10/25/11 Blog Post

I decided to blog about the articles “Moral Engagement” by Kwame Anthony Appiah and “While I Was Sleeping” by Thomas L. Freidman. In “Moral Engagement”, Appiah writes about how things have different meanings and connotations in different cultures. He gives an example in the section labeled “Family Matters”. Where he grew up, a man was expected to take care and provide for all of his family on his mother’s side. That is something we are not used to. He then begins to write about the different cultural taboos that we think are wrong because the society we live believes they are. Appiah believes that cultural taboos can be the cause of many human characteristics the have become more common over the years such as homosexuality.

In the article “While I Was Sleeping”, Freidman states that the world has slowly “flattened” itself. After going to India to see why they have come so important to American outsourcing and why we rely so heavily on them, he realized that with all our technology these days we have all become interconnected. He states that this had made our globe tiny, something that he calls Globalization 3.0, which has made it easier for everyone in the world to interact with one another. He sees this as both a positive and a negative thing. It can be positive because everyone is in contact with one another if they need something and negative because people, such as terrorists, can use this interconnectedness in harmful ways