Nudges towards the online world Discount F50 Soccer Sale Online beyond Facebook

Nudges towards the online world beyond Facebook

Inside looking in (Image: Contrasto/Eyevine)

The global scope of the internet has only made us more insular, but there is a solution, says Ethan Zuckerman in his new book Rewire

YOU'RE browsing a menu peppered with healthy food - and end up ordering the cheeseburger. The mere presence of salad somehow makes it easier to choose the unhealthy option.

This well-known heuristic also informs the way we use the internet, says Ethan Zuckerman, who directs the Center for Civic Media at MIT, in his book Rewire. Like the salad on the menu, the web's ability to put information about important global topics at our fingertips makes us more likely to burrow into our Facebook friends' feed Buy Nike Magista Shoes Online.

This tendency has contributed to a steep decline in our consumption of news about people who aren't like us. Zuckerman shows how foreign news coverage in most US magazines and newspapers fell precipitously between 1979 and 2009. We demand more local and less international news, and it's a tribalism that makes us bad global citizens, says Zuckerman.

The solution, if we wish to seek one, may lie in our allergy to shame, as Zuckerman illustrates in an amusing account of the consequences of US ignorance. During a soccer game between Brazil and North Korea in the 2010 World Cup, the top trending topic on Twitter was "Cala Boca Galvão". The Galvão bird, Brazilian tweeters explained, is hunted to extinction - every retweet would donate $0.10 to its conservation Adidas Nitrocharge Shoes. The meme was soon unmasked: Cala Boca Galvão means "Shut up, Galvão", a joke aimed at the sports commentator Galvão Bueno - but also at the US twittersphere which ceaselessly retweeted it.

Shame is a powerful motivator, but it will need a boost from technology. Zuckerman has several inspiring suggestions for how to rewire the internet to nudge us to more global content, including improved machine translation to help us read posts in other languages. His point is best summed up in a quote from mathematician Duncan Watts: "Just because something seems far away, and just because it happens in a language you don't understand, doesn't make it irrelevant Discount F50 Soccer Sale Online." Now you just have to convince me to order the salad. New Soccer Cleat For Sale