Altermondialist VS Anti-mondialist

2005-11-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

Topic: Political Correctness
Link to article: In French, canoe

In this entry, Mondialist will be used as someone who supports Free Trade, and the term will be coined in anti and altermondialist.

Synopsis: Altermondialist protesters caused unrest in South Korea for the APEC (Asian-Pacific Economic Conference) conference. The manifestations were violent and needed to be broken up with water-canons, as protestors attacked the Riot Police with bamboo sticks and iron pipes.

So here you have 2 words meaning the exact same thing, but with a COMPLETELY different baggage in term of how the idea is being expressed and how it will make you react to it.

On the first side, you have the original term that was dubbed in the late 1990's, which is anti-mondialist. The term come from the particle Anti, which means "Being against" or "Opposing" and mondialist (free trade), which is a politico-economical doctrine of free and open trade.

On the second side, you have the NEW term which has been introduced by the media... Altermondialist, changing the first particle from Anti to Alter, which should be taken as meaning "alternative" "a different kind of" mondialist.

What does this mean exactly, in term of language?
This is a great example of the desire for political correctness that is permeating our news media culture as of now. The negative connotation of Anti has been "carefully" replaced so that people would not immediatly associate them with something dangerous or disruptive. It sounds WAY better when you tell your parents that you are an Altermondialist then a anti-mondialist when you are going to a protest, that you can be sure... Why? Well, when you say you are an ALTERmondialist, that means you support an different form of mondialism rather then oppose all forms of it, unlike the ANTI-mondialist. The anti-mondialist also was coined with bad press due to A LARGE NUMBER of major riots that occured at various international trade organisation (in Quebec, the United Kingdom and Italy, more recently, as examples).

Altermondialist is a nice term, though. To desire a different form of free trade IS a good thing, for many see the United States and China as the sole recipient of such a strategy. The thing is... are they really describing a new group of people? Those altermondialist are doing the EXACT same thing as their anti-mondialist counterpart.

See how our language is messed up when the media gets a hold of it?

Why are we going to deal with this issue?

2005-11-19T15:11:00.000-05:00

What is information and misinformation, one might ask? Sadly, it is the world in which we live now, a world where all our senses are forever saturated with media that gives us the truth, their version of the truth, plain old lies or even worst, media-manufactured truth.

So how much of something is information? And how much of a news article is misinformation, information given to us in order to create a bias or manipulate us to believe something different from the truth? That is a good question, isn't it? From here, I will make it my duty to look at various problems, news, books, web sites, video games, magazine articles, blog entries and comment or movies to locate the political and social implication that are hidden behind them, trying to have us react to different stimuli so we can be further pushed into this world of media.

What is it you are going to do exactly, you might ask? This is a literary criticism method called "Cultural criticism", which evolved from the various earlier form of social criticism (like feminism or marxism) and that focus on locating the implications of power within the work itself. Everything we do is a affirmation of power, from the way we dress to the way we eat. Even the language we use is FILLED with power relations, as that words have different meanings according to where you are from and how you were raised. As an example, the difference between "Chien" being "Dog" in English shows that the sign used to represent the signifier is different in all languages but that none are more accurate then another, as neither word represents the true "essence" of the 4 legged, furry, tail wagging mammal, both are just a "representation" of the dog concept (I will make a few posts as to the concepts behind literary criticism later on, opposing various authors and concepts). But in some situations (let's say 1950's Montreal, Quebec), the difference between a "Dog" and a "Chien" would be extremely critical, as the rich, powerful factory owner would own a dog, while le tit employer d'la ligne, lui, ya ein chien. English was (and still is) the dominant language in business in Québec, and therefor the person who could use it correctly had power over the one who could not, or could only use it to get himself not fired.

As there is power relations in everything, this is an attempt to locate and diffuse those power relations to the general public, that would want to understand them better or would want to become aware of what is going on around them, even if they do not understand it. We will be searching for meanings and explaning those meanings together, hoping that more people will become aware of the situation we live in right now.

To whom does this Blog speak to? Anyone who wants to look at the world with a new pair of eyes, or that would want to get information on just how misinformed they are by their community.

For those who would want more information right away, I suggest reading on Roland Barthes (I recommend Mythologies, for it is amusing and quite refreshing), Jacques Derrida (only if you want to go in a severe depression from lack of understanding), Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (great authors on the political repercussion of the introduction of English to colonial Africa, interesting when looking at the power of language), Karl Marx (his literary critical works, not his propaganda), Jean Baudrillard (interesting theories on meaning and the meaning of meaning) and Stuart Moulthrop (his essay "Hypertext and the Law of Media" is very interesting to people relying more and more on the internet and electronic media technology).

Misinformation and Information: The Cyanide Report

Altermondialist VS Anti-mondialist

Why are we going to deal with this issue?