[lit-ideas] Re: News via the web
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2004 11:51:53 -0800 (PST)
Actually, even The Guardian articles and commentaries
tend to be longer than those in New York Times. And,
as it seems to me, much more thoughtful.
O.K.
--- Mirembe Nantongo <nantongo@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> A review of the Nisbett book Andreas cites can
> be found below. It certainly does sound fascinating.
> Question for John: what are the newspapers like in
> Japan? Does straight reporting tend to be written
> as it is here -- ie make it short, summarize the
> story at the beginning, add the detail later for the
> reader to take or leave -- or do articles tend to be
> much longer than an average report in a U.S. paper
> with important points sometimes appearing for the
> first time deep within the body of the article?
> What about newspaper layout? Are the pages broken up
> into what we would consider visually manageable
> chunks using headlines and graphics, or are there
> vast stretches of closely-printed type largely
> devoid of graphics? I'm trying to get used to Arabic
> newspapers -- it's completely different ground and
> seems to be catering to a very different kind of
> thinking, and I don't mean political thinking. My
> current simplest impressions are that the average
> reader of Arabic newspapers
> has both more time and is better at sustained
> mental focus than the average US reader of English
> newspapers, but am open to contradicting or
> additional ideas. Best, MN
>
http://www.umich.edu/news/Releases/2003/Feb03/r022703a.html
>
> The geography of thought: How culture colors the way
> the mind works
> ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Cultural differences in the way the
> mind works may be greater than most people suspect,
> according to University of Michigan psychologist
> Richard Nisbett, author of "The Geography of
> Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think
> Differently...and Why," just published by The Free
> Press. "When you have a diverse group of people from
> different cultures, you get not just different
> beliefs about the world, but different ways of
> perceiving it and reasoning about it, each with its
> own strengths and weaknesses," says Nisbett, a
> senior research scientist at the U-M Institute for
> Social Research (ISR), the world's largest academic
> survey and research organization.
> In the book, Nisbett, who also heads the U-M Culture
> and Cognition Program, discusses the substantial
> differences in East Asian and Western thought
> processes, citing experimental, historical, and
> social evidence. His findings call into question the
> long-standing psychological assumption that the way
> the human mind works is universal. In the process,
> he addresses such questions as:
>
> · Why did the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and
> arithmetic, but not geometry?
>
> · Why do Western infants learn nouns more rapidly
> than verbs, when it is the other way around in East
> Asia?
>
> · Why do East Asians find it so difficult to
> disentangle an object from its surroundings?
>
> "East Asian thought tends to be more holistic," says
> Nisbett, who also heads the U-M Culture and
> Cognition Program. "Holistic approaches attend to
> the entire field, and make relatively little use of
> categories and formal logic. They also emphasize
> change, and they recognize contradiction and the
> need for multiple perspectives, searching for the
> 'Middle Way' between opposing propositions.
>
> "Westerners are more analytic, paying attention
> primarily to the object and the categories to which
> it belongs and using rules, including formal logic,
> to explain and predict its behavior."
>
> In study after study described in the book, Nisbett
> and colleagues from China, Korea, and Japan have
> found that East Asians and Americans responded in
> qualitatively different ways to the same stimulus
> situation. In one experiment, designed to test
> whether East Asians are more likely to attend to the
> whole while Westerners are more likely to focus on a
> particular object within the whole, Japanese and
> Americans viewed the same animated underwater
> scenes, then reported what they had seen.
>
> "The first statement by Americans usually referred
> to a large fish in the foreground," says Nisbett.
> "They would say something like, 'There was what
> looked like a trout swimming to the right.' The
> first statement by Japanese usually referred to
> background elements: 'There was a lake or a pond.'
> The Japanese made about 70 percent more statements
> than Americans about background aspects of the
> environment, and 100 percent more statements about
> relationships with inanimate aspects of the
> environment, for example, that a big fish swam past
> some gray seaweed."
>
> In another experiment described in the book, Nisbett
> and colleagues found that Americans respond to
> contradiction by polarizing their beliefs whereas
> Chinese respond by moderating their beliefs. In
> still another study, the researchers found that when
> making predictions about how people in general could
> be expected to behave in a given situation, Koreans
> were much more likely than Americans to cite
> situational factors rather than personality
> characteristics as reasons for someone's behavior.
>
> Social practices and cognitive processes support or
> "prime" one another, Nisbett points out. For
> example, "the practice of feng shui for choosing
> building sites may encourage the idea that the
> factors affecting outcomes are extraordinarily
> complex," he notes, "which in turn encourages the
> search for relationships in the field. This may be
> contrasted with the more atomistic and rule-based
> approaches to problem-solving characteristic of the
> West. Consider, for example, the nature of
> approaches to self-help in the West: 'The Three
> Steps to a Comfortable Retirement' or 'Six Ways to
> Increase Your Word Power.'"
>
> According to Nisbett, Asians move radically in an
> American direction after a generation or less in the
> United States. "But it might be a mistake to assume
> that it's an easy matter to teach one culture's
> tools to individuals in another without total
> immersion in that culture," he says.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 11:52 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: News via the web
>
>
> > > Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 2004)
> at
> >
> http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/2/beckerman-iraq.asp
> >
> > > The conversation just kept on leaping around
> without any rational back and
> > forth. Many of the Iraqis he talked to had a hard
> time developing clear
> > arguments, explaining themselves fully, and, as
> Packer put it, understanding
> > their own situation. Packer thinks this might be
> related to the fact that
> > the Iraqis were isolated and denied free will for
> so long. A psychiatrist
> > whom Packer quoted in the article explained that
> Iraqis lack the power to
> > experience freedom.
> >
> > This is so silly! Those reporters simply have no
> idea what it is like to
> > live outside of their own country. They can be in
> Europe for ten years and
> > they're still in the USA.
> >
> > There is a fascinating book: Geography of Thought,
> by Richard Nisbett, that
> > explores the differences in the way Americans and
> Asians think, perceive,
> > and express themselves.
> >
> > yrs,
> > andreas
> > www.andreas.com
> >
> >
> >
>
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