Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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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: Youtube

  • Green Fields are gone

    The camera panned jerkily (watch You Tube) as the Four Brothers sang away their classic hit, Green Fields. The comments section was led by “I miss my papa, this was one of his favorites”. The Greatest Generation, and now the Boomer Generation, are slowly but surely fading away. Gone with them are the many lessons…

  • On Seeing

    With YouTube, Skype Video and 4-G network, we will be watching a lot of video. Some content was finally “remastered” to be added on to the collective archive in the cloud. Yet, we neglect to clean our lenses and learn to see as if for the first time. The sense of wonder, curiosity, marvel, or…

  • A Face w/ a name

    A few years ago, TIME’s Person of the year got a face with a name. In fact, he manages to drag in a billion faces and names with him. The last time someone wearing pajamas in public yet got that much publicity was John Lennon (who invited the press into his honeymoon suite). Mark was…

  • Filter builder

    Building up our filtering capacity does not mean firming up our prejudice. But no matter what we do, we can only watch an average of 4 hours of TV and a few hours on the Web, mobile or stationary. So we rely on thought leaders. Two-step information flow. Except this time, information flow through a…

  • Act 2

    At the gym, I couldn’t help notice two guys with Mountain-Dew T-shirt. We can still have “black swan” scenario in our life time e.g. the US rises again from the depth of deficit (muscle memory), or someday a Hispanic president will seek a M&A with Mexico (will not be the first time the US offer…

  • message in the bottle

    Cast away. Sending an SOS. an SMS. I hope that someone will get my message. We are born to connect (our belly button testifies to this) with nature and others. Yet marketers are telling us that in Retirement Ville, cruise ship (with sauna sound that reminds us of incubator) and virtual existence can substitute for the…

  • Listening across the cultures

    Listening is hard to begin with (just ask a psychiatrist). Listening across the cultures is doubly hard. It requires an extensive grasp of the others’ frame of reference. As technology enables the world to shrink, more groups join the globalized market. (The PM of Malaysia was on GPS telling Fareed that in the 60’s, Malaysia…

  • The bookmark of time

    Recently I ran into a childhood friend, member of the band.  Almost 40 years in between. It were as if I found a cartoon book, with a bookmark which landed me right where we had left off. We could have been like two kids again, with passion for music and all things jr high. He…

  • My machine vs yours

    When Henry Ford put together two motor cycles side by side to invent the automobile, he wasn’t interested in pleasing his customers, “you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black”.  Now, car turns commodity, the Chinese came up with Cherry, the pink car designed to please its female customers  Bye bye…

  • Under-utilized imagination

    The-girl-with-a-dragon-tatoo series got me hooked. I know it’s cold  in Stockholm. And I know he did not produce tangible products from the factory, such as sweet or swatch. But he offered readers an emotional experience (getting out of mundane existence, stepping into character and experiencing triumph and tragedy unavailable to us otherwise).  The author did not live…