Some time ago, Whitney Hoffman, Andrea Ross and I published a conversation about myopia in community, social media and personal projects. The premise of our talk (without having listened to the recording since we published it) is that seeking to understand means achieving both a broader and deeper view of the world around you and tying it to language you can understand.
In his 2010 TEDTalk How to listen to global voices, Ethan Zuckerman explains that a myopic view of the world comes from not looking beyond ourselves, and living in a world in which data doesn’t always travel faster than atoms (as much as we might wish to believe otherwise). Mr. Zuckerman makes a fantastic case for exposing ourselves to different languages and cultures, and seeking to understand that which we don’t.
