W7 Reading Reflection – I love you and I hate you.
November 11, 2007
It’s not surprising to know the result of the research in “Around the World Wide Web in 80 Days.” While more educated people tend to use internet for political guidance and financial information, the female users tend to use internet for family and health information. I wish this research could also show if gender plays an important key of online political information seeking, but that’s not the topic here this time.
About the other article, “The Tragedy of Commons”, I found it very interesting and enjoyable to read even though I think Hardin is somehow a little cynical. I mean, to against human having the right of breeding, that sounds too communism. Population problems is complicated, they can not be taken solely on the reasons that Hardin provided since “the globe village” does not mean all human beings now belong to one country, or the globle warming problem would be much easier to solve,too.
Let’s take a look of online world now, it is a place people think where “globle villiage” is, has big population problems already. Admit it, how much times we have wasted on internet? Almost every time, when I get online just for email checking, or to take a short break during the “home work”sessions, I end up drowning in the MSN conversation, blogs, gardening websites (well…just me) and spent too much time on those things that I did not plan to do. And I HATE those forwarding jokes and “meaningful” articles in my email box, when you get at least 20 of them each day, non of them is interesting anymore.
As for my experience with electronic government, I do not really trust it. I’d rather check some big news websites for political information. There are many politician’s blogs online now, they all tend to talk for themselves for more votes, I don’t feel there is any sincereness and truth. The supporters pour their “love” to those blogs, when there is any different voice from a message poster, those fans start to attack him or her. For me, it is just too painful to see things like that.
Years ago, I tried to send an email to the mayor of Taipei to complain about the porn ads on an English newspaper in Taipei. I did get a response, but it was from the automatic response system. Well, at least that was a start! I haven’t tried to contact government again since, maybe the service is better now.
I still give positive feedback to online eDemocrocy. It is still an open window from the government for everybody to communicate with it. But before asking people to trust it, we need to educate both people and politicians, to make good use of it, not to pollute it. It does not have any technical solution, it needs moral solution.
Questions:
- How to tell people stop forwarding junk emails without hurting their feelings? ( I guess it’s not a question for our class, but I really wish to know how!)
- How to build trust of online democracy?
- How the internet’s impact on the upcoming elections?
Entry Filed under: Com546 Reading Reflection. Tags: com546 reading reflection.
3 Comments Add your own
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
1. Questions - Week 7 « evolution and trends in digital media technologies | November 12, 2007 at 5:02 pm
[...] Yu-Lan (Sharlan) [...]
2. kmastin | November 13, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Hi Sharlen,
I think the problem with eDemocracy right now, is that it does not adequately reflect the entire population. There are many people who are under-represented by the political Internet polls and blogs. It seems that the largest online demographic for political participation falls squarely on white, middle class, college aged people. The Americans on the other side of the generation gap (maybe any age from 35 and up) just don’t engage the political aspect of the Internet with as much fervor as those on the younger side of the ‘gap.’
I think that in the next generation the participation will be more representative of our society, since every generation from now on will be familiar with the Internet. This process may be considerably slower in developing countries, with maybe an overall lag in the general participation of society.
3. sfrost | November 20, 2007 at 11:58 am
I agree that the author of “The Tragedy of the Commons” seems very cynical. But I understand his points of view about the necessity to choose which freedoms to preserve and that a law is the only way to reduce the growth rate of the population.
If everyone has the freedom to breed as they choose and the growth rate of the population continues the way it is, the world will run out of the necessities to sustain the entire population. At that point many other freedoms we enjoy today will be in jeopardy. At some point we may have to choose which freedoms are more important to us. I don’t think it is a choice any of us would like to make, or one that we will have to make. But future generations may find themselves in a tough situation if we continue reproducing at the rate current rate.
I understand the authors reasoning for why laws would be the only way to reign in population growth, but it presents several problems. I don’t see how it would be possible to create or enforce a global law on breeding. And what would happen if someone broke the law? Those are questions I would never want to have to answer. This whole topic is a little scary and very controversial.