about global village
Fragments from the book NO LOGO of Naomi Klein - just started to read from it today - it's quite big and full of english words i don't completely understand, but here we go:
"Usually reports about this global web of logos and products are couched in the euphoric marketing rethoric of the global village, an incredible place where tribespeople in remotest rain forests tap away on laptop computers, Sicilian grandmothers conduct E-bussiness, and "global teens" share, to borrow a phrase from a Levi's Web site, a " world-wide style culture".
Everyone from Coke to McDonalds's to Motorola has tailored their marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM's long-running "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign that most eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe.
It hasn't taken long for the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalisation to wear thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high-gloss facade. More and more over the past four years, we in the West have been catching glimpses of another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing.
This is the village where some multinationals, far from leveling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet's poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the village where Bill Gates lives, amassing a fortune of 55$ billion while a third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, and where competitors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made obsolate by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one i visited outside Jakarta.
IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labor producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines.
On the outskirts of Manilla, for instance, i met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD_ROM drives for IMB. I told her i was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers", she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers". Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all."
Naomi Klein, NO LOGO, (Harper Perennial, London, New York, Toronto and Sydney )
"Usually reports about this global web of logos and products are couched in the euphoric marketing rethoric of the global village, an incredible place where tribespeople in remotest rain forests tap away on laptop computers, Sicilian grandmothers conduct E-bussiness, and "global teens" share, to borrow a phrase from a Levi's Web site, a " world-wide style culture".
Everyone from Coke to McDonalds's to Motorola has tailored their marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM's long-running "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign that most eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe.
It hasn't taken long for the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalisation to wear thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high-gloss facade. More and more over the past four years, we in the West have been catching glimpses of another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing.
This is the village where some multinationals, far from leveling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet's poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the village where Bill Gates lives, amassing a fortune of 55$ billion while a third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, and where competitors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made obsolate by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one i visited outside Jakarta.
IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labor producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines.
On the outskirts of Manilla, for instance, i met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD_ROM drives for IMB. I told her i was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers", she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers". Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all."
Naomi Klein, NO LOGO, (Harper Perennial, London, New York, Toronto and Sydney )
posted by arancia at 7:02 AM
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