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The term "The Great Equalizer" refers across a wide spectrum of human experience to events, situations and technologies that dramatically alter the power balance, or status of interpersonal relationships. The broad range of uses of this term include:

Contents

[edit] The Internet

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Much has been published about the revolutionary impact of the Internet on society. A July 2000 study by Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael D. Smith of the Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Sloan School of Management explores how consumer choice behavior, price intermediaries, and Internet shopbots and finds that shopbots substantially weaken the market positions of branded retailers and strengthened the market power of consumers, still brand name and retailer loyalty still strongly influence consumer behavior.[1]

Also, the Internet based communication is often cited as equalizing interpersonal power, for gender[2], for disabled persons[3], for race and class.[4]

[edit] Death, Pain and Disease

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Pearl Watley Mitchell in her 1952 poem The Great Equalizer describes death:

soldiers, lawyers, plumbers, preachers
waiters, docters, unemployed speakers

[edit] Education

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Douglas B. Downey, Paul T. von Hippel and Beckett Broh of Ohio State University have researched the cognitive effects of public school education with seasonal comparison analysis of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups of students and found that public schooling strongly tends to reduce socioeconomic inequality, but the findings for race were mixed, with Blacks and Hispanics not finding an equalizing benefit from public school, and Asian Americans finding a benefit.[5]

[edit] Weapory, Firearms and Bombs

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A study by Mario E. Carranza of Texas A & M University-Kingsville found from the perspective of international politics, that nuclear weapons are the "great equalizer" in international relations, and Pakistan can be more secure by deterring an Indian conventional attack with the threat to use nuclear weapons.[6]

Explosives, weaponry, artillery, gunpowder and dynamite invented by Alfred Nobel has been described as The Great Equalizer which made possible the famous industrial megaprojects that transformed the countryside and defined the the Twentieth Century.[7]

Happy the blest ages that knew not the dread fury of those devilish engines of artillery, whose inventor I am persuaded is in hell receiving the reward of his diabolical invention, by which he made it easy for a base and cowardly arm to take the life of a gallant gentleman; Don Quixote (1605, 1615) Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra[8]

Also, The Great Equalizer is a title used for firearms, referring to their ability to make physically weak or unskilled people equal, in confrontation, to the strongest, most combat-skilled, and most aggressive people[1].

A criminal, for example, who sees a little old lady walking through a dark alley in a society where concealed carry of handguns are allowed must wonder if the reason she risks the shortcut is that she carries a handgun clutched inside her purse. In a society where guns are illegal, she would be utterly helpless against assault or robbery from him; but if she has a gun, then all of his strength and aggression is rendered irrelevant[2].

This phrase has been used, in reference to firearms since some time after 1836, when it was applied specifically to the Colt revolver[3], the first modern-style handgun; easy for anyone to load and use. Previous weapons typically required strength and coordination, for example the muzzle-loaded muskets of the American Revolution.

This phrase, having become famous and common, is occasionally adapted to refer to some other thing that is seen as equalizing the powerful and weak, as with the liberation of speech by the Internet, allowing everyone, not only establishment-run media entities, to communicate ideas worldwide, or nuclear weapons, allowing weak nations like North Korea and Pakistan to hold off powerful ones like the United States and India. Once a nation has nuclear weapons, it's generally considered unassailable, a fear expressed currently by American neocons in reference to the nuclear research of Iran.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Brynjolfsson, Eric and Smith, Michael D.; The Great Equalizer? Consumer Choice Behavior at Internet Shopbots: MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, 2000
  2. ^ Wojahn, Patricia G.; Computer-Mediated Communication: The Great Equalizer between Men and Women?. Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication, v41 n4 p747-52 Nov 1994
  3. ^ Brody, Herb; The great equalizer: PCs empower the disabled, PC/Computing archive V2#7pgs82-93 July 1989
  4. ^ Ebo, Bosah Louis; Cyberghetto Or Cybertopia?: Race, Class and Gender on the Internet. Praeger/Greenwood, 1998
  5. ^ Douglas B. Downey, Paul T. von Hippel and Beckett Broh, Ohio State Universty.; Are Schools the Great Equalizer? School and Non-School Sources of Inequality in Cognitive Skills . American Sociological Review 69(5), 613-635 (October 2004)
  6. ^ Mario E. Carranza; Nuclear Deterrence After the Indian and Pakistani Tests. The Nonproliferation Review/Spring-Summer 1999
  7. ^ Bown, Stephen R.; A Most Damnable Invention: dynamite, nitrates, and the making of the modern world. St. Martin's Press, 2005
  8. ^ Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes; Don Quixote, 1605-1615