It's democracy, Jeffrey, but not as we know it....
The organisers openly admitted that they had no way of preventing individuals from voting multiple times, and some countries encouraged their citizens to vote as much as possible. Jordan mounted an international campaign to get Petra as many votes as possible, while Peru went so far as to open special internet centres where Peruvians could go and vote for Machu Picchu as frequently as possible. It was a bit like an old-fashioned election in Northern Ireland... vote early and vote often.
It's as similarly flawed as the Time Magazine internet vote a few years to choose the person of the century, and Turks voted en masse as frequently as possible to push Kemal Ataturk to the top of the public vote. Alright, fine, Ataturk was undeniably an important figure in 20th-century Mediterranean/European history, and it's certainly nice to have the standard Trans-Atlantic significance trope challenged, but Ataturk was no more the most important historical figure of the 20th century than Christ the Redeemer in Rio is one of the top 7 'wonders' of the modern world. What's important in these internet 'votes' isn't some pure notion of democracy, but mobilising a local block vote and getting that block to vote as often as possible.
Those of us familiar with the Eurovision Song Contest know the principle....the winner is supposed to be decided on the basis of 'democratic' phone voting, but no one seriously claims that the voting process is fair, and western Europeans always end up seriously baffled that eastern and southeastern Europeans claim to care; you mean the Serbs are celebrating on the streets of Belgrade just because they won Eurovision? There's nothing really wrong with a bit of national pride, but realistically winning Eurovision - or getting your local site on a list of '7 new wonders of the world - doesn't mean that much. And neither should we read too much into it.
Alasdair Brooks
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Poo. What made the original "deciders" experts about the old list? Did they fork
over money for conservation of the hanging gardens? Why should the world's peoples
not get to decide on which sites they think are spectacular? Just because there is a
sort of global democracy involved in voting does not mean that countries without
spectacular sites are being discriminated against. How friggin' politically correct
do we have to be?
The quibbling by UNESCO reminds me of a stream of comments on hist-arch about how
archaeology is presented by movies and TV shows. Some folks complained about the
obvious and frequent inaccuracies. Other argued that anything that gets the public
talking about archaeology gives us openings to engage the public notions and perhaps
to correct them when need be.
Jeffrey L. Boyer, RPA
Project Director
Office of Archaeological Studies, Museum of New Mexico
mail: P.O. Box 2087, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504
physical: 407 Galisteo Street, Suite B-100, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
tel: 505.827.6387 fax: 505.827.3904
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
"It might look a bit messy now, but just you come back in 500 years time." --Terry
Pratchett
________________________________
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY on behalf of geoff carver
Sent: Fri 7/6/2007 7:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: 7 new wonders of the world
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