Letter from Curaçao<< All You Can Eat TV: It's the American Way | Main | It's Alright Ma....Bell, It's Only TV >> Todd Chanko | March 02, 2006, 02:33 PM Welcome back, dear readers. I slipped away mid-February for a brief winter break in Curaçao, a lovely island in the Netherlands Antilles. Just 35 miles north of Venezuela, Curaçao is an outpost of Northern European culture endowed with turquoise waters, sultry snorkeling and rijstaffel, a personal favorite. A polyglot, I particularly enjoyed Papiamento, a language comprised of Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and myriad other influences. We had dinner with a local family, when I was struck by how confined our ideas of language can be. At that meal, conversation flowed seamlessly from English to Spanish to Papiamento to French and back to English again - a linguistic round-trip. There are lessons to be gleaned from this wondrous pliability, in which human speech goes beyond the limitations of any one syntax or vocabulary and utters what is needed when needed. It would be too facile to pounce upon this as a Derrida-like deconstruction - this is more like reconstruction. In our fragmented media-world, in which platforms and content vie for audiences, consumers should well remember that no one platform or film or TV program or any other medium can satisfy the quest for communication. We owe it to ourselves to process the discrete nouns and verbs of the media and to create our own syntax. Media companies should, in turn, realize that platform and content have their own grammar. As that dinner demonstrated, sometimes Spanish is what is needed – and sometimes quelque chose d’autre. Masha danki. |
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