Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day 2008. It's basically a coordinated effort by 10,000 blogs around the world to all discuss an issue and raise awareness of it. This year, the blogs are uniting to put a spotlight on world poverty. At first, I thought that this is a little outside of the scope of things I usually discuss.


However, I thought about it a little bit and I realize that it really is within my scope in many ways. I am blogging from the "have" side of the digital divide. The digital divide is basically the idea that the world is divided in to two groups - those who have technology and the ability to use it, and those who do not. My students and anyone reading are reading from the "have" side as well. Even if you don't have technology like computers in your home, you have access in other places - school, libraries, even while visiting friends.

We're incredibly fortunate. Many of us have cell phones (and most of my students remember to switch them off during class, so thank you all for that!). Some of us have iPods or other portable media player devices. Some of you have global positioning systems (GPS), so you don't even have to worry about getting lost when you're on the road. Even if you don't have that, we now have Google Maps or Mapquest or any of the other mapping Web sites that make this available.

I think we take these things for granted when there are places all over the world where people don't have these things.

Poverty, hunger, the digital divide...all sorts of things that most of us are on the good side of at this point. We've got roofs over our heads, food in our stomachs, and Internet available all over.

Speaking of hunger - there is a site sponsored by many different companies - if you visit the site and simply click on a button, well, at the end of the day, the number of clicks leads to food being given to the hungry and poor in the world. This site is 100% legitimate, and if you want to do more, any purchases you make through the site lead to more food being given to the hungry.

I guess the purpose of Blog Action Day was for not only the readers of the 10,000+ blogs who signed up, but also the authors.

Web Link:

• The Hunger Site