Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Is this Blog Really Relevant To Anyone?:)

Today as I was sitting wondering where to go to find an interesting article to post and review for content analysis; I decided that I would write my own. I did this on my other blog as well and I think I will begin a new trend of doing it one or two times a week as the mood hits me(maybe more) just depends. I will call this article a case study of the relevance of cultural relativism and human rights from an internet readers perspective approach. The first thing I really wanted to share with you is the first time I ever heard of this notion "cultural relativism". I was still a political science undergraduate in my senior year and my professor allowed me to sign up for what is called an "independent study" for three credits. He said the topic was going to be "cultural relativism". The directions were quite simple; using whatever scholarly sources you choose, write a paper and discuss this notion of cultural relativism and present to me your analysis of whether it is a theory that holds water or whether it should be disregarded in political science research. I said "OK". So that was several years ago. Anyways, I did my thing and all, presented my research and what have you and received my grade etc etc. Today I am not convinced if he agreed or disagreed with my findings, because I received no feedback whatsoever on my report.(except for a grade of course) However I made an argument for and of course against the notion from a moderate viewpoint. "always taking the middle-ground in college for some reason not steering to far left or to far right of center). Anyway back on topic, for today's post I decided to do some "relevance" shopping so to speak. So, I did 8 searches via the internet using the two most popular search engines Yahoo and Google respectively. Here are my results for you to have a look at" Search Terms Yahoo Number of Hits Cultural Relativism 1,040,000 Cultural Relativism and Human Rights 669,000 Human Rights 946,000,000 Human Rights and Cultural Relativism 673,000 Search Terms Google Number of Hits Cultural Relativism 569,000 Cultural Relativism and Human Rights 150,000 Human Rights 131,000,000 Human Rights and Cultural Relativism 148,000 There are interesting findings here for discussion right away. You see any? Of course you do. First off, Yahoo archives there files for a much longer time than Google or something like that I would say! Human Rights had very high hits on both searches but so did Cultural Relativism. When the terms were combined in either direction the numbers went down but they are still significant numbers! So you see? We are talking about two notions that others have been discussing for a very very long time and apparently it has been difficult to come up with some kind of consensus. So it seems anyway. Are these still worthy topics of debate according to these numbers?... Many scholars, writers from other disciplines, etc. have been writing about human rights and cultural relativism and publishing on the web for a very long time. SO........ I have to make my content unique to keep my readers coming back because there is plenty of content out there to look at right? That is why I like to do "content analysis" of other writers work on many occasions because I can analyze and give my viewpoint on there viewpoint which makes an interesting commentary. This is how dialogue and education process works. That's why it is called blogging. I hope you enjoyed my first article on this site. There will be many more to come. Best William

1 comment:

Nodami said...

By the way my professor said that internet as source is not that effective, he really wants as to use books as source hehehe, It is not bad if you write about this topic even though there are many people who write this topic, the important thing is that you write what really interest you, thanks