Hans Rosling's Washing Machine Video
Rosling presents a video that is part humor, part social studies, and part practical application for the viewers. His ultimate and salient point seems to be how technology has helped to change the social status of women, but in fact he is making a moral and sociological argument as well; and he arrives at his point with an audience's laughter in the background.
The Washing Machine Revolution
By bringing a grandmother into the video Rosling is providing a perspective for his audience. After all, her whole life grandmother has been washing clothes by hand, after first heating water over a wood-burning stove. The primitive clothes-washing strategy grandma is familiar with juxtaposes dramatically with the white machine that does all that for the mother or grandmother. When grandmother asks to be the one to push the "start" button on the machine, she is literally and figuratively taking a giant leap forward like astronaut's "giant leap for mankind" when he stepped onto the surface of the moon.
"To my grandmother the washing machine was...
Once he clearly establishes what a grand breakthrough the washing machine represents for his grandmother in Sweden, he quickly points out that there are many people on earth who don't have machines like this one. Many people (millions of people) still heat water over a wood fire, and not only to millions of people heat water primitively, those same people don't have all the other technological devices that households in the industrial world enjoy, like computers and televisions and stoves and power tools and air conditioners.
"Two billion people live on less than two dollars a day," he explains, moving the conversation from the miracle of technology (and how that helps women provide for their families) to the fact of poverty and human struggles for sustainability. By Rosling's math, five billion women wash clothes by hand, and some have to bring water from nearby lakes and rivers in order to do their washing. Rosling is making a philosophical, sociological, and moral argument here. He points out through his charts that one-seventh of the world's…
