Hong Kong not so racist after all

Over the weekend I was called up to make a comment on this story for the SCMP. Whilst on the run I said that I didn’t think it was a fair reflection on Hong Kong as it is today. Now the news notes the statistics were wrongly assessed. We have some reflection here.

So now people are thinking Hong Kong isn’t that racist. It again seems that  so much quality information is lost in the fumble for quick statistics and soundbites. As academics we spend a painstaking amount of time trying to give a balanced insight into the data available to us. We strive not to make kneejerk reactions and we tend to agonise that our comments are being taken too generally.

In the social media age, with tweets and blog postings, the visibility of the academic is encouraged. Yet like quick-to-the-press stories, we must strive to maintain credibility. Having a bang up to date media that is constantly reacting to second and third hand stories is not as valuable as having information you can rely on.

Bauman Posits Solidarity

An interesting, and optimistic article by Bauman on solidarity In Eurozine. It covers some very familiar terrain, but at the same time we see Bauman venturing a little further with ideas about how to tackle our contemporary problems. He notes…

Do you want solidarity? If so, face and get to grips with the routine of the mundane; with its logic or its inanity, with the powers of its demands, commands and prohibitions. And measure your strength against the patterns of daily pursuits of those people who shaped history while being shaped by it.

Highlighting that there are some serious challenges for us as liquid modern beings, to actually cope and deal with the dullness of commitment to political change. Our solidarity comes with the burden of the mundane.

Setting out a schema for what we do need for solidarity, he turns to Richard Sennett, who has proposed ‘informal, open-ended, co-operation’. This strikes me as being very much aligned with the notion of prefigurative politics. The focus being on the method, rather than the result. Bauman also leaves us with the notion that co-operation, solidarity, and functioning community, all leave us with increased knowledge. We become enriched not because of what we gained, but because of what we experienced. Wisdom becomes knowing how little you know.

I am currently reading Liquid Surveillance by Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon. It is another one of Bauman’s conversational books where we read a dialogue, this time between him and Lyon. This format actually works quite well in this debate as Lyon tries to lead Bauman into areas where he has not made unambiguous declarations. Such forays aren’t always as successful as one would hope, alas we are fascinated by Bauman not because of what he doesn’t say but because of what he does say.

The points I wanted to make about this text resonate with its focus on technologies of surveillance. From an academic point of view the development of the network as something more important than community is really key. The Social Sciences are paying serious attention to social networking sites, but it almost seems that there needs to be an overarching  critical academic approach to it. something like ‘networkology’, that works with the foundations provided by sociology, anthropology, psychology and media and cultural studies, and then uses it to take account of how central social networking and media sites are in everyday life.

Bauman makes the point that the network is not like community, there isn’t a shared outlook, or similar geography, a shared culture or national perspective. Think of your Facebook friends or your Tumblr followers, you are the only thing that all of them share in common. Accordingly with such fragile ‘liquid’ bonds, network nodes work with a shady individualisation. The truth of the matter is that they are a series of disconnections that can be interconnected, but need not. Quoting Robert Dunbar, the human brain is suited for knowledge of up to 150 people, or 150 ‘meaningful relationships’. Facebook friends are thus a collection of acquaintances, unknowns, old friends, and intimates, muddled up with family too. Sharing information with such a vast array of people models an uneasy truth about the world…we know that we readily give ourselves over to methods of DIY surveillance, our phones, our loyalty cards, our Facebook accounts, but at the same time the fear is not ‘big brother is watching you’, it is the fear of exclusion, of being redundant, wasted, or forgotten that haunts the contemporary denizens of Bauman’s liquid modern world. This visibility is key and the network (both virtual and real world) is now tended with greater care than our community and cultural ties.

There is much more to this book. Some excellent debate on drones, remote surveillance, and even some revisiting of concepts from Modernity and the Holocaust. Notions of the value of technology, of the capacity for it to reflect human strengths and weaknesses, all provide stimulating reading.

Alcohol intake in Asia. A brief infographic from the Kely Support Group.

Apparently there is a surge in binge drinking when Hong Kong’s economy is doing badly. Following the SARS pandemic I remember reading that signs the economy were doing bad correlated with two positive business developments. Beer consumption increased during an economic downturn and also the production of locally made movies with erotic undertones soared.

Passing through Central this lunchtime and strolling through Chater garden I spotted this large Menorah. Celebrating the second day of Channukah you can see that two of the bulbs are lit along with the shamash bulb in the centre. The third will be lit tonight.

The Menorah is sponsored by the Chabad community in Hong Kong. You can visit their website here. 

Whatever Happened to the Islamists? Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam.

An interesting new book that I am going to have to get hold of. I have followed the work of Amel Boubekeur for a number of years. She has written some excellent articles on “cool Islam” and the repackaging of Islam in commercial products.

This edited collection follows with those themes.

Available on Amazon and here through Columbia UP.