Race as a visual technology

This was a question for one of my 5000 words essay which i have to hand in soon (tomorrow in fact.. hmmm). Apparently, one cannot get away from this subject, huh? I chose that because I wanted to talk about Marxism and capitalism and so on and so on. However....... all the readings I do kind of point back towards that line of thinking. Now, I am trying to start D&G's chapter on faciality in their book "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia". I wish I could write like them. *sigh*..

Urban Society and Information Society

In this day and age when the term ‘information society’ is a more descriptive term for ‘urban society,’ the use of new media technology has been dominated by urban areas. Even in cities in developing countries, such as Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, where most people still earn less every month than the price of the cheapest handset, mobile phones have become a necessity and one can see people from all levels of the economic class using a cell phone in Jakarta, from domestic servants, drivers, and street hawkers to bankers, elementary school children, and other executive types. A recent research that was published in The Jakarta Post stated that almost half of all households in Jakarta have more than one cell phone number .

For richer countries, internet connection has become a household necessity in cities. Digital communications has also eliminated distances between cities, allowing parents from the other side of the world to have a ‘face to face’ conversation with their children thousands of miles away. Meetings between metropolitan cities of London, New York and Tokyo can now take place without the purchase of a plane ticket. In the comfort of each participants office, without any compromise on amount of message being conveyed. Pictures, video, graphs, maps, recordings are digitized and sent in forms of bits and bytes over invisible networks that spawn across the five continents. All this development of incites a utopian notion of the superiority of cyber urban space, as opposed to real urban space, which lead to the thinking that one day real urban space maybe be better off eliminated, replaced by its idealized version in the form of cyber cities. Of course, these utopian ideas about ‘cybercities’ replacing real urban spaces does not go undisputed. The idea that new media technologies eliminate distance and thus, eventually, eliminate the need for a physical city can be easily refuted by the rapid urbanisation around the world and also the constantly increasing number of airline travel between cities around the world and also the massive tourism industry. The notion of absolute virtuality also ignores the fact that this vast and seemingly ‘invisible’ network of new media technology to replace cyberspace actually rely on real physical infrastructures: wires, cables, electricity, satellite stations, web servers, relay towers, and so on to actually make things work. There is also the fact that these infrastructures can be mapped according to their geographical location, which leads to the issue of the vast digital divide between urban and rural areas, especially in developing countries. With regards to the ability of new media technologies to facilitate human interactions and experience, they are still unable to move beyond sight and sound. Even though attempts to replace long distance hugs have been made, such as clothes with embedded sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and heart beat rate of the sender and sends it to the actuators that recreate the sensation of touch and warmth of the hug to the shirt of a distant loved one , who will actually choose a pair of these shirts over a plane ticket back home?

Nota Kecil

Ruangku..
Ruangmu
Kurasa tak ada ruangku tanpa ruangmu
Dimanaku bisa sentuh dan rasakan
semua sudut sisimu
semua isi susunmu
Ah.. kurindu..
kurindu ruangmu..