Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

recent posts

about

With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: tech and multi-cultural marketing

  • Dad and Grad!

    Retail stores are pushing Dads and Grads cards and gifts. Today, my Aimy (hip-hop queen) is graduating from high school. Valley High, as a matter of fact (not Silicon, but San Fernando). During her 18 years of existence, she has seen changes from brick phones to touch phones. She has also lived through a few…

  • Living longer

    http://health.yahoo.com/news/healthday/haveapurposeinlifeyoumightlivelonger.html The last time I looked, it was eating sushi. Now, it’s to have a purpose in life (must be dementia-free and 68- year- old to be included in the research ). Here in Florida, I was asked if I had a senior citizen discount card. In California, I was flattered when I  got carded…

  • The medium is the message

    Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum (Does anybody notice that the 3M’s:  McLuhan, Moore and Metcalfe are all important in tech?) still rings true today. So many people are coming out with post-mortem on the current recession. Sub-prime over booking and clever repackaging/marketing of securitization are often mentioned. But so far, I haven’t come across a piece …

  • Send in the cloud

    “Thin client” has nothing to do with putting your desktop through a South Beach diet program. It is part of the migration from desktop to cloud computing. BTW, these “thin clients” will soon make our flat screen TV’s obsolete when fiber-enabled bandwidth arrived at our doorstep. I have been telecommuting for about a decade now.…

  • white balance

    Digital TV is here. Selected reality represented by a series of 1’s and 0’s. I miss the Indian-head poster TV studios used to put up to “white balance” and signal align their cameras before each broadcast. The jump from analog TV to digital TV will be more significant than the jump from B/W to color…

  • Anti-social (networking)

    Emily who teaches at Long Island and also P/Ting as a librarian has written an opinion piece on Facebook’s shadow culture (http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0611/p09s03-coop.html). She quotes Aristotle’s “a friend to all is a friend to none”. Harsh words. I would say we are living in an age of commoditization, friendship included. Lucky for us, LinkedIn has not…

  • Escaping Death!

    Train crash or auto accident? B choice! My sincere condolence to the surviving husband who was spared (not sure about his state of being, but he and his wife had missed the Air France flight which crashed miles away from Brazil two weeks ago). His wife however was reported dead by head-on collision in Australia…

  • H1N1 penetration

    BBC World News today shows a map where 141  H1N1 deaths are located. Somehow, none of the red ink lands in Africa (Yes!) Virus go where they want. Back in the 80’s, it was AIDS  (predominantly African-originated). Now, it’s H1N1 in N America. Health, environment, economy. In which order on this hot June day? I…

  • The International

    It’s just a new release on DVD. But I couldn’t help notice the subtle introduction of a new kind of cop: women (Naomi Watts) who want to protect their families when faced with organized crime threat. That leaves Clive Owen as the lone rogue agent. We are living in an age of empowerment: a confluence…

  • High touch

    High tech, high touch! The rise of social networking reflects and reaffirms human needs for social connection. YouTube adds to that the visual element. Now we can be seen and heard via 320X240 pixels, unlike the television screen which projects larger image (Peter Jennings used to do a news stand-up from the balcony of Caravelle…