Monday, January 3, 2011

Am I Doing This Right?



Most of you either read or skimmed my essay on globalization and the internet. If not, here is the link.
I still stand by everything I said there, but this guy has some pretty good points.
I said that the internet is an amazing tool for connecting and educating people. But when I look at my statistics, most of my views come from the United States, and after that Canada and Europe. There's most of the "Western" world. We're all pretty similar. When I look at my feed list, the majority of the people there are Americans in their twenties (or in the case of those I know personally, teenagers). Most of them being women. I am an American woman close to her twenties but not quite there yet, and doing (literary and media-related) things that most people don't do until then.

So apparently I recognize the potential of the internet, but am not utilizing it. Which kind of sucks, because I thought I was doing such a good job. At least I know I'm doing better than a lot of people I know.

The man in the video also said that it's difficult to rectify this problem because when we're looking for new things to read, we ask our friends, who usually fit into our demographic (American teenagers), and therefore usually read the same sort of things that we do.

Some food for thought. I'm off to watch more TED videos.

2 comments:

  1. Hmmm, it is always nice when TED confirms something I thought was true ;) An interesting follow up to your presentation material, thank you for sharing.

    On a related note, I was looking for the meaning of a Latin phrase I came across in a book I was reading today, and the top result on google that didn't seem to be an exerpt of the book, was a Wikipedia page. I thought this was great, as Wikipedia usually explains things well enough that I get an idea what is happening. Turns out though that this was a page from the Italian Wikipedia. Sometimes it feels like each language has its own Internet.

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  2. Just as there are different Googles for each country, which come up with different top results.

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