About a year ago, Coca-Cola Co. announced it would attempt to take on Starbucks by introducing new technology to deliver single servings of coffee through their own newly designed brewing machines. Last month the first Far Coast Cafe opened its doors in Toronto, Canada.
Since I don’t drink coffee, it is hard for me to judge them on the quality of their product. And as hinted by my very first post I must have some sort of obsession with coffee:
Global Culture should not be about MacDonalds and Starbucks in every little town around the world. It should be the opposite: being able to experience your own cultural heritage in the context of a foreign community. So if you come from Venezuela, where good coffee is a century-old tradition, you should be able to find the equivalent to your traditional coffee house wherever you go. If done well, becoming a global citizen should not require you to loose your cultural baggage.
If you read through the reviews, most people are drooling over how cool the Far Coast lounge is, but people like Paul Terefenko from NOW Magazine have dissected every element of their operation, from the apparent eco/social [...]
If you liked the interactive visualization from Gapminder about human development trends you are definitely going to enjoy watching its creator Hans Rosling debunk the myths about the developing world earlier this year at the TED Conference. This global health expert uses the power of statistics to convey his strong message about global trends.
Thanks to YouTube user Sidewinder77 for posting the videos.
The winter edition of Reconstruction is now online with a collection of essays about the Theories and Practices of Blogging.
Global Culture is featured in the Why I Blog section, among a fascinating list of peers addressing the fundamental question about our craft. It is difficult to understand how a medium that has little monetary rewards is having such a profound impact on our society, but as I explained in hackers & work culture:
increasing number of people are moving away from their mandated jobs and investing their own time to develop all kinds of personal projects that provide real entertainment. They do it because they can, because they have resolved their most basic needs in life and can afford to be distracted a few hours a day. The Protestan Ethic is becoming obsolete and no longer provides a true incentive for people to participate in the capitalist machinery.
The collective wisdom compiled by guest editors Michael Benton and Lauren Elkin provide an incredibly useful reference about the art of blogging and the impact it is having on our digital culture.
It is not a coincidence that this blog was born a few days after the first Mesh Conference back in May of this year. The fact is that I came back so energized from this conference that I felt it was the right time to get started with an idea that had been dancing in my mind for a while: Global Culture. While the concept was difficult to explain, it always seemed to be floating around us.
But having something to say is only half of the equation. I needed to make sure that people would be interested in listening. The blogging medium seemed ideal, as I explain in my previous post 8 hours labour, 8 hours blog, 8 hours rest:
…having a voice on the web certainly provides all the entertainment that our generation can ask for. While a few years ago critics could‚Äôve convinced most that this participation was meaningless, it is now settled that the future of business depends largely on understanding how people create communities around small niches that, when aggregated, have an important effect known as The Long Tail… People do this by leaving breadcrumbs of wisdom throughout [...]
Adbusters.org is running their now traditional Buy nothing day this Friday November 24, 2006.
When writing about the negative impact that globalization has on global culture, it is easy to believe that all the blame can be assigned to global corporations spreading their influence throughout the world, but the fact is that they are only feeding on our obsession for material things. If nothing else, use the premise of the “buy nothing day” to question every single product you buy by thinking about the complex manufacturing processes, wasted materials, under-paid labour, pollution generated and burocracy served just so you could buy the latest, coolest, cheapest thing. Is it really necessary?
I found a perfect way to convey some of the recent arguments about distribution of income: Gapminder produced a presentation on Human Development Trends in the form of several animated visualizations, including:
World income distribution
Regional income distribution
The distribution of poverty
Regional differences in health and income
Income and health of countries
Same income, different health
Development directions
Differences within countries
Child deaths
Once you’re done going through the presentation, you may want to spend some additional time playing with the data with the interactive tool.
Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development.
It’s only fair to promote a real debate on the issues that concern us. Through this blog, I’ve always talked about the negative impact of globalization, so to fuel the debate I had to find a voice that cheers loudly for it: George Reisman is a well known economist, author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. A new article posted on his website capitalism.net entitled Globalization: The Long-Run Big Picture provides a first-class defense of the theories behind globalization, saying that it that
has the potential to raise the productivity of labor and living standards all across the world to the level of the most advanced countries
It’s hard to argue against such a wonderful picture, with people in Africa, India & China enjoying the same quality of life than those in North America or Europe. He even makes such utopia seem very reachable
by incorporating billions of additional people into the global division of labor, and correspondingly increasing the scale on which all branches of production and economic activity are carried on, globalization makes possible the unprecedented achievement of economies of scale.
I have to admit my lack of formal knowledge in most economic theories, so someone will [...]
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