Adam Menter’s Blog

Check out this website: http://greatfirewallofchina.org/.  It tests any URL to see if it is blocked in China.  For example, http://www.dalailama.com/ - blocked.  I was surprised to see that GreenerMind.com did not show up as blocked.  We had a lot of trouble viewing it in China.  To update it we had to use a Falun Gong mini-ap that rerouted the data through Europe.

An interesting site - and an interesting social evolution.  I can’t think of any other time in history where it has been possible to have such transparent visibility into censorship.  The world is SO interconnected and information flows so easily that, in my opinion, it is just a matter of time until this Great FireWall of China falls.  But maybe that’s all the time the CPC needs to ease it’s population into the information age.

The following quote - about how the thoughtfulness of documentation in the business world may have decreased due to the advent of word processors - was interesting and rang true for me:

” Consider the word processor. Before this amazing “labor-saver,” someone had to type the entire document. You couldn’t cut and past almost effortlessly from other documents or old versions of the same document. Because retyping was so hard, you invested more thought in each version…Verbosity was also a problem - if your document was too big, no one would type it. The electronic thesaurus hasn’t helped communications…because it’s so easy for people to find fancy alternatives to plain-Jane but well-understood words.”

From Customer Centered Products by Ivy Hooks and Kristin Farry, pg 247.

The process of thinking is different than that of writing or editing.  Word processing has made manipulating words and ideas so easy that sometimes it’s easy to gloss over the content and presentation of what you are saying. While cranking stuff out I sometimes have to take a step back and really challenge myself to push my thinking to the next level. Jump Associates has been pretty good about pushing me to do that.