Date: 14 Jan 97 17:54:00 EST From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-CompuServe.COM> Subject: M-I: Ethnical bashing and 7-bit hegemony Joao Paulo Monteiro 13th Jan: ----------------------------- A funny thing these cultural tectonic plates. I believe I belong to the latin-germanic one. That=92s why I=92ll probably never dig much into analytical marxism and stuff like that. I do have a english-portuguese dictionary by me. I read the sentences and they make sense. I can follow the arguments. But, on a higher level, my conceptual processing machine is not compatible with this kind of input. Shall I dare saying here that all the anglo-american empiricist tradition looks kind of provincial to me? This is a delicate matter and I don=92t want to enter in any kind of =93ethnical=94 bashing Chris Burford: -------------- This seems to me a very fair opinion, not just because I agree with it, but because we must be able to discuss major trends in thinking. This post however illustrates a more immediate communication problem. With the growing internationalisation of these lists there are an increasing number of posts which incorporate distracting codes incomprehensible to ango-americans relying on 7bit ascii technology. The imperial standard was set by the USA on this matter and cannot incorporate more sophisticated alphabets such as those >from continental Europe using 8-bit code, so we have a problem. In this extract, as I received it through marxism-international- digest, the "tilde" (?) ~ over the 'a' of cde Monterio's first name shows in the introduction correctly. However on my screens in the passage quoted, what must be an apostrophe appears as =92 and open double quotes (?) as =93 and close double quotes as =94. Repeatedly. It is a major effort to grasp the subtle argument. Just to be frustrating, those of you who read your mail using 8-bit software routinely, may not see anything wrong with the passage quoted above, because I have copied it precisely as I read it, presumably with codes embedded, rather than typing it out again. So this communication problem may grow because the 8-bit posters may not be aware of it. The other very common problem fortunately does not occur in this quote for some reason, =20 at the end of each line as a line end marker, also used in a number of word processing packages. About a year ago Spoons tried to adjust the mailing list softwear to adapt to all this. These efforts were feared to be the cause of a crash that took the best part of a month to put right, and since then no one has dared look at the problem again, so I understand. So we have a serious question of proletarian internationalism, whether it would be succumbing to anglo-american empiricism and imperialism for all other subscribers to set their mail to 7 bit standard (and for example put an "e" after every vowel with an umlaut in German) or whether somehow we can all adapt to 8 bit technology, despite the weight of the great american internet serving companies. My hunch is that 8-bit technology will gradually drive our 7-bit. Chris Burford London --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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