Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 19:49:10 +0100
Subject: Re: death and the mobile phone


Eric

Been in Dallas again ---- not a dissimilar experience to the first
paragraph... It always strikes me when I'm in the USA that the greatest
multi-cultural task that a post-modern European has is the multi-cultural
relations that we have to establish and understand between the citizin of
the USA and ourselves. It is easier to deal with inhabitants from any third
world, second or European state than it is with the US subject. Strange and
alarming by turns, and yet we appear to know so much about the US dominant
culture....  Curious. The self and other relations are to similar and yet
to strange, the unreadable  facial structures and expressions... and so on

sdv



Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:

> steve:
>
> I remember a piece of antropological folklore which has it that in some
> tribal societies, if a person commits a great crime, he or she is not
> tortured, imprisoned or physically exiled.  The person simply no longer
> exists for the tribe. They are no longer spoken to, their name is no
> longer mentioned. They are ignored as if they were no longer present.
> They walk alone amid the others as an invisible living ghost.
>
> Needless to say, such a penalty becomes a veritable death sentence.
>
> If we are retribalizing today through communication technologies into a
> kind of global village, then the loss of a cell phone or laptop with
> modem becomes the loss of an umbilical chord.  The loss of a connection
> becomes a loss of the soul.
>
> Are we becoming ghosts in a planetary machine?
>
> Does anything really exist until it appears on television?