Edu Blog 2

Shift Happens....
I first saw a "Shift Happens" video last year as a part of my literature class. What I was able to read fast enough astonished me. Now, watching another, 'I'm equally surprised. The first thing that read across the screen was the number of babbys that would be born in the time it took to watch the video. More kids were born in China and India then America. This didn't so much surprise me as much as it made me wander how their lives would differ from the lives of the children born in the US. Then I was informed that in the not to distant future, the number one English speaking country in the world will be, not America, not Britain...China. My jaw dropped. I had a hard time believing this at first, then I really thought about it. Every other country is being taught English as a second language. What are we learning here? Spanish.Because the population of China is much larger then America's- and constantly growing- it would make sense that all these children would be speaking English. While this is taking place in China, children here are being taught Spanish.
The next bit of information I received disgusted me. The average 21 year old has spent 20,000 hours watching TV, 10,000 hours playing video games, and 10,000 hours emailing or IMing. That's a combined amount of 40,000 hours. One year has only 8,766 hours. Put simply, the average 21 year old has waisted more then 4 and a half years of their life watching TV, playing video games, and emailing/IMing. So does this mean that the average 21 year old is actually only 17? So someone old enough to legally drink is actually barely old enough to drive? Excuse me, but thats messed up...
Another thing that surprised me was the number of text messages sent per day. The first text was sent in 1995; now the number of texts sent per day is more then the population of the world. I am proud to say that I am not contributing to this statistic, seeing as my phone doesn't have text messaging on it.
Its hard to find someone now who doesn't have a myspace. This is understandable, because if myspace was a country, it would be the eighth largest in the world. I'm not sure how current this information is, but on average, 230,000 people join myspace per day. This number could be increasing drastically, or diminishing, but it seems like the number of people joining would be falling. It seems like everyone readily available to the Internet already has one. Ill admit that I have TWO, but I forgot the password to my first so it shouldn't count.........
Something that pleasantly surprised me was that 3,000 books are published per day. As a published author, this makes me feel kind of special. It made me wander how man of the books I am published in have been read. I wander how many times my poem was read, and what people thought of it.
The truth is, shift happens, whether we like it or not. The only thing we can do about it is get used to the changes going on in the world.