Sunday, November 2, 2008

ring ring ring




Global cell phone use at 50 percent

"At present, Africa has the largest growth rate of cellular subscribers in the world, its markets expanding nearly twice as fast as Asian markets. The availability of prepaid or 'pay-as-you-go' services, where the subscriber is not committed to a long term contract, has helped fuel this growth in Africa as well as in other continents." ~ wiki

To people going global south, esp Africa, i'd say avoid internet & get a cell! a. You can integrate / meet up better b. they are cheap and c. as Carlos recently reminded me, its the main way virals and memes and such get spread. Its youtube, boombox, AIM. Plus, its the only way to learn text languages. Im particularly fasinated with Arabizi, which is easier for me b/c I can't really read arabic w/o harakat anyway and I gratefully <3 the simple grammar.

Being able to understand chat language is really useful & surprisingly hard to get w/o traveling. Ive been really pissed off at wordreference.com, whose message boards have always been godly while trying to write french papers or translating messages at work. But the moderators have actually deleted my recent posts asking about west african french e-speak b/c they 'werent inquiring about correct french grammar', proving once again how commited most of french language academia in the US is to maintaining their own irrelevency. porkoi?!!



Above are the strangly appealing graphics of Kosovar youtuber Legoistat, who contributes to a long line of 'local' refurbishings of universal tech noises,in this case Nokia ringtones. He also made an amazing nationalist / homophobic video which gays up all the the flags of countries that did not recognize Kosovo. Somehow the hate ends up as a magical art.

These refurbs appeal to me as a nerd and lover of what may be now "contemporary post-colonial urban electronic dance music"






msn carib/braziled:


and dancinggg

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

holy crap. i am seriously geeking over these nokia tracks! dammnnn, put that mobile to work for YOU, people!!

Unknown said...

awesome post, rachel!

and thanks for the nod. also, i'm with you on your criticism of the tunnel vision w/r/t to, well, language, involved in not including your questions!

online pharmacy said...

This is really unbelievable because I thought that the largest cellular subscribers were the American people, How do you know that? I want see facts.

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