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 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 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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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on November 10, 2008.

Thousands of people campaigned tirelessly for their respective candidate, and one campaign saw the product of its hard work materialize with Obama winning the presidency. But the grueling months of campaigning are over. The political jargon from pundits is over. The passion and drive to get someone elected has reached its climax, and we are left in a state of complacency.

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