Derek (DJ) Harris
Art 309 – Migration and Visual Art
Greene
MIDTERM PAPER
For this paper I am choosing to do the theme of borders. The Alladeen web site and the film documentary Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005, Gulati) is great examples of creating new world borders. Both of these use technology to help connect the world from one end to the other more easily.
Globalization is a big part of today’s world and is becoming more recognized as the way of the future every day. It has been around for a long time but it is just now starting to come more into focus. We read an article about a man that used a large number of satellite dishes to get channels from all over the world and is now helping women in his town keep in touch with their home countries. We also learned about people who choose to move, or are exiled from their home countries in order for that different lifestyle. What is really interesting is how much the lifestyle does or doesn’t change when they move. People can move halfway across the world to a completely different country that speaks a different language and find out that its not that hard to settle in at all because things are becoming so similar. Every where we look countries are blending into one and it isn’t always that one country is taking on another ones beliefs, its more of a merging of two cultures into one. Now we even have companies with branches in other parts of the world so that they can run twenty four straight hours out of the day. When one country shuts down for the night, the other one picks up.
The Alladeen web site and the film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night shows us, the viewer, what it is like to be one of these workers that work for a company halfway around the world. The film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night shows us the whole operation on a global scale. Gulati is thrown off when someone can properly pronounce her name on the phone so she decides to figure out more of why this is. It turns out it was a girl from her native India doing work for an American company. She works the night shift in India doing this job because it pays extremely well and experiences a new side of the world. The Alladeen website interviews these workers on a much more personal level to help us, as a viewer, to understand and experience what it is like to bridge one side of the world to another. We hear about what it is like for an Indian, with a fake American persona, to interact with an actual American on a one on one level.
Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night takes us through the process of how this whole process works. We find out that many companies from different countries are grouped into different sections of the same building. People take vocal lessons (so that Americans can understand them) to work here just because of how well it pays. We also learn though that people don’t stay in this job very long because of the wear it has on their personal life. These people really enjoy the experience and take a lot of new learnings away from it, but it is just too much on them.
The Alladeen web site helps to exemplify this for us. While the film showed us what the work was like on working level, we never really feel what the people are experiencing; We never really get to see what it’s like to bridge borders between multiple countries. This web site helps to fix that. Here we get to hear what several people experienced on a personal, one on one level. They all share their newly acquired wisdom from talking to people of a different culture that they might not ever experience otherwise. Each person goes through and says what they thought of Americans before they had this job and what they think of them now after working there sometime. Some may like Americans more, and others may like them less, but it is for certain that their perceptions have grown and changed. They also talked about some of their favorite experiences while on the phone with a stranger. Some of them were funnier than others but the shear ability to have that story of talking to a stranger from another world is something to talk about on its own.
My knowledge of this subject is growing just like their perceptions of a new world defined by digital borders. I hope that I can continue to find out new things in this subject. I would like to reference more examples from class and expand on the ideas I already have for the final paper.
