a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway

1994

My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.

Posted by don quixote

Friday 1 August 2014

Social Media is winning the battle of ideas in #Gaza


The coverage of Gaza from Channel 4 news UK has been in complete contrast to the BBC and other mainstream TV news channels in the UK and US. I'm sure that is due to pressure by social media to record the perceptions of the weaker side, the oppressed, the, before now, voiceless and I think Paul Mason is part of that. 
 It's a different world now that social media can counter mainstream media's bias for western governments interests. Twitter and Facebook are giving a balance to reporting international events. This really accelerated from 2009 and the failed green revolution in Iran and then spread to the Arab spring and then to the Occupy movement in the west. I say it over and over again and won't apologise READ Paul Mason's ' why it's kicking off everywhere' Our leaders haven't fully woken up to what is happening, there is a revolution in information exchange and the social movements that are arising because of it. It will be bigger and have a wider impact than the 60's cultural revolution in the west because it's worldwide. 

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