The western world and the non western world

The United States, in particular, and the western world in general have ‘peddled’ worldwide for many decades the virtues of liberal democracy and the associated universal suffrage. As the Arab Spring [Dec 2010 to mid 2012] illustrated the energy of nurtured popular aspirations, mobilised and in part co-ordinated by contemporary communications, that is by the mobile phone, made political ambitions more achievable. The unleashed ambitions brought the mass movements into conflict with either entrenched elites [the Army in Egypt] or sectional tribal interests [Libya] or awakened sectional religious and social groupings [Syria and Iraq]. The ensuring conflicts have put back the achievement of liberal democratic western ideals.

Contributor Geoff Williams. Sempringham eLearning Office

What's not to like about ‘like’!

In the office we heard an older teenager, well endowed with courage and an appetite for adventure, talk about her application to volunteer for the one-way Mars trip. The one-way journey is scheduled to take off in about 10 years’ time. The young woman's expression was littered with the word like, added incongruously at the end of phrases were an older speaker would add a coma. Kant proposed that people communicate their thoughts successfully because the categories, the underlying concepts, are shared throughout society and that we learn these categories by inference from day-to-day speech ‘on our mother’s knee’. The spread of the contemporary use of ‘like’ that spread rapidly through teenage talk possibly because teenagers lack the protection of cultivated articulation, points to the teenage years are a key conduit and locomotive for cultural change. Without the protection of established expression ‘like’ spread as rapidly as ebola in West Africa. We will point up the growing emphasis of culture in History by further posts over the next sixty days. (See, for example, post dated 5 March 2015)

Contributor Geoff Williams. Sempringham eLearning Office