5th Assigned Post: A New Kind of Think Tank

I have said it before and I am not afraid to say it again: the American population, as a whole, is dumb. What I mean by this is that, in my opinion, a majority of Americans do not have an adequate “social literacy” to make informed political decisions. “Social literacy” refers to a knowledge base a citizen has over a variety of social issues that currently affect the country. To show just how “dumb” our nation has become, I embedded this video of comedian Bill Maher highlighting a Newsweeksurvey which asked one thousand Americans questions from the U.S. citizenship test.

(Watch till 1:17 for the statistics, watch the whole thing for some laughs)

If we Americans cannot correctly answer questions that test basic knowledge about the United States’ government and history, how can we be expected to make informed decisions when it comes to electing our leaders? Congress is meant to represent the will of the American people in order to enact policy. But when citizens do not have enough knowledge to identify what is truly best for the country, how can they be expected to elect the right officials? Where this is really alarming comes in how our “social literacy” compares to other countries. The European Journal of Communication conducted survey which asked European citizens if they could, for example, identify the Taliban. The results are summarized by an article from The Daily Beast.

“Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan.”

The past two weeks in class, we have discussed think tanks as either advocacy or advisory organizations as well the gray area that falls in between them. They serve to influence government policy by conducting research or presenting information to elected officials. This is the role of think tanks in our legislative system and it will always be their role.

However, I would like to see a new kind of think tank emerge in the near future. With the myriad of information floating around right now, it is almost impossible to keep up to date with it all. In my opinion, a think tank should promote unbiased facts to educate the general public on pressing issues. When the public is smarter as a whole, the country will be able to better choose elected officials.

Everyone suspects the major news agencies have their inherent biases. Whether this is true or not, people will choose not to accept information from them just by seeing the source’s name. This is where an academic organization educating citizens would thrive. People would whole-heartedly accept information from a neutral source over a news organization. Since think tanks are already moving towards producing sound bites instead of full-fledged reports, they already have a product that could be widely accepted by citizens.

Whether new think tanks like this arise or if this aspect becomes a separate branch of existing ones will to be determined. With an election season around the corner, my only wish is that they develop soon.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/03/20/how-dumb-are-we.html

3rd Assigned Post: The Super-Disempowered

Chapter 12 of The World is Flat is titled “The Unflat World” and explains four forces that stand in the way of global flattening. Friedman claims that one of these forces is that certain people are too disempowered to participate in the flat world. These people, he suggests, are considered to be in the gray area between the flat and unflat world because they live in countries with significant flattened areas but lack “the tools, skills, or the infrastructure to participate in any meaningful or sustained way” (p. 470).

Friedman essentially uses rural India as his primary example of such an area. He suggests that people in this area rely on the state for basic needs such as electricity, water, and security but are left unattended to by the government. When this happens, people are said to be more likely to become radical in their thinking and more attached to their caste because they sometimes get a glimpse of the flat world.

While I will not disagree with anything Friedman claims in this section, I think he missed out on an opportunity to address a larger issue. What about those individuals who live in a flat country, live in a flattened area of that country, but are constantly banned from participating in the flat world? What about the families that are stuck in their social status as servants of the privileged? They are immersed in all the glitz and glam of the flattened world but have no way of attaining it. It is happening in Mumbai and my family is guilty of participating in the problem.

 

It’s hard to believe but these two pictures were taken no more than seven miles away from each other in Mumbai. The one on the left is a picture of the Dharavi slum pictured in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. The one on the right is a neighborhood known as Powai and is where my family lives. The neighborhood offered everything a Western city has and it felt like I had never left the U.S.

So how does one move from the left to the right, so to speak? Friedman mentions giving universal access to certain public goods so that everyone can participate in the flat world. The one public good I think far outweighs the other is education. When people have even a small education, a multitude of doors open for them. In the U.S. we often take this for granted with our public education system. Almost anyone can receive and education for very little or no cost. This is not the case in Mumbai.

All schools are either private or subsidized but to send a child there, parents must pay tuition. A child like Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire would be rejected from every single school in the city because his family has no money. Therefore, he will participate in the lifestyle his ancestors have been a part of before him. The cycle repeats and there is essentially no escape from the unflat world.

Friedman plainly says the state needs to improve. For the disempowered to become empowered, a change in policy needs to be made in these areas. Offering universal access to education would not solve all the problems an unflat Mumbai has, but the cycle needs to broken somewhere.

ImageLink: http://indiatug.pbworks.com/f/1241019248/1241019248/1241019248/dharavi-slum.jpg

1st Assigned Post: Flattener 4.1

In The World is Flat, Friedman’s fourth flattener talks about the phenomenon of uploading.In my opinion, this is the most significant contributor to what he calls Globalization 3.0, or the rise of the individual. Essentially, any person in the flat world has the ability to author their own content and make their opinions known to an innumerable amount of others. With the increasing usage of Facebook, blogs, and Wikipedia (not to mention the number of different ways we access those services), some of us act as “mini-authors” multiple times a day.

Anyone that knows me, knows that I am crazy about Twitter. I follow over 250 accounts and have a number of different third party applications that help enhance my experience with the service. One of these applications is known as TweetDeck and it allows me to divide all those accounts into columns based on their subject matter. For instance, my first three columns are labeled as “News”, “Football”, and “Friends” (I won’t tell you their order to save myself from embarrassment…).  This organization lets me pick and choose the type of content I want to experience at any given time.

With that, I hope you have an understanding of how I personally use Twitter (and not think that I sit in front of my computer hitting refresh all day). Friedman places a great deal of emphasis on the creation of information while I think that the spreading of information is where the real power of Globalization 3.0 lies. For those who do not use Twitter, the site offers a convention known as “retweeting” where User A can share User B’s content with User A’s followers. An example goes as follows: I follow an account known as @psufootball and it posts something I find interesting. I simply type “RT @psufootball” and copy/paste the tweet. If I desire, I can even add my own thoughts in front of the “RT” or I can even change some of the original tweet, in which case I would type “MT”, short for modified retweet. The newest version of twitter simplifies this whole process by allowing a user to simply click a retweet button. Unfortunately, there is limited functionality with this method such as being unable to add your own thoughts and lack of integration with services like TweetDeck.

[For a history of retweeting prior to the new release, check out this link: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23312/]

I cannot begin to explain the profound effect the retweeting has on avid users of the site. For mathematical purposes, consider this: I follow 250 accounts and just for argument’s sake, lets say each of those follow 250 accounts. If they actively use the site and retweet what they find interesting, I essentially follow 62,500 accounts! Back to my original point, the sharing of information through twitter allows me to be on top of events around the world seconds after they happen. With so many people connected to one another, any bit of information has the potential to go viral.

Information sharing is not just limited to Twitter, however. Take the recent earthquake in Virginia as an example. Within minutes, my cell phone’s inbox was filled with texts from friends and family along the east coast that all looked something like “EARTHQUAKE OMG.” I feel as though this is the heaviest flattener of them all. Through any number of degrees of separation, someone in Afghanistan can relay information to millions of people on the other side of the planet.

If you don’t believe me, I invite you to check this out: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/05/02/man-live-tweets-u-s-raid-on-osama-bin-laden-without-knowing-it/

About Me

Hey everyone! Thanks for checking out my blog. I hope we all get to know each other throughout this semester and our 445H experience goes well. Here’s a little about me:

My name is Ankit Jain (pronounced Ahn-keet) and I am a Junior double majoring in Information Sciences & Technology and Security & Risk Analysis. I am from Downingtown, PA, which is about 45 minutes west of Philadelphia, and I have lived in Chicago and Milwaukee.

My main interest in life is travelling the world. There’s nothing I enjoy more than seeing the innumerable wonders the world has to offer. My family and I try to go on two trips every year, the most recent of which was a one week vacation through the Canadian Rockies. Throughout the years, I have been all over the United States and India as well as countries like Spain, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

Sports have always played a major role throughout my life. I have been running cross-country competitively for the past 6 years but I play a wide variety of sports for fun. I am a HUGE football fan – my first word was “touchdown” – and I support the Green Bay Packers and (obviously) Penn State.

Aside from sports and travelling, I have recently found an interest in cooking now that I have my own apartment. Although I’ll be the first to admit I’m not very good at it, I’m always looking to try new things. I am also a big trivia fan so I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching game shows like Jeopardy and Cash Cab. I have always had an interest in following current events and reading a variety of opinions on them.

Over the past two years or so, I have developed a strong interest in the role social media plays in our lives. The reason I am taking this class is to learn more about the phenomenon of globalization and how I can relate it to the way we use sites like Facebook and Twitter. Specifically, I want to take a closer look into how news is spread across different media and how individuals make their opinion on them known to the world.