Global Culture

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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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