This week’s readings deal with perversion –
of truth as well as ecosystems
(Buchanan, 2002), of food distribution (Atkins & Bowler, 2001) and market
forces (Patel, 2007). The Uncommon Forum (UF) shows a fourth and increasingly
prevalent perversion in a sub-forum devoted to eating disorders: many young
women and a minority of young men deliberately starve themselves, sometimes to
death, in order to meet imaginary standards. And, since the forum attracts
worriers, there is discussion about the starving millions, overpopulation, and
the spoiled first world.
UF has a minority group of nutritionists whose
ringleader believes hypoglycaemia is at the root of most human complaints.
Naturally these members are frequently at loggerheads with the psychological
point of view, which is by far the majority on a self-proclaimed psychology
forum.
Buchanan’s (2002) observations about stable
and unstable ecosystems apply equally to other webs. Whenever the chief
diet-change advocate takes a break from posting on UF his followers are less
inclined to contribute, and the forum shifts from nutritional debate to something
else: currently, new-age claims and counterclaims. This is no less valuable to
people looking for help and UF is highly unlikely to fall apart, but other
ideas fill niches just as species do in biological ecosystems. Conversely, a
highly specialised (single-topic) forum of which I’m also a member has been
offline for weeks citing "technical issues". I suspect it isn’t coming back.
Just as food is always something other than
food (Kuttainen, 2013), UF is something other than an exchange of problems and
solutions. It is networks within a network, relationships between members,
power in the form of banning or bestowing of status -- and hundreds of
narratives, many of which begin to sound curiously the same after a while.
REFERENCES:
Atkins, P. & Bowler, I. (2001) 'The
Origins of Taste', in Food In Society:
Economy, Culture, Geography, pp.272-295. London, UK: Hodder Headline Group.
Buchanan, M. (2002) 'The Tangled Web', in Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking
Science of Networks, pp.138-155. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Kuttainen, V. (2013) BA1002: Networks,
Narratives, and the Making of Place. Lecture 7: A Case of Rum.
Patel, R. (2009) 'Introduction', in Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for
the World’s Food System, pp. 1-19. Toronto, Canada: Harper Perennial.
PICTURE: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Anorexia-Patients-Don-t-Really-Know-Themselves-236246.shtml
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