Wednesday, 11 September 2013

Perversion and poverty



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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