When I started posting for Global Culture I did it with a feeling that the task at hand was important, but without a predefined plan. I gave myself these first few months to debate the relevance of the concepts with those interested, to test some dark places and avoid some very common ones. The only thing I knew was that the learning process would be intense and would help me figure out what should come next.
Never in my most colorful dreams I saw such a promising outlook for what this project can be, but it is looking more real every day: with the millions of people throwing themselves into the fast paced world of global everything, everyone seems to be in desperate need for some identity that can be carried through the future to give us the certainty that when we finally get to our destination we haven’t lost our essence. This is the promise of a Global Culture. One that doesn’t belong to anyone and yet everyone cares about.
With an average monthly growth of 53% in the number of visits, a lot of people seem to care about these ideas. At [...]
The holidays are the season of family reunion. For those of us who live outside of our culture of origin, to have the opportunity to share our traditions with the loved ones is a special treat that doesn’t come often, so we must embrace fully. But deciding which traditions we honor is not necessarily an easy choice because after a while our loyalty to one or another culture tends to blur. Surprisingly, far from being a problem, this is only allowing us to accept a wider range of traditions without the usual conflict of feeling foreign to them. This seems to be the special gift of Third Culture Kids:
While Third Culture Kids usually grow up to be fiercely independent and cosmopolitan, they are more culturally sound and sensitive. They also tend to get along with people of any culture.
Third culture kids grow up in a genuinely cross-cultural world. While expatriates watch and study cultures that they live in, third culture kids actually live in different cultural worlds. Third culture kids have incorporated different cultures on the deepest level, as to have several cultures incorporated into their thought processes. This means that third culture kids not [...]
How would you determine the degree to which a given person has been exposed to a variety of cultures and can, as a result of this experience, act as a bridge between them? It is not an easy task and for starters I came across a multitude of questions that hint at the variety of factors that should be considered:
Who would have a better perspective on a given city? The business traveler who visits frequently but for a few days at a time or the immigrant that arrives once a settles for good?
What influence do people from other places exercise on your perception of their cultures?
Which cities are the most cosmopolitan and how are their inhabitants better informed about other cultures?
How many cultural artifacts (books, movies, tv, sites) do you have to consume to really know a particular culture without ever being there?
How knowledgeable are second generation of immigrants raised in a different country about the culture of their parents?
What is the relationship between Internet savviness and ability to understand other cultures?
While I have a general idea of what the answers are, I’m starting a weekly poll that will allow the growing readership to participate. Over time, [...]
Yesterday, in my usual monitoring of web analytics patterns of this blog, I witnessed a beautiful event: a swarm of users drop by for a few minutes, courtesy of StumbleUpon. The unusual peak came as a nice surprise even after a great week as a result of recent exposure through the Weblog Awards. In StumbleUpon, users are suggested new sites to visit based on their previous history, and the more people liking a particular site, the more likely it will be suggested to others. The analogy with a swarm or flock comes from the elegant organization that the group achieves without an appointed leader.
In an interview for the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1965, McLuhan explained some of his ideas around the Electric Age:
If the wheel is an extension of feet, and tools of hands, back, arms, electromagnetism seems to be in its technological manifestations an extension of our nerves and becomes mainly an information system. It is, above all, a feedback or looped system.
While web analytics provide a great deal of feedback about users visiting a particular site, I find the most important piece of information is understanding the context with which these users [...]
Via Public Diplomacy Watch I found a reference to a speech given by Martha Bayles, of the Arts and Sciences Honors Program at the Boston College. The speech, which could be considered a preview to her upcoming book, was entitled The Ugly Americans How Not to Lose the Global Culture War, and addressed the issue of bad PR generated by the degrading aspects of American popular culture, mostly at the hands of a few corporate executives from the entertainment industry with too many connections in Washington.
I had addressed the issue of apparent American cultural hegemony in the post jazz & macdonald’s, observing among other facts that Hollywood had a great test bed for pop-culture in the millions of immigrants that were avid consumers of the American Dream. Whatever hit resonates with them is likely to do well elsewhere. Prof. Bayles comments:
the export of American popular culture skyrocketed. The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization reports that between 1986 and 2000, the fees (in constant dollars) generated by the export of “filmed and taped entertainment” went from $1.68 billion to $8.85 billion an increase of 426 percent.
However, such an overwhelming amount of media reaching out to all [...]
In the early days of the web (circa 1994) a few geeks would spend countless hours writing code to create their homepages. Very few people would care, but the joy of crafting a space that would reflect a piece of their personality was a reward in itself. A few days ago I watched a friend of mine update her MySpace page and realized how the same obsessive attention to detail was put into adding widgets, updating content, uploading pictures, linking to other content or leaving comments on her friends spaces. What I found really interesting is the fact that she would’ve never even come close to the geeks back in the early days, yet there she is today, spending probably more time on her page than I did on mine back then.
In my previous post, d√©j√† vu, I pointed out the heavy influence that a drastic change in the demographics of web users will have on the web as we know it today. The generation of geeks that created their first pages in the 90’s likely grew to become professionals of the medium and went on to produce some of the great sites out [...]
In an attempt to forecast what the growth of Internet users may be over the next few years, I came up with a very simple realization after analysing the data from Gapminder: the current (2004) distribution of Internet users resembles the distribution of phone users back in 1996:
Notice how after making a selection of 12 countries (India, China, United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Japan, Rusia, Germany, France and United Kingdom) with significant populations and grouping them, the distribution in both cases is very similar with the U.S. & Canada leading the pack.
The reason I make this comparison is because we know exactly how the number of phone users grew over the last 10 years and if we consider that the type of infrastructure development that is required to acquire new Internet users follows a similar path than the one that was required to acquire phone users:
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