several different versions are used by people reading this poem. Makes us see how drastically a text can change meaning depending on the form of it. Different translations means only that translators saw the meaning of the text very differently which is then multiplied with us reading their different translations deriving even more separate meanings from the words.

[pic: CC-BY-NC-ND, Thorsten Becker]

Josef Ohlsson Collentine

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Summary Through Essential Quotes: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Bridging the Digital Divide, Why One Laptop per Child Fails

Poetry of the Late 19th Century: Whitman and Rimbaud

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