Assignment 3 Idea

One possibility for the major argument of Assignment 3 could be sports and how it acts similarly to religion.  In many case, people are more serious about their sports teams than they are about religion.  If a survey were conducted, one might even find that more people follow sports than the number of people that follow a religion.  Sports, similarly to religion, can bring people together or tear people apart.  It can act as a common ground for a conversation or cause tension between two opposing fans.  Religion has been known to cause wars, rivalries in sports have been known to cause death in extreme cases.  When you meet a fellow sports fan in general, you can instantly bond with them.  You can discuss stats, strategy, who you think will win the championship.  In religion, when you meet someone of the same faith, you instantly feel a bond with them.
Another cultural artifact I could discuss is technology.  Technology bridges any distance and makes life convenient.  It is a useful tool that makes everyday life easier and easier with each passing day.  However, technology can also cause aggression and hatred.  It can give spawn to negativity and things that weren't acceptable decades ago.  It makes file sharing and SPAMing readily available.  It has good, but it also has bad.

Intro Paragraph

  There is no "I" in team.  As cliche as that saying is, it is a timeless truth.  No matter what the situation is, one person can not carry the entire team alone.  A football team must work together to get the ball into the end zone in an effort known as "team work."  The key word here is team.  Without a team, team work is impossible.  Collaboration, very similarly to team work, can only be achieved through the cooperation of the others involved in a project.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and without the other pieces, the parts can sometimes be completely worthless.  A computer monitor will not function without the proper wiring to a working computer.  A quarter back can't throw a touch down pass if his receivers can't catch the ball.  A building will not be built if there are laborers but no engineer or vice versa.

Assignment 2

For the written Assignment 2, I would choose number 3 as my prompt.  Friedman's essay discusses the use of communication to collaborate on projects.  Nathan's essay took notice in the lack of collaboration at AnyU university.  To bridge the gap between these two, we have to look at what Friedman did in his essay.  Friedman discussed the idea of the internet as humankind's project of collaboration.  It was through the internet that terrorists were able to connect and work together on planning various attacks.  The key here is the convenience of the internet- All the information you could want is right at your fingertips.  Collaboration in college social events requires convenience in order to work.  Students aren't going to show up at a planned movie night if it happens to be scheduled the night before early classes, an exam, etc.  Similarly, students aren't going to go around and round up all of their friends of different ethnicities before heading to the cafeteria for a meal.  If the student's friends aren't going to eat at the dining hall, there is nothing the student can do about it.  I will sometimes eat with my friends who consist of all ethnic backgrounds, but sometimes I will eat alone if no one else is going to or are already at the dining hall.   In order to get collaboration in the college environment, it needs to be convenient and cater to the busy schedule of not just one student, but all students.
One of the major differences between the two works is their approach towards unity.  Friedman argues that anything that slows down or prevents the flattening of the world can be disruptive, while Nathan's essay discusses how we should strive to be individuals rather than just part of a whole such as a fraternity.  However, I don't think you can really compare these two situations.  Friedman discusses how different countries collaborate on products and services to achieve maximum efficiency, while Nathan talks about expanding your horizons and meeting new people who you can share past experiences with.  Learning how to work with an overseas partner to produce products and services won't really help you with being an individual at a college campus.  Collaboration just takes effort on the part of the collaborators.  There need to be sacrifices and compromises.  Convenience is easy, but easy doesn't get the job done.

Sports as a Global Venture

When most people think of global ventures, they think of oil and other trades, but I think sports can loosely fall into the same category.  The entire world partakes in athletics give or take a few regions.  However, the sports that each country participates in or focuses on is unique to that country.  While the United States is the dominant "exporter" of the sports that we deem "the major sports," we are not the dominant exporter of all sports.  It is difficult to argue that the United States does not have the best football, basketball and possibly baseball.  The United States is not however the dominant country when it comes to sports such as cricket, soccer, rugby or even boxing.  Similarly, there is no single country that is the best at every sport.  As an American who loves soccer, I have to watch English, Spanish or Italian soccer if I want to watch the best matches.  For people outside of the United States, they have to watch American basketball or football to get the best of those sports.  This creates an interdependency between the many nations of the world.  I'm not exactly sure what the business standpoint is on international sporting events or if the "Dell Theory" applies to the broadcasting of international sporting events, but I do believe that the political image of a country has an effect on the people that view sporting events of that country.  The United States soccer team may think twice before scheduling an International Friendly match with Iraq.  In addition, when a country is participating at a world level of any competition, they want to be judged by their performance in the event not by the actions of their country.  While sports do not play a huge role in a country's restraint to go to war the way huge corporations such as Dell do, they may still play a minor role in convincing countries that it is not in their best interest to go to war.

Assignment 1

I would like to do something about Hawaii for assignment 1.  My topic will probably be that most people have a "single story" of what Hawaii is like.  They believe that Hawaii is just a place of paradise where everyone is happy.  There is never a cloudy day or a day that goes by where Hawaii's inhabitants don't go to the beach to surf.  The truth is that Hawaii has a deeply rooted history that extends further back in time than America's existence.  The "Natives" of Hawaii are said to have arrived from Tahiti.  With them, they brought their ideas and culture to make the new land (Hawaii) their own.  They dominated the people who were already living on Hawaii (who they referred to as "mana hune" or "small power"), and forced the original inhabitants into hiding.  From this, Hawaiian culture began to develop.  The new inhabitants of Hawaii developed the way of life that became common to Hawaiians.  This system worked until foreigners arrived in Hawaii and slowly began taking over.  The foreigners brought greed and diseases that wiped out the majority of the population in the islands.  The Hawaiians were educated in different ways from the foreigners, and they were tricked into selling their land.  Eventually the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown, and people became ashamed to be Hawaiian.  They scraped their skin with coral and washed themselves with bleach in attempt to rid themselves of their dark skin.  The language and culture was forgotten, forbidden even.  In the last 50 years, the Hawaiian culture is starting to make a resurgence.  However, we are not happy.  We are not simply living in paradise.  We are minorities in our own homeland, governed by people who are not from here.  There is much more to Hawaii than most people will ever know.

Cosmopolitanism

Kwame Anthony Appiah uses the term "cosmopolitanism" to say that people are not just a part of their own community, they are a part of the world.  Cosmopolitan literally means "citizen of the cosmos," implying that what we do affects everyone else in the world (and possibly universe).  He also stresses the idea of tolerance in the world, the idea of coexisting with people of different beliefs from us.  There is no right or wrong, just a matter of opinion.  One of the best ways to coexist in the world peacefully is to talk.  Conversation is a way to learn about others' beliefs and backgrounds and learn to tolerate or even accept them.  We have to break down the barriers of "patriotism," in order to begin seeing things from other cultural stand points.  It is okay to alter a culture because it brings two cultures closer together.  Appiah uses the example of his father's circumcision to support this argument.  Circumcision was not a part of his father's culture, but it is important to be flexible with your beliefs.  The human race is often proud of the differences that make every person unique, but it is also important to share a sense of unity with the people all around you.  Disagreement is the source of conflict.

Hawaii, the Community

The community that I would like to identify and discuss is Hawaii, my home state.  Hawaii is a community because it is composed of many different people living and often times working together in a common environment.
Although everyone in the state calls the islands his or her home, each and every person varies.  Hawaii is composed of a particularly diverse ethnic population, but everyone is also diverse in their experiences in life.  Many people have lived in the islands their entire life while some are only there for an assigned time period of military duty.  Most of the Asian population came to the islands early in the 1900s to work on the plantations and have since branched out into just about every other field of work.
The community of Hawaii is also unique because it is like its own little world.  You can find just about any resource on the island.  The drive from a mountain to a beach could be as short as half an hour.  There are beautiful green mountain tops flowing with cold waterfalls and warm sandy beaches all in the same community.
Hawaii is also unique because it is a home to an indigenous group of people, the Hawaiians.  The Hawaiians are a minority in their own homeland and the mixing of ethnicities in the islands is further diluting the Hawaiian race.  Some people believe the Hawaiians to be a dying race, but they are coming back stronger than they have been in the last century.
Another aspect of Hawaii that is unique is that it is composed of many different islands, and each island is their own community within a larger community.  As you head west from the easternmost island of Hawaii, each island is older than the next.  For this reason, each island varies in population and landscape.
Another part that is pretty unique to Hawaii is its tourism.  Tourists visit the islands so frequently that Tourists in general are considered a part of our community even though each individual tourist has his or her own community.  They are from another community, but they help to form ours.

Timeline

1992: Hurricane Iniki struck Kaua'i and killed four people and caused $2 billion in damages.  Although this was not on my island, it was still a big deal to the state of Hawai'i because of the damage it caused.

1993: Clinton signs the Apology Resolution.  This was significant because he acknowledged that the overthrowing of Hawai'i by the United States was wrong.

1995: The last sugar planation on the Island of Hawai'i closes.  This is a pretty big event because sugar cane is one of the major exports of Hawai'i.

2000: US Supreme Court declared restricting voting in Office of Hawaiian Affairs to Native Hawaiians violated the 15th Amendment.  This was a huge event for me because I am part Hawaiian and I come from a school that requires Hawaiian Ancestry to attend.  Hawaiian rights is a huge deal in Hawai'i because people are always trying to take it away from us.

2001: September 11, 2001.  I was getting ready for school when I walked into my mother's bedroom to see Muslims dancing and celebrating as the twin towers and World Trade Center went down.  I was too young and naive at the time to understand what was going on.  That soon changed.

2006: An earthquake knocks out power and topples rock walls in Hawai'i.  This was big because it was the first earthquake I had ever experienced in my life.  It was also the first time school had been cancelled because of any natural doing.

2007: University of Hawai'i football goes undefeated and plays in their first BCS bowl game.  This is the first time the UH football team was really recognized at a national level.

2008: Obama is elected President.  This was a significant event because he was the first President born and raised in Hawai'i.

2010: Graduation day.  13 years at the same school finally comes to an end.  A new beginning awaits in the fall.

Community and Diversity

Community: Community is used in this essay as the many college students living and learning together at the same university.  The community is composed of an ethnically diverse group of people.  However, the people of different ethnic appearances tend to hang out mostly with their own kind.  In Nathan's study, "most students, but white students predominantly, ended up becoming close friends with people of their own ethnicity." (240).  A person of a community need not to interact with everyone in their community, he or she simply needs to coexist with the other residents.  That's not to say that unity in a community is not a good thing because it could make a dorm experience much more enjoyable.

Ego-Centered Network: A personal network of friends that serve as "the backbone of most students' social experience in the university.

Community Living Agreement: "The dos and don'ts of hall life."