Globaization: Good or Bad?

Globalization is a highly controversial and debated topic that has existed since roughly the mi-20th century. Interestingly enough, our class's book shows just how varied people's opinions on this topic can be. Some countries and organizations have seen American business franchises spreading to other countries as a form of so called "cultural imperialism", which essentially replaces the existing cultures of other nations with that which Is found in America. One recent example of this has been Russia's apparent desire to remove McDonalds from their country. On the other hand, our book gives an example of how in China McDonalds has been met with a generally positive impression. I personally find it fascinating how different cultures and political relations can cause dramatically different opinions.

Google and Piracy

In an interesting turn of events, Google recently announced that they will be partially changing up how their name sake search engine works in relation to illegal websites. While up to recently illegal sites could and would often come up among the top results while searching for media, often above legitimate websites, they are planning to allow legitimate websites to pay money in order to take the top spot. One example of the pirate-friendly nature of the current situation can be found if you were to type anime into Google. The very top result is a pirating site, with the legitimate site Crunchyroll appearing further down the page. This is obviously not in the producers of these shows favor, so they and other media companies will likely welcome these search engine change. If you are interested in learning more about the upcoming changes, you can read more here: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29689949

Media in Everyday Life

One chapter of our book was dedicated to the topic of media, particularly the use of it in everyday life. It first established that media is any sort of medium that is used to convey information, and then listed a wide variety of media types. More interesting was the second half which focused on the critique of media and how it might or might not effect people's lives in various ways. I found the section about how just a few companies often end up controlling the majority of the media to stand our to me personally due to the fact that I've done some research on this topic previously. Overall, this chapter was rather long, but it managed to keep my interest throughout with it's engaging references to real-world examples.

Categorization

Our teacher had us read an interesting article by an author named George Lakoff on the topic of categorization. I had never previously put much thought into the topic, as categorization is such a simple thing, right? Well, according to this guy, it's more complicated than what most people assume. He is basically saying that categories are abstract concepts, and as he goes along with this line of reasoning, deduces that if we accept this as true, many of the commonly held western views on reality simply aren't true. To be honest, the topic became more and more dense as I was reading, so by the end he was a bit difficult to follow, but I'm fairly sure the gist of what he was saying is that we need to reconsider some of our basic long-held assumptions about the human mind.