This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on March 16, 2009.

In the spirit of the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday last Friday, I’d like to celebrate my favorite thing on the Web right now: Twitter.

On the surface, it is deceptively simple. It’s a social network and a micro-blogging tool in which you exchange 140-character updates with your “followers.” These blurbs are publicly visible by default, but can be restricted to just your friends.

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This paper was submitted for “Global Studies 100A: Globalization – Concepts and History” with Professor Russell Burgos, Professor David Rigby, Professor Dominic Thomas and Aron Ballard in Winter 2009.

Globalization will strengthen the United States absolutely and not only at the expense of other actors. In the past and currently, the US has benefited economically and politically, however unfairly, from smaller and weaker economies. In the long run, the US – as the nation-state becomes more relevant again – will remain a leading world power, but in a different context. In analyzing the changing role of the nation-state and the economic logic of governance, I believe that the US will be expected to participate and more importantly, lead, in a plurilaterialist system, as proposed by Philip Cerny, alongside potential super powers even if it requires learning the limits of its hegemony.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on February 2, 2009.

The information highway just got a little more crowded. There are now more than 1 billion people on the Internet, according to comScore, an Internet research firm. The Internet’s democratization of information has made a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge easily accessible. However, this also has its pitfalls.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, wrote, “The notion that the world’s knowledge is literally at your fingertips is very compelling and is very beguiling.”

The question remains: Is the Internet making us stupid?

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on January 16, 2009.

During a visit to the tech hub that is Silicon Valley, Barack Obama, the biggest geek to hit the White House since Al Gore, touted a new position in White House if he were elected: Chief Technology Officer. But with the economic state of our country still volatile, the little-known CTO appointment seemed irrelevant.

Au contraire; it is very relevant if we want to regain our economic strength and be competitive again in a continually globalizing world.

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This collection of analyses was submitted for “History 2B: Social Knowledge and Social Power” with Professor Sharon Traweek in Winter 2009.

Heinze, From Scarcity to Abundance, 1990
Heinze’s topic focused on immigrants as consumers, but emphasized Jewish immigrants in particular. Heinze set out to explore why there was such a disparity between the consumption patterns of Jewish people who have immigrated to the United States versus those who have not. His hypothesis involves how Jewish immigrants interpret the values of the United States, link that to their religious past to view “America as a haven” (196) and assimilate accordingly. Thus, as Heinze concludes, Jewish immigrants are more absorbed in wanting to adopt US values, particularly consumerism, to more quickly adopt to their new home. Heinze mainly uses statistics and observations, whether his own or those noted in cultural histories.

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