global voices

 

I’m sitting around in my robe exhausted this morning and getting to blogging late. Eileen gets on a plane this afternoon to fly away to California. I wish I was going with her. But I didn’t want to miss a weekend at work. Stupid me. I’ll drive her to the airport.

Sometime today I’m figuring my Mom will need a ride home from the hospital. The nurses assured me the hospital could work with my schedule to arrange the time. I will go over this morning and say hi to Mom and find out if any decision has been made for her release.

This morning I continued reading Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. 

The lack of connected footnotes drives me to check stuff out on the web. In order to flip back and forth between where I’m at in the text and the footnotes I have disciplined myself to do no other highlighting or put notes in the ebook. The reason for this is that they quickly mount up and the Kindle interface insists that I page from the beginning of notes each time I access it. If that doesn’t make sense, just know that it’s I needlessly cumbersome.

It occurs to me that ebooks are not designed by people who love to read. Or at least people like me. I miss knowing conceptually where I’m at in the book especially. I usually read footnotes. But I find that since I read at an enlarged font setting the Kindle reader sometimes has difficulty returning me to where I’m at in the book from a footnote.

But I do like the convenience of the ereader. I love being able to discover a book I’m interested in and within minutes have it on my ereader. Also the compactness of carrying around a library is invaluable to me.

Anyway in Rewire I discovered that the author, Ethan Zuckermann, is involved with the organization Global Voices (“The world is talking. Are you listening?”). I think a lot about how to connect to the world and get as much perspective on stuff as I can stand. I think this is one benefit from living in a small town where my paths do not often cross with people interested in the stuff I am interested in.

I recognized Global Voices because I follow them on Facebooger (link to their page). “Emerging citizen media” as they call it there interests me a lot. Despite the sound of American minds snapping shut, I am encouraged that journalism and information is thriving. One does have to seek it out.

Zuckermann points out that it was an aha moment for him and Global Voices when they realized that they not only had the task of bring global stories into the limelight of world wide availability, they also had to create demand. Ultimately it becomes a question of visibility and attracting attention to interesting stories.

Here are the last two on their Facebook stream:

reddreamballet

AND

brazlianwomen

I’ve rigged the images above so that if you click on them you should go to the story if it happens to interest you.

As I say once or twice a day (usually under my breath), I love the Interwebs.

2 thoughts on “global voices

  1. So happy to see you are enjoying the book. Good stuff. Overall Zuckerman is quite an optimist and it’s infectious.

    Also: nice sticker at the end of your post. Keeps making me giggle — the internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up. heheheehe

  2. Yes. thank you again for giving me a copy of it. I’m learning quite a bit. I just checked out the library copy of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers which Zuckerman mentions. I think I might read it as well.

    Glad you liked the sticker. Heh. love from Dad

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