Technology, Society, Global Dominance and Human Development

For this weeks lesson, we discussed global dominance in the various sectors namely social, cultural, military and economic. Regarding social dominance and media, I found this rather interesting image which describes the evolution of social media ever since the first email was sent in 1971.

Credit to: www.onlineschools.org

We also discussed about the shift of the global dominance from the UK in the past to the US at present and very possibly to China in the future. As seen in recent articles, China is even strengthening their military prowess at rates which are more rapid than expected, while the economy in the US is in crisis indicating that global dominance in these sectors are slowly but surely shifting in the direction of China.

Prof showed us the “Shahi Organizational Behaviour Model for Identifying Innovation Leaders and Dominant Players” which I thought was pretty interesting. It basically states that for every society or corporation, there will be a dominant player, a falling star that used to be the dominant player and a rising star that will potentially take over as the dominant player. The example of football clubs in the English Premier League was used to explain the diagram and it really fit perfectly into the model where Manchester United, Manchester City and Arsenal were the dominant player, rising star and falling star respectively. I learnt from this model that a good leader must be willing to listen and learn to others and not have a closed perspective, believing that whatever he knows is right and is the only way to go. We have to constantly improve ourselves by taking advice from others in order to climb up to the top and become the ‘dominant player’.

We also had our first individual presenters for twc. We had Jannah presenting on whether Google was making people stupider. I feel that Google has certainly made us lazier, but definitely not stupider as we still have to analyze and be able to comprehend the information given to us. Meng Xin presented on technology and the possibility of immortality in the near future. I’m rather skeptical about the idea of immortality, as the article states that humans would become more and more like robots, being fitted with mechanical parts in order to keep us going. Personally I’d rather not be kept alive than to turn into a cyborg just to live forever.

Overall I would rate this week’s lesson an 8/10. The lesson content was really interesting although a few more videos could have made it better. The individual presenters were also very well prepared and knew their facts well and they really set the bar high for future presenters such as myself.

I have never actually had a blog before, so I wasn’t too thrilled to find out that one of my TWC assignments was to set up a personal blog journal and that it would be 10% of my total grade. L

Anyway the first lesson was pretty interesting, as we got a preview of what’s in stall for us this term. We viewed a video entitled “Shift Happens”, which is basically various facts and statistics related to globalization. One statistic that really caught my attention was that so much new information is being generated every year, such that half of what we are about to learn in our first year would be outdated by the time we get to year three. Hmm.. makes me wonder if I should be selective with my studying.

We also went through the “Timeline of Time”, which is a timeline of all the major events that took place since the creation of the universe, which was about 14,000,000,000 years ago. I thought that this part of the lesson was pretty dry, as it’s really just a long list of events. However I did pick out several interesting events, like that the Mayan calendar ends in year 2012 and that it indicates the end of the universe.

Next, we watched an excerpt from a documentary entitled “Guns, Germs and Steel” in which a New Guinean named Yali posed the question, “Why do white people have so much cargo, but we New Guineans have so little?” Prof got us to discuss the answer to Yali’s question, and some suggested that the “whites” were more willing to explore outside the boundaries of their lands or rather required to do so in order to survive. Also, the availability of various resources to New Guineans for survival was probably one of the reasons why they did not develop as much as the rest of the world. They were probably also satisfied with their lives and as such did not find various ways and means to improve it further. This video also got me thinking if the New Guineans were happier and more satisfied with their lives than us, with all our convenient gadgets and a much larger variety of everything else.

Overall, I would rate this lesson an 8/10, as it wasn’t overloaded with information. The lesson also wasn’t too dry and the videos made it even more interesting. However I was hoping to watch the rest of “Guns, Germs and Steel”, but I guess that’s an unofficial assignment I have to do during my free time. I’m sort of looking forward to the next lesson. Haha.