My thoughts on Cynthia's article

While reading the article "Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution," by Cynthia Selfe, she talks about how technology has created a change so that it can "help us create a global village in which the peoples of the world are all connected, communicating with one another and cooperating for the commonweal. According to this popular social narrative, the computer network that spans the globe will serve to erase meaningless geopolitical borders, eliminate racial and ethnic differences, re-establish a historical familial relationship which binds together the peoples of the world regardless of race, ethnicity, or location." Taking this idea of today's technology, we will simply create an electronic colony; as in all the people in the world are going to be connected to each other and communicate with each other through the world wide web. For example, people in Canada are communicating with people in China; they don't know each other in person, but with technology, they know each other through communication. The idea of creating a "Global Village" through technology can happen, but it won't likely happen because we can just communicate through technology thus making us an electronic colony (people who are connected to everything). We like to believe that technology will be the global village, but it turned out to be the electronic colony. While reading these segments from the article, I believe that this is the most important part that Cynthia talks about.

Coming out of this part of the article, I believe that we need to know what it is to be in a global village instead of an electronic colony. First of all, let's take a look at world hunger in Africa. There is a lot of people starving all over in that country and they will have the first-hand experience in that subject. Then take a look at someone in the United States that has access to the internet. That person will look on there and find out what's the latest situation in Africa and find out exactly what is going on. He can choose to send a donation if he please if he cares that much; but that's all he is doing, he is simply clicking around on the internet and absorbing all the information and possibly sending a donation by clicking a button. He has no idea (no first-hand experience) of the troubles in Africa, he has only seen it on the computer. In order for it to become a global village, the people that are the donators will have to travel to Africa and experience the hardships first-hand. They will have to step in their shoes and contribute to the cause locally. There will certainly need to be more traveling among races to fully communicate and contribute to each other's causes. But for right now, I believe a lot of people will just have to use the good old technology to see what's happening around them; no matter what race or ethnicity, we will all contribute through the web and first-hand for some people.