Don’t Miss This Video

There’s so much great stuff on the internet, it’s hard to keep up. This week I finally caught up with an amazing and challenging video on YouTube. I think it should be mandatory viewing for generalists in public relations and financial, healthcare, pharmaceutical and high tech corporate communicators and the specialty PR firms that cater to them.

“Did You Know/Shift Happens” is a PowerPoint presentation about globalization and the information age created by Colorado educator/blogger Karl Fisch and posted on his blog, The Fischbowl. To whet your appetite, here is a sampling of the facts and figures that caught my eye:

• The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America.
• China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world.
• If you took every single job in the U.S. today and shipped it to China, China would still have a labor surplus.
• The U.S. is 20th in the world in broadband Internet penetration. (Luxembourg just passed us.)
• There are over 106 million registered users of MySpace [as of August 2006]. If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th-largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico).
• It’s estimated that a week’s worth of The New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

For those who are interested, sources for the data featured in the video can be found by following this link.