The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 How They View Us: The Riddle of Culture After the hand-wringing and plain- tive “Why do they hate us?” in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the results of a carefully designed and executed study of the attitudes and beliefs held by teenagers in 12 coun- tries give food for thought. The most negative attitudes toward the U.S. are held by the average 17-year-old in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, hardly a surprise. But that third and fourth place in the anti-American league belong to teenagers in South Korea and Mexico, respectively, may give pause. In fact, in every country but Argentina, attitudes were consistently negative toward Americans as people. Titled “The Next Generation’s Image of Americans,” the preliminary report on the research by Margaret and Melvin DeFleur, professors in the College of Communication at Boston University, is available online ( www.bu.edu/news/releases/2002 /defleur/report.pdf ). S ince March 2002, about 1,400 teenagers in 12 dif- ferent countries — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, South Korea, Mexico, China, Spain, Taiwan, Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Nigeria, Italy and Argentina — were surveyed by the DeFleurs. Their aim was to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which the next generation in the countries studied regard Americans, to identify the many sources from which their views are formed, and formulate, if possible, any strategies useful in reshaping those views. Interestingly, the profiles of beliefs C YBERNOTES Site of the Month: “Exploratorium” “We don’t ask ourselves where languages come from because they just seem to be there: French in France, English in England, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan, and so forth. Yet if we go back only a few thousand years, none of these languages were spoken in their respective countries, and indeed none of these languages existed anywhere in the world. Where did they all come from?” This is the simple yet tantalizing lead to an exploration of the origins of language presented by Exploratorium mag- azine that is authoritative yet accessible to both young and old, and presented online in an appealing and user- friendly format. Exploratorium Magazine Online is just one part of the award-winning Web site of the Exploratorium ( www.exploratorium.edu ), th e California-based museum of science, art and human perception founded in 1969 by physicist Frank Oppenheimer, and since 1991 steered by Dr. Goéry Delacôte, a French scientist and science educator. The Exploratorium’s mission is to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them. Online since 1993, the Exploratorium was one of the first science museums to build a site on the World Wide Web. The Exploratorium site includes more than 12,000 Web pages and many sound and video files, explor- ing hundreds of different topics, and currently serves 17 mil- lion visitors per year — nearly 20 times the number of actu- al visitors to San Francisco’s landmark Palace of Fine Arts where the museum is housed. Several things make this Web site unique. First, the com- bination of range and quality in both content and technical/ artistic delivery is remarkable. Numerous subjects, from cooking to sunspots and the science of baseball, are explored in a lively and memorable way. As Exploratorium explains, “Many of the resources on our Web site are examples of very simple uses of information technology, but thoughtfully implemented. For example, the site contains instructions for over 500 simple experiments, all of which may be viewed on any type of Web browser, with even the slowest connec- tion, and easily printed out.” But the site designers have also made use of some of the most sophisticated technologies to demonstrate certain phenomena in a variety of online exhibits. Second, the site is as inviting to an adult as it is to a middle-schooler. Apart from the pure enjoyment of knowledge-gobbling, the latter will find extensive resource materials and ideas for school projects and homework assignments — whether in online activities and exhibits, the online magazine, the science news webcasts, or from Exploratorium ’s 10 cool sites of the month and related links. Teachers, too, have an unusu- al resource here, with an “Educate” section containing carefully chosen tools for teaching and a direct path to other pages of particular interest to teachers on the site.