Alex Intl 201 blog

A few months ago, my mother posted a link in our family group chat about a controversial decision made by a particularly progressive preschool teacher on Bainbridge Island. The teacher's decision provoked a great deal of thought-provoking conversation within my family about gender equality in our world. This past couple weeks, the gender equality conversations we've been having in class have reopened my thinking on the issue, and so in this blog post I'd like to try to tie together my family's conversation and our classroom conversations into some kind of cohesive whole. The teacher's decision was about which children got to play with what toys. The young boys in her class predominantly liked playing with trucks, guns, and other violent toys; the young girls in her class predominantly liked playing with dolls, toy houses, and other quintessentially female toys. She saw this as a problem, and decided to not allow the boys to play with toys like trucks or guns, and ...

So far, the most influential thing for me in this class has been Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's TED talk on the single story. This first blog post will be both an exploration of the single story within our own culture, and will provide an argument that the world is culturally flat (contrary to Pankaj Ghemawat's view in E&Z, Ch 2 reading 3). I will specifically focus on an example I brought up in class after the talk: the massive online communities that are beginning to have a pervasive influence on global culture. When I think of the central hubs of online discussion, I think of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan. Facebook and Twitter are popular for everybody; they serve as the central links of the hubs. Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan are each culturally distinct. For the purposes of this discussion, I will brand Tumblr as the home of the far-left of the political spectrum, Reddit as the intermediate home of 20-something moderate left intellectual males, and 4chan as t...