Reflection on “The Bottom Billion”

What Collier described in the “The Bottom Billion” is a land that eagerly needs help from the developed world. I used to think that Africa is a place that full of hunger and chaos, and it is. An ordinary person like me, I got the impression of Africa from the mainstream media, where we usually see African suffering under really harsh conditions, such as the internal political issues, the ethical and race conflicts, natural disasters, lack of food, shortage of medical and education…so and on and on, seems like that’s the most unfortunate land in the world while we sit comfortably in our back yard and sip at our iced tea.

According to Mr. Collier, the bottom billion societies are caught in at least one of four traps which prevent them from converging on the developed world. But Collier views these traps are “serious but fixable”, the poor countries must rescue themselves but they defenitely need help from outside. So why should we care? Why those bottom billions’ life matter to most of the lucky us? The answer to me is simple – because we are human beings who share this globe with others, as Collier mentioned in the book, we carry responsibilities, it would be really arrogant or even ignorant to only watch for our selves and pretent everything is just great. The low life-quality of the poor countries already costs us money and life, think in this way, if there was no these hard-to-fix problems in Africa, things like Somalian pirates wouldn’t happened, and that was just the iceberg of a huge hidden trouble we or our children need to face in the future. How do we want this world to become? What kind of world we are leaving to the generations behind us? These are why the “bottom billion” matter to us.

The solutions Collier suggested in the book need lots of coordinations. Unfortunately, this seem very difficult due to many reasons. Besides the differences among donors from developed countries, there are those notorious oppressors and civil wars to deal with. Even Collier admits that those countries’ situation won’t be better in the decent decades.

As Collier suggested in the book that E-services now have the potential to deliver rapid economic growth and he took India as an example. But what’s happening in Uganda is a different story than what had happened in India. When a 8 year old child is expected to carry a gun and shoot people for his own safety, how do we expect that he cares about using a computer and get on Internet??

But having good telecommunication infrastructure indeed can offer the chance for people to get more knowledge about what’s going on there and here. It means digital media could be applied among “helpers” such as UN members, aid agencies and donors to work on the differences and try to figure out the real helpful solutions. For those poor countries, cell phones might be an easier method for digital communication if the telecommunication businesses can be managed normally and fairly.

This book is a very informative read and it makes me start to think about what role we “ordinary people” should play in this world.

Reflection on Bill Wasik’s speech.

For Bill Wasik, Kindle is a great invention is because it allows people to download heavy books into one small device, and those who do not like it is because they like to jump frm piece to piece instead of setteling down. Paying for something like “content” is too much of commitment.

I disagree with Mr. Wasik of the “commitment phobia” theory. The reason that I haven’t purchased a Kindle and the reason that I do not purchase digital books is simply because I prefer the feeling of touching the real book and paper. Reading books from the computer monitor always give me headache ten minutes after I start it.

But I agree with that short content will eventually go free online. Actually, it is already free (if we are not talking about internet pornography). Because people tend to think short content is not as important/valuable as the long ones. Long content usually is more serious and offers more in depth. For example, people would expect to get free “joke collection” but wouldn’t think they could get a free copy of “Harry Potter” online. So I guess it leaves some interesting questions for content creators and publisher to fugure out how to make revenue from their content if they decide to join the Internet market (It’s not really possible for themto say no to online viewers now).

The length matters

In the past, we all agreed that most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video. The notion “shorter videos work better on the web” seemed like a rule. But the rule has changed. I know more and more people watch streaming videos online, and each clip is longer than 5 minutes. Most of them watch TV shows on Internet now because they can watch them in bed.

Duration is a big factor and it sometimes decides the popularity of a video. But it also depends on the type of the video. If it is a serious discussion of a serious topic, I’d like to know deeper about the issue andI’d like to hear more people’s opinions from the interviews. But if it is a funny video shows a adorable baby or kitten, even though I love those things, I probably would not want to spend more than 2 minutes on it.

Of course it does not mean short videos are out of web soon. It only means people are getting more comfortable to watch a full-length show on Internet, even though TV is still quite irreplaceable, but people are moving and audience has more channel options.

What is a show? It is a easy question for Television industry. But for Internet, the wild-west, the answer is still hard to define. I watch “House MD” online, and I am sure that is a show, because it is a TV drama. Is “Funny dancing in our wedding” on Youtube a show? I don’t know, even it attracts millions of online viewers, I still can’t really say it is a show.

That’s why it is important to categorize online videos. So we can do more efficient measurments, we can research more Internet ecosystem on a more accurate base and marketers would have better stradegy ideas.  Sacerdoti is right, we can’t compare apples to lettuce. For TV shows, there are categories of drama, comedy, documentary, interviews…etc, so why can’t it happen on Internet? Only by classify online videos can we begin to have the discussion about the claim of the “most popular shows” on the Internet.

Where am I going?

I don’t need to repeat here about how social media has changed the internet user behavior, the advertising business, the marketing strategies, and how it connects people in a brand new way. What are we talking about in this week’s entry is what am I going to do or what do I wish to do with social media.

Being a mother, when life is occupied by diapers and an always-messy house, it is sometimes hard for me to think about myself and my goals for life now. But I take my time that I spend on study as an escape and personal vacation, and I do have things that I wish someday could be accomplished with the help of social media, maybe not just by me, but also by people who are willing to do something to brighten our children’s future.

Social media is not the answer for everything. It is true that it has opened a different direction to how to connect people, how to express ourselves and how to make influence. But so far I haven’t seen any of these social media solutions telling us how to use it to improve education. My child is three years old, he can use mouse or his finger to pick his favorite games on Internet and spend an hour on it happily. I don’t blame him for enjoying technologies, I know someday he will be one of the million Internet users who has been online since they were infants. I wish he will actually learn something from social media tools, not just chat thru the class when his teachers are yelling on the stage.

Second, I believe print media won’t vanish. It will reappear with a different image. While the citizen-jourlist will be all over the place then, the fairness and objectiveness will also be the problems of their articles. We still need trained and professional writers to give us serious and in-depth stories.

Last, it is really a dream to hope that everybody realize the importance of protecting our planet. There are already tons of social media sites try to enforce the idea, but it is not something can be solved solely by Internet. We will fugure out how to really make the connection with people who care and who DON’T care, and try our best to make our influence.

Videos on Newspapers

It’s been my daily habit to check news online ever since I had my own computer with Internet access many years ago. (It’s free and I don’t have to throw the heavy papers out every week!) Usually I don’t go for those videos because I can read same stories on the same site. Maybe that’s one of the problems those news websites need to think about. The content of those videos and the text news are overlapping, so it reduced the traffic of the video.

Recently I found an interesting newspaper website that avoids that problem. The Stranger is a weekly newspaper that covers Seattle news, politics, music, movies and events and it somehow has quite honest view about things. On its website, there is a video section where audience can see what they can’t see from its text articles such as interviews of local artists, coverages of local issues or certain subjects. I think it is a smart move for seprating video and article sections.

But The Strangers does not put its videos on a noticeable spot. Viewers have to pull the page down to almost bottom to see the video section or dig into it’s “blog” section then try to find the hiding videos.  Maybe the editors aren’t confident enough about the streaming media yet, or maybe video media is not The Strangers pays its attention on yet. Generally speaking, most newspaper websites can do a lot more than they can do today. Even with WashingtonPost.com, its homepage is predominantly words and pictures.

It would be wise for newspaper sites to offer a better mix of content formats, and cease being so word-dominated. Combining all of the aviliable media- words, video and audio, make sure each story is distinct. It also can make a site that attracts younger viewers.