The Bluest Eye

The bluest eye, written by Toni Morrison is a novel based upon the story of Pecola Breedlove, a black girl living in Ohio around 1940's.
Toni Morrison's style is very unique due to her use of many characters talking at the same time. She uses this style to show the readers the different viewpoints.
Up to three or more characters may be talking in the same chapter, and even in the same page.
Toni Morrison divided this novel into four parts, as the year, four stations.
 This is to show the transition of the novel and how it develops across the year.

coltan, affected by media

Is it possible to have a world wide issue that has not been informed by media? I believe it is not possible. Any issue that may sound interesting to more than a small percentage of people may be posted into a mass media comunicator. Coltan may sound as an exception, because it has caused so many problems that media companies dont want to interfer in this issue. They dont want to become part of the 1500 persons that die daily because of this war.
In the image below, we can see the demographic map of death in Congo, due to the Coltan effects.

Even though Congo does not faces only the coltan effects, but also the internal conflicts, Coltan mining causes more than 1500 deaths daily, either because of slavery and hard work or radiation in the extraction.

The social impact that the mining of Coltan is causing is getting to a severe point where people in Congo are not able to live healthy more than 16 years, and at this point it has caused more deaths than second world war.

How is it possible that such a huge issue as this one has not had the attention that the second world war had? Or even less important events have more attention than this one.
The reason is so selfish that it is as simple as understanding the humans ambitions.
90% of every electronic device that we use to comunicate and to spread mass comunication issues use coltan for their energy power sources.
Do you really think that companies as Samsung, Sony, Blackberry, are going to sell you a product by telling you the amount of people that have died to produce it, or the amount of water they used to extract the mineral that is making your device work? Not really. They just tell you the amount of hours it can last with one charge, or the speed of the internet it can carry, but obviously, they are not going to tell you the dark side of every electronic device they sell.
How much do you pay for a Blackberry? I think that is enough to buy not only the coltan to produce it, but also the media to prevent the spread of this type of information filtering all over the world wide web.

This is how Coltan can affect mass comunication, but also the way mass comunication affects coltan,.. or at least tries to affect it, without having any positive result.

How does Media affects a Global Isssue?

During the last seventeen years, Coltan has been extracted from different regions of the world, but the place that has the worse effects has been the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This country has suffered different internal conflicts, but more often related to the control of lands and minery.

Different etnic groups want to have the control of the products extracted from the lands, and for this, they have to fight against the other groups that are looking for the same power.
The problem is that coltan is not a cheap mineral that can be found everywhere. It has an exponential increase in value, and also in price.
The demand is the main reason that the price increases, but also the difficulty of extracting and obtaining the mineral.





The following table shows the amount of Coltan extracted each year in each of the countries in metric tons.

	metric tons of tantalum mined
	1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Australia	165	218	224	170	238	274	276	302	330	350	485	660	940	765	807	854	478	441	557	81
Brazil	90	84	60	50	50	50	55	55	310	165	190	210	200	200	213	216	176	180	180	180
Canada	86	93	48	25	36	33	55	49	57	54	57	77	58	55	57	63	56	45	40	25
D.R. Congo	10	16	8	6	1	1	--	--	NA	NA	130	60	30	15	20	33	14	71	100	87
Africa, excl. DR Congo	45	66	59	59	8	3	3	3	82	76	208	173	242	245	333	214	146	135	313	297
WORLD	396	477	399	310	333	361	389	409	779	645	1070	1180	1470	1280	1430	1380	870	872	1190	670
1990-1993: U.S. Geological Survey, "1994 Minerals Yearbook" (MYB), "COLUMBIUM (NIOBIUM) AND TANTALUM" By Larry D. Cunningham, Table 10; 1994-1997: MYB 1998, Table 10; 1998-2001: MYB 2002, p. 21.13; 2002-2003: MYB 2004, p. 20.13; 2004: MYB 2008, p. 52.12; 2005-2009: MYB 2009, p. 52.13. USGS did not report data for other countries (China, Kazakhstan, Russia, etc.) owing to data uncertainties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan

As we can see in the table, the demand of this mineral increased in a low rate during 1990's, but in 2000, there was a tendency that said that the electronic devices were going to have a great jump in advance, therefore, more coltan was going to be needed. Countries exploited their coltan in a more intense way, increasing the amount of coltan per year at a higher rate.
furthermore, after 2006, the demand of coltan decreased, leading to a decrease in its mining.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global-mined-tantalum-production-1990-2009.png

We have seen the mining of the coltan and the data that shows how real this problem is, but we haven't seen the real impact is has brought to the different comunities, and the impact that media has within this topic.
First of all, "Impact" is not necesarily related to harmful consequences. We can't evade the fact that we all use electronic devices, and that they have done some works easier, especially regarding to comunication.
But, on the other hand, we have the socio-cultural impact, the wars, the millions of deaths. "As every rose, it has it's thorn".