see you... good bye?

The good news: I'm going on holidays, I'm leaving London for the Moroccan seaside!

The bad news: I'm not gonna post for the whole length of my vacation. I need a total rest, to leave behind anything which reminds me of London and the English language. Now it's time for French, Arabic and for beautiful Moroccans. So for the whole month of August you will have to live without my every-other-day-post. Don't cry yet, the worst is still to come. Keep reading because what follows is devastating...

The devastating bad news: I might never come back; I mean, I’m coming back to London in September of course (unless I find a beautiful Moroccan-male who wants to marry me, certainly a possibility which is always worth considering). Where I may not come back ever again is to our beloved blog, Inglesia. Yes, my dear readers, because:

>>I'm tired<<

I’m tired of a lot of effort and very little compensation. In order to understand me, all you have to do is to go back to the beginning. Inglesia was conceived as a tool to achive journalistic stardom. However, after more than four months of great dedication and effort, neither El País, nor Le Monde, nor The Guardian has contacted me so far to hand a succulent deal. All I've gotten out of this business is an average of 3 visitors a day, who, to make things worse, didn't even leave a paltry comment after reading the posts (you've guessed it, yes, I'm actually blaming you at this point).

But, to tell you the truth, writing the blog in itself wasn't that tiring. Most of the time, writing posts was entertaining and challenging. It has also made me improve my written English, and I've broadened my knowledge about hot topics like plastic surgery or sadomasochistic porn. What I couldn’t stand was having to promote it on the internet. I soon discovered that reaching a good position on Google required an effort which I wasn’t willing to make, and an amount of time which wasn't at my disposal.

But I’m not going to get into any more details. After all, perhaps this is just a “see you soon” instead of a “good bye”. In Fact, what might happen in the end is, to a degree, in your hands. If your messages of grief and despair are numerous enough I don’t think I will be able to find it in my heart to refuse.

And finally, to make this farewell feel less bitter, we'll finish on a musical note. A beautiful song with Arabic themes which I came across yesterday on Youtube.

I’d especially like to dedicate it to my dear average-3-visitors-a-day, I love you guys!

the quote of the day

"The sleep of reason produces monsters"
Francisco de Goya (1799)

This is not actually a quote but the title of a Goya's illustration. However in this case I think that the title is worth much more than the picture.

This quote/title summarizes the spirit of the Enlightenment: reason is a treasure owned by us humans and, when we don't let it rule our thinking, problems start. Some people during the Enlightenment started to liberate themselves from the irrational set of beliefs which had governed their lives till then.

This people decided to analyze the generally accepted truths from a critical perspective. Was it rational to believe all those stories about Jesus Christ? And what about the idea that kings ruled because that same Jesus and his divine father decided it should be so? Wow! the Enlightenment was really exciting.

Meanwhile, more than two centuries later, in the middle of a revival of religious fundamentalism (Evangelicalism, Islamism), when some groups in America are putting pressure on the authorities to teach Intelligent Design instead of Evolution Theory at schools, and when the uncritical belief in new age stuff enjoys perfect health, Goya's remark is still young.

Thanks Goya!

privacy threat

I’ve recently spent a couple of very nice days walking through London with a friend. During these walks, we talked about many interesting issues. One of them was the precariousness of privacy in the Internet age. All started because this friend told me that he was going to close his Facebook profile. He was afraid that at his place of work someone might find out something about his private life which could damage his reputation.

In case you haven’t heard yet about it, Facebook is a web service which allows the user to do networking as well as keeping in touch with friends. People create a personal profile on it which can contain a lot of personal information such as hobbies, work info, studies background, political opinions and photos. This personal profile is linked to the profiles of the person's acquaintances. The problematic aspect comes into the picture here, since these acquaintances are of all kinds: from childhood friends to work colleagues. Therefore people who you just have a formal relationship with may learn details about your personal life. That's why my friend said he no longer wants to risk somebody who works with him finding out something inappropriate about him.

And he might be right. The more we get involved in internet activities and communities, the more exposed our personal life becomes. Think about a person with a Myspace and Facebook profile, with his personal photos stocked on Flickr, who stores his browsing links on Delicious, and who regularly writes on a blog. If someone would take a bit of effort to track this person on the Web, he could easily end up composing a very accurate picture of what this person is like without having ever met him.

It is true that you can use false names, and that you can set the configuration options of these web services to permit a higher degree of privacy. But even so, from the moment you start publishing information on the internet you can't be 100% sure that nothing is going to get leaked. The risk that some of your data escapes your control is real.

So unless you have been really careful when interacting on the Web, the prospect appears scary: one day the employer of your dreams, while considering hiring you, will decide to google your name as a final check, only to discover those compromising pictures of you that a friend posted to your Myspace profile. Or maybe, having a look at your Facebook groups, he could learn that you belong to that minority communist party. Or what is even worse: he could find out that you are one of those pervert homosexuals!

I’m afraid this scenario is not that far-fetched. As for myself, I’ve always enjoyed looking up my acquaintances’ names on Google and I can state that recently it is becoming more and more common to find at least two or three entries for any person you search for. So, yes, in the short term, I have to agree with my friend: it is probably a good idea not to put too much personal information on the internet if you are to get involved with conservative work environments where people care about such things.

However I think that this struggle for preserving privacy is doomed to fail in the long run. Trying to erase all your traces on the internet is becoming more and more difficult, up to the point that, in a foreseeable future, it will be virtually impossible. The Web 2.0. services that I’ve just mentioned (Flickr, Youtube, Myspace, Delicious, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogs, etc.) are only the beginning. The future development of the internet is all about sharing information of every sort.

But everyone has secrets to hide. Who wants to be known by people he hasn’t even met? Being so exposed is quite problematic indeed, so what can we do to deal with this new threat?

One of the solutions could be to fight. That is, to try to protect one’s movements on the internet in every possible way. On the one hand, by using data protection technologies, and on the other asking the people who govern our societies for legal support. That's why there will probably be attempts to legislate in order to protect the right of privacy (In a very similar way to that which is happening today with the fruitless attempts to protect copyright. Since the appearance of the P2P platforms such as Napster or Emule, the legal initiatives to stop the sharing of music and video have proliferated, always with the same unsuccessful results: the free exchange of copyrighted data rises steadily).

But all that will be like trying to prevent the tide from coming in. Just think about all those mobile phones with photo cameras (whose latest generation allows you to take really high resolution pics); the mobiles with high resolution video cameras are expected to appear soon as well. And it is pretty sure that all these amateur photographers and filmmakers will be very keen to broadcast their recordings online. To make things worse, there are even people who are starting to record all their conversations on Messenger and Skype. And in the meantime, Gmail and the new mail services promise that you will be able to store the totality of your emails during your whole life. In brief, our digital print is getting huge, it will soon become uncontrollable.

The other possibility is the solution formulated by David Brin in his book “The Transparent Society”. He asks us to think about the problem with a radically new optic. Instead of the hopeless efforts to protect privacy, he proposes that society forbids privacy itself. Or in other words, that society legalizes the possibility for everyone to watch each other.

The problem of having your private life exposed appears when there is an asymmetry, says Brin. That is, when your potential watcher doesn't have his life exposed as you do. This asymmetry gives peoples an advantage or disadvantage when interacting with others. But from the moment when everyone can get to know everything about anyone else, the equilibrium is reestablished. If my boss knows that I am one of those pervert homosexuals, but I know that he pays Brazilian transsexual prostitutes to penetrate him... then everything is cool, man!

What’s more, as a matter of logic, the more powerful an individual is, the more observed his movements will be. And this would have a positive effect on democracy. For example: would the war in Iraq ever happened if all the phone conversations between those Bush, Cheney, Blair and Murdoch had been public from the very first moment that they were taking place?

highly romantic

I hope that this video will help you to understand that love between a human and a machine can be as beautiful and pure as any other form of love.

I would like to thank my favourite Italian for first showing me this video and for starting to open my mind to this different form of love.

the pic of the day

The Grand Hotel of Taipei (1973, Taiwan)

the pic of the day

A balanced composition by Gengoroh Tagame, the master of
sadomasochistic illustration.

information society well explained

Today I want to recommend you a book which changed dramatically my comprehension of our society and its future. It’s the three-volume work by Manuel Castells called “The Information Age”.

I had just finished high school when I discover this book. My intellectual background was quite poor; I hadn’t read any serious academic book at the time. Nevertheless my curiosity about the topic was huge. The Internet had appeared a couple of years before and I wanted to know how it was shaping our society. The length and austerity of this trilogy seemed a bit discouraging at the beginning but I was going to discover soon that it was worth the effort. Until then my only approach to the matter had been the books of these futurist gurus like Negroponte and Toffler. At the beginning I found them rather inspiring, they make me dream about wonderful worlds to come in which technology would allow us to do, well, everything we wanted. After a while I realized that the statements this authors made about the evolution of society were closer to science fiction than to any serious research. Pure technophile speculative day-dreaming.

On the contrary the book I was about to read didn’t make any reckless predictions. Its approach was to find the insight about the future that the systematic analysis of what is new in our society can provide.

I was in Ireland, shut away in my room recovering from a flu, when I started the first of the three books which compounds the trilogy: “The Rise of the Network Society”. And from that moment on I harrypottered it, and the other two parts which followed: “The Power of Identity” and “End of Millenium”. I just couldn’t stop reading them.

It was an intellectual treasure for a virgin mind like mine. This book offered a powerful general structure about how our society works. It’s like a reference framework which since then has remained with me and where I often go back to hang in the new knowledge I acquire.

Book shops are full of good books about particular dimensions of our changing society. Take one of them about economic globalization. Another one about the changing geopolitical game (China, India, and all that stuff). Another about the new technological paradigms of Internet and the interconnected society. And still take another about the socio-political aspects of our time (rising of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, crisis of democracy, feminism, ecologism, gay issues, the media…). Then mix them all and the result that you obtain is this book. What’s more, Castells doesn’t deal with these issues separately but manages to connect all of them in a common theoretical framework.

Disclaimer: No, I’m not getting paid by the publishing house of Manuel Castells. Neither am I his nephew or boyfriend.

more "the pic of the day"

I know, I'm posting too many "the pic of the day" lately. I have been quite busy and I didn't find the time to write a long post. But anyway, I shouldn't apologize, this section is called "the pic of the day", what means that I have the right to post up to seven "the pic of the day" a week. And you must know that from now on I will stand up for my rights.

So, once things are cleared and you know how things are gonna work from now on, here we go with today's "the pic of the day".

It's a symbolist painting by Odilon Redon. Symbolism is a movement which appears in the late 19th century as a reaction against realism to whom Redon was one of the main practitioners. I particularly appreciate those flowers absurdly surrounding the pensive girl. The dynamical explosion of colour contrasting with the stillness of the girl has an immediate appeal. I feel that the artist has succeeded to capture in the same canvas a girl living an austere existence and her escapist inner world.

Portrait of Violette Heymann (1910)

the pic of the day

The lavish, art-deco and huge city hall of Buffalo, a medium-sized city situated in the State of New York in America. Click on the image to view a bigger version.

Buffalo City Hall (1931. New York, USA)

pic of the day

Cabin at Lake George (Georgia O'Keeffe)

Another nice painting.
It's quite simple and depicts the most innocent of subjects. Nonetheless it has something intriguing. The loneliness of the scene is thick instead of being placid. And those clouds... And the window, which seems as if it could have clarify something if it wasn't so black.

the flying spaghetti monster

In the United States the movement supporting Intelligent Design
is growing. It intends to make schools to teach this new form of Creationism in their biology classes. Creationism and Darwinism would be taught together. Children wouldn't receive any more one single vision of the evolution of species.

The central argument of Intelligent Design is that the biological evolution of species is too complicated to be a random process and that therefore its become the evidence of the existence of an Intelligent creator (aka God) which drives the process.

In the middle of this battle between pro-creationists and darwinists a new group appeared. Its followers require the government to teach at the school also a third evolution theory: the "Pastafarian theory of Evolution".

This theory states that the whole Universe and the evolution process were created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM is an all-powerful creature which happens to be composed of two flying meatballs surrounded by several noodly appendages.

The number of followers of the religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is growing steadily, and so the support for this alternative theory of the Darwinian Evolution. Let's wait and see if it becomes a serious alternative to Darwinism or if the FSM theory is just other of these fashionable movements which disappear in the following season.

the picture of the day

I haven't managed to find out the author of this illustration. This is my personal homage to tobacco, smoking and to the freedom to choose. Since last Sunday, smoking in public places is forbidden in the United Kingdom.