File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-14.221, message 61


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 ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005