gofer articles

There’s so much talk about China busting the United States, and alarm bells are sounding everywhere you look (politically and otherwise) about how Americans have, are, and will continue to fall behind but for all the jeremiads there is a simple answer: Twitter.

Yes, the social networking medium that has taken the world by storm, regularly making the news insofar as people are constantly using it under unexpected circumstances (such as kidnapping victims and stuff like that) or the people using it are celebrities saying the darnedest things (Sarah Palin’s “refudiate” even made Oxford University Press’ Word of the Year for 2010).
Now don’t not understand; Twitter by itself isn’t going to be the answer to China’s rapid rising strength in economic, diplomatic, and cultural affairs worldwide.
But it is what the service symbolizes that’s intriguing – and a sign of hope that Americans need not continue to fall behind – or have had done so to start with.

For can the Chinese ever develop such a thing?
Sure, it’s an ancient civilization whose scientific and technological achievements warranted a twelve-volume Cambridge encyclopedia by Sinophile biochemist Joseph Needham – but that the last such creativity was around an entire century ago.
Has the Chinese produced anything as useful as Twitter recently?

Yes, it’s a simple idea.
And it probably won’t change the world the way rice, tea, paper, gunpowder, glasses, umbrellas, buttons, the magnetic compass, and the whole host of creations cataloged by Needham’s “Science and Civilization in China.”
But an important development nonetheless – very important, indeed.
And the fact that such things as these – Google, Microsoft, Apple – don’t have any true Chinese counterpart speaks much about where the fount of invention still lies for the foreseeable future.
Obviously, America has serious problems.
But the country has great advantages, too, with quite a monopoly on them!