Blog 12- To infinity and beyond....Globalization!

Sorry for the cheesy title, I try to be witty, but it normally ends up being cheesy. Oh well... :)

As I read last weeks reading, "Multiple Modernities in an Age of Globalization" by Eisenstadt, I right away noticed the frequent use of the word "modern." Immediately, the thoughts of my friend Rachel popped into my head. She is a philosophy major and every time she needs to put her input on an argument, she will always ask to define a certain word. I tried to think of my own definition. I came to the conclusion that there really is no time-standing definition of "modern." I see that the world is always changing, always raising the bar for the whole world. After I thought of a definition, I read that Eisenstadt says  "The contemporary world is development..." Sounds pretty close to what I was thinking, I guess great minds think alike! ;)

Eisenstadt also says that there are two forms of modernity...hence the title "Multiple Modernities..."

The first form is "structural organizational," (Urbanization, industrialization, technology and differentiation.) This form is found all over the world. For example, Japan may come up with the technology for a more energy efficient car. For a while, that will be a "modern" idea, but then another technology will come along later, etc.

The second form is institutional. Government bodies and nation-states are always changing policies, improving laws, the list goes on.

This video below is a little bit of a stretch, but I think it displays how the word modern can be defined as development. This is an old laundry soap ad. In the 1950's this soap may have been top of the line and the washing machine may have been also. However today, soap may have been improved and the washing machine would look much different and have more functions.

Blog 11- Human Rights and other Random Toughts of Mine

On class on thursday, we sort of reviewed what we talked about the past few class periods.

One of the topics that always interests me is Human Rights. We talked about the value of a human, child workers, education of women and morals surrounding the topic of marrigage (child marrigage, gay rights, etc.)
This topic really got me thinking about this issue, I did not realize how much globalization and human rights go hand in hand. One event happens and the whole world is effected by it.

Since, I have been involved with a human rights group on campus, I know quite a bit about the issue of human and sex trafficking. After the fall of the USSR, Eastern Europe was in chaos. In the contry of Moldova alone, 50% of the adult population left and went to find jobs elsewhere. They left their children behind, leaving them victim to traffickers who promised false jobs in other countires. One source that I read mentioned how spread out Eastern European women are around Europe and the world. The traffickers took and advantage of them and are making a business out of them. The article mentioned that a majorty of women in the red light district in Amsterdam, the Netherlands are Eastern European and they do not know any English or Dutch. Other destinations include Russia, Germany, USA, etc. This is also an issue world wide around 20.9-27 million people are enslaved (forced labor or human trafficking).

There are non-government organizations that are trying to solve this issue. One of them that I know about is IJM. They have offices from all over the world with employess that also come from all over. They employ lawers; helping change laws, aiding a victim in a trial or pushing a government to increase sentances for convicts.
Other non-government and world wide organizations that we have mentioned before in class have been GreenPeace, World Health Organization, the Inernational Monitary Fund, World Wildlife Fund, etc.


I know this is a bit off topic for this blog, but this was sort of my spiral of thoughts after class on Thursday. This unit was really interesting for me.

Here is a small clip from a documentary called Nefarious: Merchant of Souls. I would definately take a look at more videos about this issue. (There are more on their channel.)

Population Issues - Blog 10!

This week's topic was interesting to me! (Not that I don't find all classes interesting :) )
We talked about the population increase that has grown almost exponentially since the 1800's.

This population growth is rather alarming. This growth is not in the more developed countries, it is happening in poor regions. My jaw almost dropped on the floor when our professor mentioned that 97% of the population growth is happening in Africa. If there is this huge population growth, that means that if there are much more younger people than the older population causing issues (one example: crime). These issues get even worse when this population growth happens in much poorer countries.

Example:
Population graph of Angola: http://populationpyramid.net/angola/2015/
Population graph of Western Europe: http://populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2015/
Go ahead and explore these links. I unashamedly looked at this sight for at least 20 minutes.

This also got me thinking. If the population is growing so quickly, what happens when it all gets just too much?

This graph above notes the amount of people that go hungry around the world and how much food aid is given to these people by a certain organization, The World Food Programme. This graph shows that more and more people are growing hungry each year. This is concerning, because what happens if the world just hits its breaking point and there are not resources enough for anyone? This "breaking point" is also called the Malthusian Theory. Population will continue to rise exponentially, it will be interesting and scary to see what happens in the future. Until next time, Andrea Graph URL:https://www.wfp.org/photos/gallery/hunger-graphs

Globalization and the Media- Blog 9!

This past week in class, we talked about globalization in terms of culture from a religious perspective and from a media standpoint. I thought the media topic seemed to be intriguing. 

Globalization has changed the face of new over the past few decades. In 1983, 90% of American media was owned by 50 different companies and now only 6 companies control the same percentage of news. We were talking in class about how there is a lot of conformity forming in the news. One would think that the new sources Al Jazeera America would offer a different opinion on different global issues. However, most of the stories that they reported on were reported the same amount of times as other news stations. 

Some people say it is globalization that is creating this uniformity in the news, however I disagree. 

To be honest, I think why Al Jazeera America reports pretty much the same thing as other American stations is because of the fact that they show what the readers want to hear. If Americans want to believe that Afghan government made a bad decision or something, Al Jazeera is going to present information that displays that. Americans are not going to listen to this news if they do not agree with it, let's be honest here. In another country, Al Jazeera may report a different perspective if they are reporting in another country.

Here is a graphic that shows the amount of reporting Al Jazeera does in comparison to other American news stations. 

 

http://www.journalism.org/files/legacy/u36/3-Messages_in_Cable_News_Coverage_of_Syria.png

 

Anonymous. - Blog 8

Last week in class, we watched an incredibly interesting documentary of the group called Anonymous.

They are a group of people that have a talent in working with computers. They use their computer skills to protest and try to effect groups that break Anonymous' set of morals or breaks what they think are human rights. They have protested against a white supremacist, the Westboro Baptist church, Master Card and Visa, the Church of Scientology and the list goes on. When they were protesting against the white supremacist, they would send him pizza, industrial materials, etc. and he had to pay for that all. This eventually led him to go bankrupt and he was not able to continue his radio show. When they protested Master Card and Visa, they hacked into the system and took card numbers, because they were upset that they could no longer donate money to Wikileaks, but someone could still use Paypal to donate to the KKK.

This brings up the question if someone should actually be allowed to do something like this. Sure, they did target people that would be considered "bad" people. However, some of their means of protesting are sometimes not quite in good taste. Sure, they did shut down some organizations' websites, but in some cases they would send pizzas and hold up the company's hot line. Some of these people in Anonymous have been convicted in the United States for some of the protests they have made.

 I found this graphic to illustrate the potential that this group has. In almost every country in the world there are at least some people that have access to the Internet. Anonymous has really picked up some international ground and I personally believe that this group will continue to grow for the next few years. That is also concerning, because having such a big group of computer hackers may get out of hand really quickly and cause a lot of damage and change the way we look at Internet. Also, if you want some further reading on anonymous, check out the article below this graphic.

Graphic credit:http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/newsgraphics/2011/1206-world/1206-sci-WORLD-INTERNET.gif

Further reading:
http://www.salon.com/2011/02/25/westboro_baptist_church_anonymous_website/

Education and Healthcare- Blog 7

This past week in class, we discussed how the global society is sort of standardizing education and health care.

 



I honestly was a little bit confused with the standardization with Education on a global scale, so I will be discussing health care.

 

There has been a transition from International Health Governance to Global Health Governance. The IHG has this sort of individual country mindset and it had the tendency to exclude some people.

The GHG, however tries to have a global mindset (hence the name change to global) causing it to be more inclusive, but in turn it has the tendency to be vague.

 

The downside to this new global health mindset comes in four parts.

• The first one is that globalization causes a greater health risk world wide. If I contract some misterious disease in Istanbul, for example, I may not show signs of the disease until after I get home, even maybe weeks later. That means that I may not have only spread it to the people in the airport, in the airplane, but I may have even infected people where I live.
• This also causes a higher previlance of non-government organizations. This means that these companies have no governemental backing and it is hard for governments to control them. This occurence may even weaken governmental power. Since these organizations are spread out all over the world, it is hard for a country to step up and make them change.
• Having global health mind set may also cause a worsening in socioeconomic, political and environmental problems. Again, because these organizations have such an overarching power, it may be hard for individual countires to fix their issues.
• Lastly, it would cause a decrease in the ability for countires to tackle world-wide healthcare challenge. Having so many coutries involved with this issues and so interconnected, it may be hard for countires to reach the standards that more well-off countires have set out for them.

To be honest, you could almost call me person that is almost anti-globalization. The problem that I have with globalization is that it makes it so easy to spread to disease. Like I said earlier, I took a trip to another country, it would be so easy to spread diseases. This is happenig right now with Ebola. It is not rampent world wide, but if there is one misstep in prevention, there could be a catastropie.

Although, one good thing about this is that there are organizatios like Doctors Without Boarders. Without them, a lot of people would have not gotten medical care. The link below is a map of where there have their locations. (I tried to find a map on google images, but this is a little bit more interactive.)

 

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/our-work/countries

 



Post 6- The Global Economy

Last week in class, we looked the global economy from a sociological perspective.
It was really interesting to see the effects that globalization have had on the economy.

We talked about Rodrik's 3 sources of tension and Robinson's four concerns. I like both perspectives on this issue, but I was slightly more intrigued with Robinson's ideas.
He was first concerned about "over accumulation." That is where we see the world culture being shaped by the west. The issue with this is that the Western world consumes A LOT of resources. He was probably concerned with this, because if everyone acted like the West, we would be in real trouble with the world's natural resources and environment.
He was also concerned about the "globalization," where there is a large buffer between the world's rich and the world's poor. Some research says that this gap is getting smaller, but there is also some conflicting research. Some worry that this gap will increase with an increasing global market.
Robinson though additionally about the power individual states and politics. He believes that because of so many multinational business transactions and trade deals, that it will sort of "liquify" country boarders and lessen the power a government has.
Lastly, he was concerned with sustainability and the well-being of the planet. Not only would western world-like behavior cause an excessive and dangerous amount of consumption. There are also poor people that are also not helping out with the environment. For instance in South America, there are a lot of people barely making it by day to day. Some people are desperate for money and really think nothing of the environment. A large amount of people have no money for land to raise cattle or grow crops, so what they will do is burn down rain forest so they have some land to work with. The issue is that the soil will not be very good for long and the people will continue to burn down the forest for more land; they have to do it for survival.

In my opinion, I really believe that the western countries should reevaluate the way they are displaying themselves to others. We should really cut down on our use of resources, energy, etc. That way, developing countries cannot justify what they are doing. I honestly do not think pointing our fingers at developing countries, because they are trying to get ahead of the game and if we limit them significantly on their consumption, they may never improve.

Here is an info-graphic that may help you visualize just a fraction of what the US and other Western Countries are consuming in terms of oil. This was very eye opening.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/world-oil-consumption-001.jpg