Culture | Zigguratrealestate

In the case of our beloved flea market tradition, digital technology doesn’t disrupt but enhance it

From communication and finance to information dissemination, digital technology has disrupted how things were done in the last decade. In the wake of progress, people have also noted how certain traditions, jobs, and even lifestyle habits were rendered obsolete.

As we approach the middle of the 2020s, however, one lifeway beloved by many Filipinos has been further enhanced by the democratization of mobile internet and smartphones: Your neighborhood ukay-ukay.

Data released by one of Southeast Asia’s big reselling platforms shows that Filipinos are some of the largest users in the region, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, in terms of both buyers and sellers, with sellers making an average of P39,000.00 in 2024.

Filipinos led in Southeast Asia when it came to women’s fashion—a testament to our ukay culture. The same platform likened this to 2,544 tons of carbon dioxide offset. The data was gathered from January 1 to October 31, 2024.

Top search words from the Philippines included “bag” and “dress” and fast fashion brands Uniqlo and Zara while also reflecting aspirational purchasing through searches for Coach and Kate Spade. Interestingly, said online platform also allows users to donate items, and clothes were the top item given freely by its Filipino user base.

Meanwhile, in terms of technology, while iPhones from the last five years remained the most popular search, there was an interesting spike in Gen Z users searching for digicams.

Top search words from the Philippines included “bag” and “dress” and fast fashion brands Uniqlo and Zara while also reflecting aspirational purchasing through searches for Coach and Kate Spade

Is this a sign that we’re umay na with being online 24/7 and the constant scrutiny of it all? All while still wanting to document what’s dear to us? Similar to the Western Zillennials opting for ‘dumb phones’?

These developments were touted by the same company as good for users’ pockets (savings for the buyers, earnings for the sellers), and the planet, clarifying that they used “years watching Netflix straight” as a barometer for carbon dioxide emissions.

Over the decades, scientists have warned that rising carbon dioxide emissions from industrial activity would trap heat in the atmosphere, causing storms to strengthen, as ecosystems from polar ice caps to forests suffer from temperature imbalances, ultimately affecting the earth’s carrying capacity to sustain life.

A 2022 United Nations report indicts fashion for contributing to 10 percent of global carbon emissions. The same report also highlights fashion’s negative impacts in terms of water consumption and micro plastic fibers, ranging from 200,000 to 500,000 tons, released into the oceans via wastewater.

While secondhand buying is not the solution to an environmental crisis exacerbated by consumerism and consumption—fast fashion and retail gadgets included—the fact that Filipinos prefer pre-loved is still one step in reducing waste and, in the long run, reducing demand for producing more new goods.

There was a time when people bought technology and clothes to last for years, and the fact that we now want to give these things a second life, whether out of nostalgia or economic limits, is in a way countercultural in a world where FOMO-based marketing has pushed the bottomline at the expense of people and the planet.

Just take it from Miss Earth candidate and environmental activist Jessica Lane, who, through repeating a dress in three big public occasions (le gasp!), has shown, by example, that her advocacy doesn’t end at coronation night and that the action still continues when the lights and cameras go out.

Source: Inquirer

Blame Dickens and the Little Ice Age.

Americans are obsessed with a white Christmas and all the trimmings – snow, icicles, sleigh rides, frost on windowpanes, cuddling up by the fire, mittens, the North Pole. Christmas is a cacophony of cold imagery and warm hearts. And yet the majority of Americans live where it never snows at Christmas.

Only about 40% of the 48 contiguous states are typically snow-covered by Christmas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So even though a white Christmas will never be most people’s reality, why does it remain the ideal?

Well, experts say, in the United States it’s about a swirling blizzard of nostalgia, music, popular literature, the rise of Victorian mass culture – and, surprisingly, the Little Ice Age.

It all starts with Dickens. As in Charles Dickens, the English novelist and author of the enormously popular “A Christmas Carol,” first published in 1843. “It cemented his role as one of the most significant literary creators of Christmas,” said Thomas Ruys Smith, a professor and literary historian of Christmas at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

The novel was also a hit in the United States and quickly adapted for the stage, where it immediately gained a following. It was further embedded in the American Christmas consciousness in 1867 when Dickens gave a reading tour of the U.S. around Christmas time. “America falls heavily back in love with “A Christmas Carol,” Smith said.

The novel depicts a London Christmas blanketed in snow, cold and ice skating. And yet even by then London was less and less likely to get snow. “What Dickens is doing in ‘A Christmas Carol’ is what we all do – going back to our childhood when Christmas is the most magical,” Smith said.

Dickens grew up in the 1810s and 1820s in England, when the Little Ice Age still had a grip on Europe. The Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850, was a global period of widespread cooler temperatures. “Periods of extremely cold temperatures were much more common in the region during the middle of the 19th century, when the Little Ice Age was finally beginning to end,” said Dagomar Degroot, a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University who has written about the Little Ice Age.

The link between snow and Christmas remains so strong in England that during December, Covent Garden in London offers an hourly flurry of artificially produced “real” snow. Another literary link to Christmas that continues to reverberate down the ages is “Little Women,” first published in 1868 and which famously begins on a snowy day just before Christmas. “Again and again we’re given literary and visual cues of what Christmas should look like. The texts we still hold on to from the 19th century all have snow and ice skating,” Smith said.

That connection between Christmas and snow and cold was accentuated by the rise of mass commercial culture across the United States after the Civil War. It was the beginning of major popular illustrated magazines – most of them produced in the Northeast – which at Christmas published stories that were the Victorian equivalent of Hallmark movies. “Mary Wilkins Freeman was the most important American writer of Christmas stories,” Smith said. “They’re almost entirely snowy in their aesthetic.”

The period also had a mania for inexpensive prints, many of which features snow-drenched, old-timey (for the time) Christmas scenes, Smith said. Think Currier and Ives prints, which actually feature in the 1948 Christmas song “Sleigh Ride” with the line “It will nearly be like a picture-print by Currier and Ives.” All of this was happening in a period of colder temperatures, Degroot said. “The United States was, on average, much colder in the Victorian era than it is today. Average winter temperatures in particular have climbed more quickly than temperatures in other seasons, especially in the Northeast, where the American Christmas ideal emerged and evolved in the 19th century,” he said.

Why must Christmases be white?

Christmas is strongly linked to childhood memories, which brings us to one of the most famous Christmas songs ever – one that actually started out with palm trees. Irving Berlin’s iconic “White Christmas” was first released in 1942, but he wrote it in 1938 when he was in Beverly Hills, said Nate Sloan, a professor of musicology at the University of Southern California. “He writes about this yearning for home, for a white Christmas, which was really dreaming about his family’s roots in New York in the 1890s,” he said.

The song’s original first verse, later cut, was specific. “The sun is shining, the grass is green. The orange and palm trees sway. There’s never been such a day. In Beverly Hills, L.A. But it’s December the 24th. And I’m longing to be up north.” “This idea of dreaming about a white Christmas is about longing and yearning. And that white snow represents his youth and childhood, a sort of rose-colored past,” Sloan said.

Now it’s just about cold weather

Though Christmas carols go back as far as the 1300s, most of the religious carols we sing today date only as far back as the 1700s and after. The rise of the specifically Christmas but non-religious song took root in the 20th century and went into overdrive beginning in the 1990s, Sloan said. And increasingly, the songs on those soundtracks aren’t about Christmas at all – they’re simply about cold. The Christmas canon is full of such songs with nary a mention of Yuletide.

“Let it Snow”
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
“Frosty the Snowman”
“Jingle Bells”
“I’ve Got my Love to Keep Me Warm”
“Winter Wonderland”
“Sleigh Ride”

“It’s almost like if you just talk about snow in your song, people will associate it with Christmas,” Sloan said. Even as Christmas songs get snowier, frozen precipitation is likely to be less and less common over time, Degroot said. Earth’s global temperature experiences natural variation over time.

This is clear over the past 2,000 years, which includes the Medieval Warm Period, when grapes grew in Britain, and the Little Ice Age, when the Thames river froze so hard that “frost fairs” were held on it. But the warming over the past 50 years stands in stark contrast to the natural variation that has occurred naturally over the past 2,000 years, temperature data reveals. “Trends in greenhouse gas emissions trends are likely to lead to average global warming of around 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century,” he said.

In such a world, snowfall will be meaningfully less abundant than it is now. “If Earth’s climate system ends up being highly sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions, which is plausible, then a rapid and destructive rise in global temperatures will indeed make it impossible for many Americans to experience a white Christmas,” Degroot said. “Of course, that will be the least of our problems.”

Source: USA today

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