Two attempts at my story (both sung to an old Hoagy Carmichael tune):
Manchester on my mind
Africa on my mind
About my website.
Since its beginning a decade ago, TMB has been my personal blog with some limited opportunities for members' participation. Now the focus is moving in a more collective and interactive direction. The home page is open to posts from guest authors; a Forum facilitates discussion of some of TMB's themes (the future of anthropology, world society as a commonwealth, economy, African development and so on); TMB Press will be an online publisher of longer pieces.
Banks are slower-moving deposits of fast-moving flows, whether of water, information or money. This website is my Memory Bank, but it is meant to reach out to a public that shares my aims. The two great human memory banks are language and money which are converging into a single network of digital communications in our time. The idea of a 'New Commonwealth' refers to the possibility that money might serve the purposes of economic democracy more fully than it has; but beyond that to the need to make a world society fit for all humanity.
We face an extraordinary moment in history when the old structures are palpably failing. The formation of a global civil society, even a world state, is an urgent task. Anthropology has a distinguished past, but it has an even greater role to play in future, not necessarily as an academic discipline, but perhaps as an interdisiciplinary project: to discover what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we would make a better world. Such a project depends on making full use of the emerging social and technical synthesis entailed in the digital revolution.
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Sir,
There is a new language emerging out of the InterNet, the Engineered Central OnLine Technologies created by Google, and Googling and its impact upon the English language has already been felt at every Ivy league institutution world wide. You will see more dramatic twists in the next four years and anthropologists - the entire field - if not brought up on in the use of the InterNet and basic computer programing, [ content;- metagging usages; techno-syntaxing and their co - functionings which is derived from binary numbers functioning ] after 1994 will find themselves in greater funding difficulty. There is just as likely further modifications to the English language created by the infusions of Arabic and Chinese idoms and expression elements and will start to surface by the year 2018 - 2024.
Ask yourself this question and the pass on these questions to others you know as well.
What happened to human civilization when one peoples created their own alphabet? How long did it take those who existed adajcent to their borders to create their own? What was the resultant change in their languages? Can these three leading questions and their answers have any relationship to what is now happening impacted by the techno-infused cultural communication dynamic of the Internet and computer programing? And then what has happened to the English language as a result?
Right now there exists a growing crises within the English language.
Then you will come to face to face what is happening now. I have decided to become part of it.
RMC
I've just got notice of Open Anthropology Cooperative and I immediately decided to join! I'm still learning about the site, but I'm looking forward to interact with your network. Thanks for the welcome!
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