Last night's Film Society movie was Moolaade (IMDB page), an African movie about a mother offering protection (Moolaade was translated as protection -- or actually PROTECTION -- in the subtitles) to four girls who did not want to be "purified" (ritual female "circumcision"). While the movie was clearly against the practice, it was a much more interesting movie because it chose to focus on the power dynamics.

WARNING: Spoilers follow

All the women -- including the other two wives which the lead female character lived with -- were clearly considered, by the men, to be subservient, and the women would kneel in the presence of the men. But even the men respected the Moolaade (protection) that was symbolically put in place by tieing yarn across the entrance to the living area in which the girls were being sheltered. The reaction instead was to demand that the Moolaade be removed (by saying the word that cancels it), and when the demand alone wasn't sufficient, to publically whip the woman whilst insisting the Moolaade be removed. Clearly at any given point the men, on mass, had the physical force to overpower the women and directly compel them to be handed over for "purification" (the "purification" was done by female elders, not by the men); a power that was exercised -- off screen -- against a travelling merchant who interveened in the whipping. But they never violated the Moolaade directly, only sought to have it removed. And three of the four girls avoided being "purified" -- the fourth was tricked into leaving the protected area, and then carried off, dying of complications of the surgery.

Even more intersting was that the way that the men tried to continue their power over the women was to take their radios away. The radios that were allowing the women to listen to music and speech from outside their village. At one point we hear them listen to a segment where the person being interviewed said that the practice was not required by the teachings of Islam. The combination of these two facts (the radios being taken away, and ceremonially burnt; and what was heard on the radios) -- in combination with the deaths from this years "purification" seemed to lead to the final showdown, in which sufficient women stand together and insist no more. We don't see what happens after that, but clearly the younger women are no longer as subservient to either the older women or the men as they had been.

Technology changes everything. News of the outside world reduces the dominance of those who would try to keep people subservient. Those who seek to be in control will always seem to control means of communication.

Sex scandals, and outing

On a different, but connected, theme, GQ writes about a sex scandal in the USA (via metafilter) involving the use of online chat to trick teenagers into sending naked photos of themselves, and then to blackmail them with those photos to compell in-person sex acts. But unlike the usual situation the media likes to write about, of some older predator, stalking young girls (or perhaps young boys), here the accused is another student at the school. Supposedly one of the boys, pretending to be a girl to get the photos, and then using them to compell the boys to meet him for sex. On the Internet no one knows you are a dog (copy of original cartoon).

If the story is to be believed many of the boys were fairly easily tricked into believing that a girl they didn't quite know at school (in some cases a girl they'd never met, in others a girl they thought they'd met) wanted to see naked photos of them. The lack of visual and aural clues make the deception harder to detect. Technology changes everything. (Of course sheer disbelief should have avoided this -- and in several instances did -- but some of the boys clearly wanted to believe.)

But more interesting still is the revelation in the article that the relevant State's law requires identifying the accusers in the court documents. In situations like this they are "anonymised" by using only the initials and date of birth. However these days with everyone on, eg, Facebook listing their name and date of birth, it's the work of a few minutes for someone close to the situation to go from a list of initials and a date of birth to a list of accusers. The DA said "and we've always gotten away with it because no one ever comes down to the courthouse to get a copy of the criminal complaint." But technology changes everything. (In this case, Wired had initally published the initials and dates of birth, from the complaint, making the process even easier.)

Technology always changes everything. And it takes a long time for society to adapt to the implications of that change. My personal belief is that it always takes at least a generation (so 20-25 years) to fully adapt. We're about 10-15 years in with the Internet, so probably have another 10 years to go.

Bonus example

And one more example, monitor resolutions -- two Slashdot stories asking about ways to deal with the fact that (unlike CRTs) LCD monitors are both high resolution (and often high DPI), and perform poorly at anything other than their native resolution (also unlike CRTs). Changing technology has made a lot of old games play poorly on modern screens, since the old CRT trick of playing them full screen at the original resolution no longer really works. The answer is apparently HQX which is a high quality image scaling algorithm, used in various emulators -- the example graphic certainly looks effective. But getting non-emulated games to use that is non-trivial. (The next best option seems to be to use an exact multiple; 1280x800 on a 2560x1600 LCD, for instance.) The future of everything seems to be to be emulated. And modern technology makes that possible -- as Aardvark points out today we have more power than a 1980s supercomputer on our desktop these days, being used just for graphics display.