Signs of Crisis in a Gilded Age

The whole revolution talk in this chapter really took me back to the days that every musical theatre kid goes through: the Les Miserables phase, specifically the reference to the revolution eating its young and young men most often being the victims of revolution. I really liked the point made in the video that these men are heroes because they did not live long enough to disappoint. Eventually, these young men with nothing, fighting for something, would become old men with money and power and all the disgusting traits that come with it. But how can we be sure they would have disappointed? They were part of the revolution, after all, so it's possible that the values necessary for someone to take up arms in a revolution would have stuck around into adulthood.
I really enjoyed the part about a revolution on the internet, where it can't be silenced, and it made me think of the current political upheaval one might see on the internet these days in regards to Donald Trump or Harvey Weinstein. Is it possible to stage an entire revolution in cyberspace in today's political climate?
I don't think so. Posts can be removed from social media for being inappropriate; accounts can be terminated for violating community guidelines. These are wonderful features because you can remove the hateful comments you inevitably see on any photo of like, Beyonce or Malala Yousafzai, but the flip-side is that it can be used the other way. Someone I follow on Instagram has had posts removed for suggesting that those who marched in the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville earlier this year should face consequences. People reported the post enough times that Instagram took it down, when really, that's not a hateful sentiment to say that Nazis should face consequences for their actions.
It's super interesting and I'm really excited to look further into the revolution that was completely on the internet, but I'm also very curious about whether that would work in this day and age.

Comments

  1. Unknown26 October 2017 at 16:31

    I really enjoyed reading your blog. For some reason, this week also reminded me of the scene where Marius' friends were shot in the battle. I agreed with Dawson that the legacy that revolutionaries leave behind is partly due to the fact that they all get killed young and don't live long enough to disappoint and I never realized how true this is until this week. But at the same time, you brought up a good question that how can we be really sure if the would in fact disappoint ?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Power to the People

I feel like this week could be summed up with "ahhh, for once, not  another problem for Latin America!" This week's reading was very refreshing: there was no political turmoil or big wars to talk about, but an attempt to establish trust between the government and its people. I don't often think about how lucky I am to have a government that I trust, even if I'm not one hundred percent satisfied. I can trust that my government, on all three levels, will never put me through the same things as Latin American leaders have done in previous weeks. I really appreciate this week's material for not being so violent. I loved the part about the radios! Radios were a big thing in my house growing up (though not as big as here) and they were always tuned to cfox. I still have a clock radio as well, rather than using my phone as my alarm, just because I like waking up to music or talk-shows or what have you. My grandma always talks about radios when she was young, too, a
Read more

Citizenship and Rights in the New Republics

I love the question about race being a social construct. It always makes me think of Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be black (but was really a white woman doing some form of complicated blackface) and then the hordes of (mostly) white people rushing in to ask "well, if race is a social construct, and gender is a social construct, then why is trans-racial not a real identity in the same way transgender is?" And the answer lies in the stain of racial violence, especially the one that carried on today. It is in the fact that NFL players who kneel during the anthem are "sons of bitches" and white supremacists are "some very fine people". I think the history of slavery in the Americas shapes it in a negative light. People of colour are routinely oppressed in the Americas, especially the United States, but there are also disturbing and saddening examples of colourism in Latin America. It's always hard for me to compare slavery in the Americas with other cou
Read more

two worlds meet

I like the idea of history as non-linear, as events that we in the present have put together in order in a certain way that leads us to here and now, even though it never actually happened that way. I don't remember learning specifically about Columbus in elementary school except as a quick "this guy discovered this place" sort of deal and most of the social studies courses I took in high school were very Canada-forward (which makes sense in a Canadian high school). I don't believe I ever read anything particular about him until this course. Most of what I know about Columbus is information given to me through a very liberal perspective; people denouncing Columbus Day in the US and different states changing the day to Indigenous Americans Day. From the information I gathered in this week, Columbus himself was not a villain, but he is where today's current villains got their start from. This was the beginning of a very long war against indigenous peoples and rac
Read more