"Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography." Terry Pratchett
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The World of WikiLeaks
Why Study Geography?
I still am not an expert, far from it, but the exposure to new fields is always broadening and this one has been no exception. I now know where Singapore is. I know about the Japan Model, and I know why deserts are often near mountain ranges. I haven't mastered Google Earth but I know that it exists and that it has functionalities which I never suspected.
So why study geography? Some answers are here, but my personal answer is simply that new thoughts stretch your mind in unexpected directions. Thanks to all who made this class a worthwhile experience.
The Ninth Nuclear Power?
Our Man in the Orient: Japan
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Not really about geography but . . . . .
PS to Professor Ernst: I know this does not count towards my quota, but I hope you enjoy reading it nonetheless.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
The level of Internet freedom “is better than in any other Arab country, but it is not good.”
In an earlier world where "free press" really needed a printing press, soldiers could effectively police their jurisdiction by breaking down doors and smashing the machinery of duplication. Today anyone with internet access can flood the world with their opinions, as YouTube recently recognized as it was persuaded to remove jihadist content from its site. As I have suggested in previous posts, the meaning of borders diminishes every day even while the power of locality remains strong. Lebanon is "free-er" than nearby Syria, so Syrians can still be shot for criticizing their government. But criticism remains available to Syrians as long as they can get on-line. Freedom to speak has always entailed freedom to listen and until dictators learn how to stop electrons at the borders, they cannot staunch the invasion of cyber insurgency.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Earth Writer returns after a litigation induced hiatus
"The tunnel, which would have stretched under the Hudson from North Bergen, N.J., to a new station deep below 34th Street in Manhattan, was intended to double the number of trains that could enter the city from the west each day. The project’s planners said the additional trains would alleviate congestion on local roads, reduce pollution, help the growth of the region’s economy and raise property values for suburban homeowners," according to The New York Times.
This seems to me, at first blush, to be a classic confrontation between geography (which militated strongly in favor of the project) and politics (which allowed its demise because of economic posturing). Deeper analysis may put geographical forces on both sides of the issue. Physical geography -- the project lessens travel time and thus makes distant sites closer --loses out to cultural geography -- which informs the governor that political considerations among his conservative voting base makes this a wise electoral decision.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
All geography is local
Monday, September 6, 2010
Does globalization diminish cultural diversity? Is that really the question?
The scholar John Sexton, president of NYU, puts it this way during an interview with The Huffington Post: "I think the world at this point is miniaturizing. It's miniaturizing in every way so 'gating strategies' are utterly useless at this point. We just learned that you can't gate off of an economy, something we should have known long ago. Clearly you can't gate off the flow of people and ideas and information, so the world is becoming miniaturized, and the question I think, and maybe the most important question of the century is, how is humankind going to react to that miniaturization?"
That seems to me undeniably true. As distant causes have immediate and unavoidable worldwide results and faraway ideas and discoveries have a real time influential availability, the thought that we can isolate -- or even insulate -- our "cultural" development into a localized phenomenon is becoming increasingly obsolete.
Some will object. Local identity and national or regional exceptualism are strong forces. It may be, as Wordsworth wrote two hundred years ago, that "the world is too much with us" but the only way out of this experience is backwards, and that direction is lost to us forever. I hope.
For more, watch economist Jagdish Bhagwati's remarks at The Globalization Arguments.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
What makes North "north"?
As the fictional character Dr Don Fallows tells White House staffers CJ Craig and Josh Lyman on this clip from The West Wing, because of the Mercator Projection and its distortions, "Nothing is where you think it is." The Mercator Projection distortion does more than offer a confusing and incorrect view of the world, it implicates issues of social justice by allowing the First World -- North America and Europe -- to appear bigger, and therefore more important that other less favored world areas. "In our society we unconciously equate size with importance and ecven power," explains Fallows.
The cartograpohers in this episode argue for another kind of map, one which is more accurate as to size, shape, and location. It is called the Peters Projection.
It really exists, and it looks like this:
But wait, there's more.
The top-and-bottom orientation makes the Northern hemisphere -- where the First World is -- seem primary, elevated, and exalted, while the places in the Southern Hemisphere -- the African, South American and Asian Second and Third World are, well, on the "bottom" of the world. In truth, of course, neither is more accurate than the other. On a spinning planet which revolves around a star in a universe which has no top-and-bottom orientation, what -- other than the cultural egotism of the countries which decided -- makes North "north"???
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Playing for Change:World Geography and the Information Revolution
In our second session the class discussed the Information Revolution, a term that usually refers to the effects of dramatic technological improvements in communications, data storage, and computing. The relation to world geography is obvious -- just as the Industrial Revolution effectively shrunk the globe by reducing the time for travel to distant points, the Information Revolution has shrunk it further reducing the time for communicating with distant points -- often allowing for an effective time delay of zero (a phenomenon which has given rise to the curiously appropriate phrase "real time," as if previous delays made the passage of time more artificial).
But as the study of Geography is at least partially the study of locations, instantaneous communications can be considered to make the entire world one super-location. If it takes zero time to get to another place (even though virtually), then is it really another place at all?
Which brings me (finally) to Playing for Change. According to Wikipedia, Playing for Change is "a multimedia music project created by the American producer and sound engineer Mark Johnson with his Timeless Media Group, that seeks to bring together musicians from around the world." But just watch this video a few times. PFC is really a way, impossible before the Information Revolution, for musicians from around the world to collaborate on the same performance, while they are miles -- and often thousands of miles -- apart from one another. They bring the culture of their actual location into a concert which takes place -- where? The PFC website says that they are "connecting the world through music." Maybe they are. But it seems to me that Shakespeare's old maxim that "all the world's a stage" has now become literally (and virtually) true.