how does it feel, living in the 21st century?...
artwork by stanley donwood...
dearest friends,
how does it feel, living your life in the 21st century? are you plain happy, or just sad?... are you comfortable, or do you have panic attacks?... "God wants you to be a winner..."... the government will deliver what they promised... don't they speak for us?... i can't behave like this... phew... that wasn't me... i am back in control... i will conquer the world... what's this?... voices?... in my head?...
appreciate all your comments/impressions of the art-piece above... remember, they may reduce you to a piece of news, fit you nicely in labels, easily understood... but they can never take away our stories...
posted by aPoReTiC @ 3:33 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
is this picture from the Radiohead album? seen it before ...
Commodify everything, give it a price in US dollars, market it, tell people they are nothing without it, co-opt God for your campaign.
It's all the same anyways, right? Religion, Hamburgers, Foreign Policy, Automobiles, Wars, Cameras, Towels, Love, Sex, God.
Let's all be better consumers.
i thought it fascinating to trace the semantic meanings of some of these words... the notion of 'language-games' seem pertinent here, as these words seem to draw their meanings from very specific cultural contexts and socio-historical practices, particularly in modern/post-modern globalised societies...
words don't simply 'refer' in the traditional correspondence mould ie a word simply represents a naked object... a word like 'oil' don't just mean 'petroleum', but conjures up connections with 'production', 'industry', 'markets', 'war', 'automobiles', 'pollution' etc... which simply means our form-of-life, our historically conditioned existence as human beings in the 21st century... in other words, 'our way of life'...
these problems are specific to our time, very new, very different from our ancestors', not without continuities, of course... we couldn't be here without them...
it may take a new kind of christian, a different way of being human, to survive,perhaps?
I find the multiplicity of life in the 21st century to be exhilarating at times, but mostly maddening. Whether or not we're capable of managing pluralism, both inside and outside ourselves, we're here and we have to cope.
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