-Huge numbers of ordinary citizens are engaged in forging transnational connections as they travel small informal groups and across national boundaries.
-Many categories of individual or small-group travelers can identify some definite types:-
CHAPTER 2: MODERNITY AND THE EVOLUTION OF WORLD
SOCIETY AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS.
MODERNITY AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD.
- From about seventeenth century, the European powers began to outstrip the rest of the world in the sophistication of their ideas, the devastating force of their military technology, the strength of their navies and the organization of economic production.
- “Modernity”, the logical precursor to the current era of globalization.
- 4 successive phases of modernity and global integration:
· The development of forms proto-globalization among a number of civilizations before the modern era commenced
· The emergence of capitalist modernity in Europe and the region’s rise to global dominance
· The colonial and racial domination effected by European powers in various parts of the world
· The transformations that have taken place in the world economy since the Second World War and especially the rise of the USA.
PROTO-GLOBALIZATION
- Is early aspirations to universalism that failed to embrace all of humanity or to attain global reach.
- The Church functioned as a powerful and unifying trans-European body for centuries. (Wight 1977:26-9,130-4).
- It was assisted by other structure, especially inter-state links based on dynastic marriages, the alliances between Christian royal houses and the system of diplomacy involving rules of mutual recognition concerning emissaries and ambassadors. (Bergesen 1990: 67-81).
- These were universalizing in the sense that they aspired to reach all people.
- They never attained the influence that globalization and globalism have achieved in today’s world.
- There are several reasons for this:
· The globalizing missions of ancient empires and religions did not incorporate more than a minority of people even within their own limited domains of influence
· People everywhere lacked detailed knowledge of other cultures.
· Most of these ancient empires and religions viewed the world in terms of a clear division between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarian’ between those who had been converted and those who lived without the benefits of true religion
· Their mission was to civilize non-believers or foreign barbarians and this involved a one-way transmission of culture from the superior to the subordinate group.
CAPITALIST MODERNITY: EUROPEAN FOUNDATIONS
- This ‘nexus of features’ is known as ‘modernity’.
- As Albrow (1996:55) maintains, modernity ‘included the combination of rationality, territoriality, expansion, innovation, applied science, the state, citizenship, bureaucratic organization and many other elements’.
- Three of these elements:
· The emergence of nation state
· The development of science
· The rise of a body of universal secular thought- ‘the Enlightenment’.
THE NATION STATE SYSTEM
- The state’s bureaucratic reach and control over its population was progressively strengthened and deepened through such measures as:
· Increasing tax revenues
· Improving communications
· Partially taming the nobility by making it more dependent on the perks derived from state office
· Centralizing the nation by suppressing regional identities
· Monopolizing the most efficient means of violence for conducting wars
· Encouraging and subsidizing technological and craft development
· Investing in naval and army strength
· Nurturing local trading classes whose wealth could be taxed or borrowed to help finance state expansion.
- Alongside all this, many governments pursued a policy of national economic aggrandizement, called mercantilism.
- The technological and economic lead the industrial revolution gave offered Britain military opportunities not available to other nations.
EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT
- The central ideas of the enlightenment,
· The nation that humans are social animals whose cultures and individual capacities for good or evil are not innate of fixed but originate in social relationships and so can be modified and improved,
· A belief in the importance of critical reason, skepticism and doubt
· The human capacity to utillise these resources through observation, empirical testing and the acceptance of the fallibility of all knowledge.
· A consequence rejection of the intolerant, closed way of thinking associated with blind religious faith and metaphysical speculation
· The nation that all human beings have a right to self-direction and development best achieved where governments became constitutional or accountable.
· The possibility of attaining self-realization through practical involvement in and attempts to transform, the material world.
MARX’S ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM
- The Enlightenment provided a powerful intellectual critique of the highly regulated forms of feudal life but, as Marx understood more clearly than did his contemporaries, feudalism was also a spent force in economic terms.
- Its successor mode of production, industrial capitalism, was a highly dynamic and indeed unstoppable force for generating social transformation.
- Many preceding changes had paved the way for the emergence of capitalism, but especially significant were:
· The creation of fully commoditized economy in which everything, including land and labour, had a price and so could be bought and sold in a market
· The exercise of, often violent, measures to dislodge self-sufficient peasants and craft producers from their farms and workshops.
- An importance consequence was the tendency for capitalism to expand the productive forces by developing ever more advanced technology, harnessing the power of science, increasing the scale of production and developing business arrangements facilitate greater capital pooling.
THE GROWTH OF RATIONALITY
- Giddens (1990) sees modernity as consisting of three kinds of mutually reinforcing orientations.
- Self-monitoring or reflexivity as fundamental to modernity.
- Characteristic of modernity is the presumption of wholesale reflexivity-which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself.(1990:38-39).
- Important though this argument is, it implied that a globalization is simply modernity writ large.
- This seems rather a limited view because , as we show in chapter 2, globalizations can be said to have generated certain unique properties, especially the emergence of a global consciousness we have called globalism.
RACE AND COLONIALISM
• Because of the economic,military and intellectual lead,borrowed from other civilizations.The decisive advances were in seafaring and navigational techniques-improvements in compass,navigational charts,astrolabe and rudder,the use of gun powder and firearms,cannons and guns (Smith 1991:56)
• Portuguese,reached the tip of southen Africa in1489.Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean in 1497.The defeat of the Muslim fleet in the Indian Ocean in 1509 and the creation of a whole series of forts and trading stations across Asia,soon followed.
• The Opium War (1839-42),waged by the European powers to control the profitable drugs trade.
• Ethnocentrism derives from the Greek for people, ethnos. Ethnocentrisms see their community or nation as the model against which all others have to be judged.
• Ethnocentrism did not approximate later racist postures and even in the midst of this, there was some recognition that humanity had forfeited as well as gained something through civilization.
• Enlightenment and Arcadian notions were swept aside as imperialist realized that there were massive fortunes to be made by subordinating the rest of humanity.
• Rubber trees were stolen from Brazil, gold and diamonds mined in South Africa, lumber logged from the Equatorial forests and opium extracted from China. Sugar, cocoa, tobacco and sisal plantations were established using cheap or coerced labour and speculative capital.
• Social Darwinism applied, or more often misapplied, to human situations the role assigned by Darwin to the process of natural selection in the evolution of spices.
Changes After 1945 And The Dominance Of The USA
- a long period of sustained economic growth
- the establishment of the Bretton Woods financial system
- the rise of US global economic power and political leadership
- the widespread adoption of Keynesian national economic management
- the rise of mass consumption and changes in lifestyles
- the spread of English as an international language
Economic growth
~ From 1950-1975, the world’s economic output is said to have expended by an unprecedented two-and-a quarter times (Harris 1983:30)
~ Hobsbawm(1994:288) claimed that the ‘golden years’ of economic growth and technological development from 1950-1973 meant that for 80% of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in 1950’s.
~ By the mid 1950’s Europe and Japan had recovered from the devastation of war and were achieving new levels of prosperity.
~ During the 1960’s,Japanese might and the rising power of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) became evident, along with rapid rates of industrialization and urbanization in countries like Brazil and Taiwan.
The Bretton Woods financial system
~ Bretton Woods is the name of a small town in New Hampshire where 44 countries, mainly allies of the USA, met in July 1944 to formulate policies for global economic co-operation.
~ Devaluation-lowering the value of your currency against that of your competitor countries to cheapen the price of your exports and make their imports more expansive
~ The Bretton Woods system also involved establishing several key economic international governmental organizations (IGOs).The most important were the world bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which provided short term financial assistance and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff(GATT),a world forum on facilitate regular discussions between member countries on measures to reduce trade barriers and related issues.
US Global economic power and political leadership
~After the Second World War, economy emerged undamaged with stronger, re-equipped industries.
~ The USA becomes the world’s leading creditor nation, supplying grants to Europe (through the Marshall Aid Plan) and Japan. It supplied loans on favorable terms to other countries, although this was something of a Trojan horse, allowing US located TNC’s to penetrate new markets.
~ The East-West Cold War confrontation dominated global politics from 1947 to 1989.
~ President Truman persuaded the US Congress to pour dollars into the national and economy via arms expenditure and military aid. There were large deployments of troops in Europe and Asia, while the onset of the Korean War helped to encourage the long post-war boom (Arrighi 1994:273-98)
~Successive US administrations encouraged further decolonization by France, Britain and Netherlands.
~ The USA now wanted ‘a share of the action’
Keynesian national economic management
~ John Maynard Keynes was a major 20th century economist
~Keynes suggested governments play a more proactive role in spending on public investment and stimulating demand-so creating job and investment.
~ Keynes thought that governments should use the tax system to redistribute income from rich to poor.
~ World War is the only slight to say that Keynesian policies gave capitalism a new lease of life. They also strengthened the long boom and so contribute to globalization.
Mass consumption and changes in lifestyle
~ Prosperity helped fuel important changes in social life, especially in the advanced countries.
~ Life expectancy rose and many people were better educated than ever before even in the developing countries.
~ Globalization meant that such powerful influences could not be contained within the rich countries but spread to the communist and developing world through education, the mass media, tourism and TNC’s
The spread of English as in international language
~ Spoken English came to occupy this role when Britain emerged as the world’s first industrial nation
~ It control controlled the largest empire until well after the Second World War
~ USA assumed this leading role after 1945,by an accident of history it also happened to be an English-speaking country.
~ USA continues to dominate the various mass media and advertising, which are so influential in shaping global consumer and lifestyle inspirations.
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATION
The Next Pattern of Conflict
- Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations and will dominate global politics.
- Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. As a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, fist among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy.
- During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which a nation state in the classical European was sense nor each of which defined its identity in the terms of its ideology.
Why Civilizations Will Clash?
- Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and most important, religion.
- However, over the centuries, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.
- The interaction between peoples of different civilizations are increasing, these increasing interactions intensify civilizations consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations.
- The interactions among peoples of different civilizations invigorate differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history.
- Process of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons.
- Civilizations-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. As a result, a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among the non-Western civilizations.
- A de-Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western countries at the same time that western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people.
- Cultural characteristics and differences are mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones.
- Economic regionalism is increasing and this will reinforce civilization-consciousness. Economic regionalism may only succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization.
- Differences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the environment. At the micro-level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently.
- At the macro level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, competitively promote their particular political and religious values.
The Fault Lines between Civilizations
- The most significant dividing line in Europe may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity.
- Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1300 years.
- This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline and can be more virulent. Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger.
The West versus the Rest
- Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. It dominates international political and security institutions.
- The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values.
- Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming modern.
- They will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, skills, machines and weapons and will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values.
- The West are require to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests.
Globalization: The New Global Impact of New Technologies
Introduction
Globalization is a term that came into popular usage in the 1980's to describe the increased movement of people, knowledge, ideas, goods and money across national borders that has led to increased interconnectedness among the world's populations, economically, politically, socially and culturally. Globalization and new technologies have brought innumerable benefit to our society. Although globalization is often thought of in economic terms this process have many social and political implications as well. Many in local communities associate globalization with modernization. Social and cultural manifestations of globalization though there are many social and cultural manifestations of globalization, here are some of the major ones Informational services. The past two decades have seen an internationalization of information services involving the exponential expansion of computer-based communication through the Internet and electronic mail.
On the one hand, the electronic revolution has promoted the diversification and democratization of information as people in nearly every country are able to communicate their opinions and perspectives on issues, local and global, that impact their lives. On the other hand, this expansion of information technology has been highly uneven, creating an international digital divide. Often, access to information technology and to telephone lines in many developing countries is controlled by the state or is available only to a small minority who can afford them. News services in recent years there has been a significant shift in the transmission and reporting of world news with the rise of a small number of global news services. The contemporary revolution in communication technology has had a dramatic impact in the arena of popular culture. Information technology enables a wide diversity of locally-based popular culture to develop and reach a larger audience. For example, "world music" has developed a major international audience. Old and new musical traditions that a few years ago were limited to a small local audience are now playing on the world stage.
Now days, this processes of mediation between the global and the local as an inherently communication phenomenon. The promises for change not only the context but likely the nature of intercultural communication and technologies. The awesome potential of information, new technologies and globalization has already had a profound impact toward industries, society, internet, multimedia, network, cyber culture, and virtual reality and so on. It is the purpose of this summary to explore the relevance of these globe-shaping forces to intercultural communication, and vice-versa, to identify some of this issues about new technologies in communication that arise as a result of these forces, and providing foundations for understanding a globalizes, technologies world.
Globalization , media and technology
1. TELEVISION AND SURVEILLANCE DEVICES
Ø M. C. Boyer identifies that surveillance video camera scanning and interpreting more and more parking lots , hallway entrance , banks or everywhere else are generally usurped by technological devices that see in our place.
Ø But Virilio claims by putting those technology ,the industrializations of prevention , r prediction kind a sort of panic anticipation that commit the future and prolongs ‘the industrialization of simulation’
Ø Cyberspace is a new electronic , invisible space that allows the computer or television screen to substitute for urban space and urban experience.
Ø In addition , other surveillance devices such as e-mail , voicemail and telephone messages seems to be replacing person-to-person interaction.
2. RHEINGOLD AND THE ILLUSION OF ‘COMMUNITY’
Ø We reduce and encodes our identities as words on a screen , decode and unpack the identities of others. Inn cyberspace we determined our identities or culture. The aggregation of personae, determines of the collective culture.
Ø Computer mediated communication (CMC) will usher us in the great new era that other media of communication have failed to bring us If we uncritically accept it.
Ø “virtual communities might be real communities , they might be pseudo communities , or they might be entirely new in the realm of social contracts”
Ø The question remains , though , wether or not our communities we may form by way CMC will.
Ø We also must be carefull to distinguish between these contexts of social experince’.
3. VIRTUAL REALITY, INTIMACY , VALERIE AND SEX.
Ø All kind of communication link by the cyberspace.
Ø Imagine you are the creator as well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the power to use a gesture.
Ø It seems, potential major change here is some erosion of the classic body/mind. Like all other imaginative situations, has the potential for changes gender stereotypes, but while ,as in other kinds of play-acting , women and men can temporarily change their gender.
Ø In virtual sex, they have many ways to the players typing the descriptions of physical actions, or so whatever for many peoples it is the centerpiece of their online experience.
Ø On MUDs (multi-user domains), some people have sex with their own gender and some with difference gender.
Ø Some enjoyed have sex with non-human characters for example its robot or animal.
Ø Lastly, people using the cyberspace to create their own personality and construct their own identity.
TNCs : THEIR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ROLES
- TNCs have a wide sphere of autonomy. This is partly true; certainly this tendency might grow.
- Three contexts in their activities:
Ø When acting alone
Ø When acting in combination with powerful nation states
Ø When acting in the context of newly industrialized countries.
ORIGINS AND CHARACTERISCS OF TNCS
Characteristics
- Operates in more than one, sometimes many, countries
- The principal reasons for decentralization are to secure new markets or to stop their rivals getting there first.
- Many developing countries had abundant supplies of cheap, unorganized labour. The division of labour into more minute skilled and semi-skiled task, allowed untrained workers to attain rapidly the levels of productivity in the countries where industry was long established.
- There are six big sogo shosha in Japan, two of which, Mitsubishi and Matsui, are household names in the West. They have massive bargaining power.
- The sogo shosha provide:
Ø Financial services(credits, loans, guarantees, venture capital).
Ø Information services (up-to-date market profiles, national regulation, technological developments)
Ø Risk-reducation services (insurantce, buffers for exchange conrol regulations)
Ø Organizational and auxiliary services (translations, legel contracts, tranrsport, paperwork and wholesaling).
Definition
Having described the origins and some of the characteristics of TNCs, we are now in aposition to give a more formal definition. In extending Dicken’s argument we arrive at a fivefold definition: TNCs.
· Control economic activities in two or more countries
· Maximize the comparative advantage between countries, profiting from the differences in factor endowments, wage rates, market conditions and the political and fiscal regimes
· Have geographical flexibility, that is an ability to shift resources and operations between different locations on a global scale
· Operate with a level of financial, component and operational flows between different segments of the TNC greater than the flows within a particular county
· Have significant economic and social effects at a global level.
TNCS AND THE NATION STATE
· The firts emphasis on their globalizing capacition, aposition we associate particularly with the work of Dicken.
· The second a more sceptical view developed by Hirst and Thompson, suggest that while TNCs may have continued and fostered the long-established internasional economy, they have not etablished aglobal economy and have not superseded the nation state.
TNCs as globalizing agents
- Dicken (1992) argues that the TNC is the single most important force in creating global shifts in economic activity. Grown significantly faster than world production. Clear indicator of the increased internationzation of economic activities and greater interconnectedness, characterize the world economy.
- TNCs play in binding together national economies, growing portion of each county productive capacity,technolgi knowledge and skillsis an organized extension of the capacities located in othor countries.
- The resulting flow of raw materials, components and finished products, technological and organizational. Skilled personnel constitute the basic bulding blocks of the global economy.
- TNCs responsible for an important chunk of world employment, production and trade. Particularly true of production, perhaps between one-fifth and one-quarter of all production is in the hands of the TNCs.
- Understanding the global economic importance of TNCs is to take them as equivalent units to countries. The 100 most important economic units in the world today, half are nation states and half ate TNCs.
International, but not global agents
- These and other findings lead them to argue that the world economy may have become ‘international’ but it is certainly not yet a ‘globalized economy.
- Also suggest that the world’s economy may indeed be hardly more international than it was before the First World War.
- Economic often consistis in large part of relatively immovable plan, equipment and infrastructure as well as employees ‘trapped’.
- Presumably means that we can hardly be surprised at the continuing propensity of companies, large and small, to retain strong roots in their home economies.
- The same reasons, is it possible for even the largest TNCs to be completely foot-loose or free from any national control.
Assessment
· At the empical level, there is room for disagreement over how to interpret the available evidence.
· The secound difficulty with Hirst and Thompson’s (1996) analysis is theoretical in nature.
· Hirst and Thompson (1996) mount a powerful case against the nation that economic globalization has reached a stage when TNCs are truly autonomous and governments have been rendered more or less powerless to act in the face of global economic forces.
· The extreme globalization thesis has also been used as rationale for doubting the possibility or efficacy of joint intergovernmental action.
TNCS, NICS AND WOMEN WOKERS
- Most of the labourers is women-employers must have ‘nimble fingers’, making them suitable for work on electric circuit boards.
- The young women who worked in the EPZ were often grateful for the employment offered and extended their periods employment, thus reducing the number of years in which they could safely bear chidren.
TNCs: POWER WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY
- the primary social criticism of TNCs is than they exercise power without responsibility.
- The theory and sometimes in practice the power of the state is restrained by the due processes of law,byregular elections and by capacity of people to organize, demonstrate, advance their views and defend their interests.
- Although not all state have this degree of democracy,even in the most extreme distatorships poeple have managed to bring their rulers to book.
- Equivalent forms of corporate power rarely have any such costraints on them.
- TNCs are supposedly constrained by shareholders, but these are usually large anonymous blocks of shares bought by pension funds, insurance companies and banks with litle interest in the company’s affair beyond the central performance indicator.
CHAPTER 5 SUMMARY: CONSUMING CULTURE
1) CONSUMERISM AND EVERYDAY LIFE
In this chapter we explore the globalization of consumption and consider its implications for the way we now experience social and culture life. Our central theme concerns the impact of what Sklair (1992: chapter 3) calls ‘the culture ideology of consumerism’ evidenced by many in the rich countries, but especially by those who living in the developing countries. The adoption of this ideology had led some observes to fear that continued western and more especially US domination of many industries, along with advertising and the mass media, are giving rise to a new kind of imperialism, one based not on political but on cultural control.
In the capitalist economies this universal duality between function and form acquires a further characteristics because goods become commodities and assume an exchange value in the market. Moreover, as well as will see, the cultural meanings that inhere in all goods become highly desirable forms of merchandise in their own right.
To understand how and why this happens we need to understand the semiotic or symbolic nature of goods. Contemporary sociological discussion of consumption often draws on the study of semiotics as developed by thinkers such as de Saussure (1857-1913) and Barthes (1915-1980).
2) A CRITICAL-PESSIMISTIC SCENARIO: CONSUMERS AS DOPES
2 Focuses: 1) Idea that consumers are innocent in the face of the onslaught of producers, advertisers and market managers.
2) How consumers strike back and, to some degree, assert their autonomy and innovativeness.
COMMODITY FETISHISM
- Employed by Marx- commodity production creates a de-personalized economy.
- Clusters of unknown, hired workers and machines in different locations produce goods for unknown buyers.
- Commodity exchange conceals the real world of work and production
- Opportunity or self-realization available to mankind through creative work and social co-operation is simultaneously denied and compensated for the attractive possessions of bazaars and shopping malls.
- Resulting in fetishism-turn commodities into objects of devotion
MASS CONSUMPTION
- Business feed our desire for more good while persuading us to abandon still useful products in favour of new ones.
- Associated with the Fordist Production
- Advertising industries play a major role in producing an endless stream of new meanings into mundane things such as vacuum cleaners, soft drinks and soaps.
- The meanings employed into mass consumer culture are simple and instantly accessible to speed up turnover of huge volumes of goods.
- Resulting in a homogenized world of standardized mass products and a bland, stupefying culture, lacking substance.
-
SIGNIFYING CULTURE
- Baudrillard(1988) = SIGN-VALUES- subtle meanings implanted in goods by advertising and seductive packaging.
- We live in a ‘signifying culture’ which is one that abounds with disconnected messages and it is these, supposedly, rather than the functionality of goods themselves, which we seek.
- What we buy bears less and less relation to our actual needs
-
DEPTHLESSNESS
- Meanings often mutate or break free from the object or context they were originally intended to represent.
- Signs are inherently volatile and subjected to media manipulation
- We are unable to find a self-realization or ourselves on the supermarket shelves
- Jameson- all o f these destabilizes our lives and gives them a certain depthlessness.
- We lose our bearing and become disorientated.
FANTASY BECOMES REALITY
- Media-inspired fantasy world of TV soaps, films and adverts, where symbols flourish, often seem more alive to us than the actual social world we inhabit.
- We seek to imitate and build our lives around one or more SIMULACRA
- Hyperreality (Baudrillard)- fake or fantasy experiences become more real to us than our concrete everyday world
3) TOWARDS A HOMOGENOUS, AMERICANIZED GLOBAL CULTURE
ü The spectre of world culture domination through the spread of western consumerism and the rise of increasingly similar materialistic societies worries many observers (Tomlinson, 1990). The fear of Americanization is ften more acute.
ü Sometimes it described as McDonaldization, the delivery of standardized products and their related system of business control (Ritzer, 1993).
ü Pointing to this widespread fear not simply of US consumerist but also cultural domination. Hannerz (1992: 217) points similar term, the ‘cocacolonization’
ü The destruction of once vibrant and unique religious, ethnic and national identities and not just local dietary custom and small industries.
ü The fear of Americanization are strong in France; Coca-Cola applied for a license to begin local bottling in 1948, the French Communist Party won public support when argued that Coke’s incursion should be resisted because the com,pany doubled as US spy network
ü Others maintained that it represented a threat to French civilization or observed that like the earlier Nazi propaganda, Coke’s advertising exercised an ‘intoxicating’ effect on the masses (Pandergrast 1993:241-3).
ü More recently, research demonstrated how the leading role played by US TNC in expanding post-war markets for consumer products was soon consolidated by similar moves in the 1960s on the part of US advertising agencies and media network
1. in the late 1970s, US advertising agencies operating abroad earned 50 percent of their incomes from these sources (Janus 1886: 127)
2. early 1980s, they virtually controlled the world advertising of consumer goods in most leading market.
3. Television ownership growing in many of developing country in 1960s. The US radio and TV networks were able to sell both the technology required in order to establish communication facilities and programmes (Sinclair 1987:103).
ü In the former communist country there are doubts on how the products such as Big Mac burgers were eagerly welcomed in 1980s. It seems as a powerful symbols which offered access to western freedom and consumer lifestyles as exemplified in the ‘authentic taste of America.
The Experienced Consumers
ü People living in the advanced societies have been exposed longer and more intensively to the attractions of a consumer society than anywhere else. In most cases, most of us are able to impose our own interpretation on the goods we buy.
ü Our membership of different groups also act as screening device through which meaning are negotiated and altered. If anything mismatch occurred between the advertisers’ messages and the way of consumers read them is likely to be much greater.
ü Hannerz (1992: 243) argued that the meaning of any external cultural flow is ‘in the eyes of the beholder’
The Roots of Cultural Change
ü Cultural changes are not new. The construction of new identities and meanings has often followed in the wake of religious and other influences that reached the societies from outside. Culture in all its forms is always socially constructed.
ü Many people regard the changing identities of the present era with such fear and distaste because they are mediated by the ‘forces of a commercial market’ (Firat 1995:121)
ü The gluing of cultural artifacts and experiences to money incentives and their projection into the world marketplace offers the best guarantee that they will survive.
Diversity within the Homogenizing States
ü Apart from their native inhabitants, both US and Canada were formed out of cultural ingredients imported from many countries.
ü Distinctive ethnics’ cores survive in many of US cities. Most continue to celebrate their linguistic, religious and culinary legacies and to retain connections through marriage and community with those descended from similarity migrant backgrounds.
The Survival of Local Cultures
ü American consumer culture may be strongly present in every culture across the globe but the reverse is equally the case.
ü Several generations of migrant cultural experience have survived prolonged exposure to intensive consumerist and media influences in the wealthiest country
ü It is not easy to understand the availability of KFC in the streets of Bombay or ability to view Roseanne in the villages in Egypt are liable to destroy the entire cultural traditions of these or any other developing country.
ü Some inhabitants in Lagos and Kuala Lumpur drinks Coke, wear Levi 501 jeans and listen to Madonna records. But it does not mean they are abandon their customs, family and religious obligation and national identities even if they can afford to do so, which most not.
Reverse Cultural Flows
ü Significant reverse cultural flows to the West from Japan and other developing countries located in all world regions are also increasingly evident. Many more are likely in the future when and if more non-western countries achieve industrialization. We already noted examples such as world cuisine and Japanese management ethos.
ü The interesting examples is the diffusion of traditional Asian medicines, health and fitness practices and approaches to mental health.
4) An optimistic scenario: consumers as creative heroes
Product differentiation
The product differentiation is the result of the capitalist marketing techniques. Its goals are to provide the adequate goods to different consumers.
Advertising and its limitations
The advertising promotes the sign value of the goods but doesn’t influence its use. Sinclair suggests that the goods are not purchasing solely for their sign value.
The social sieve
Bourdieu says that the consumer behaviour is link with life-style. He defines this set of characteristic by the term: “HABITUS”.
Consumption as life enhancing
Many writers describe the rise of a post-modern where the consumption and leisure time are more important in citizens’ life.
Consumer creativity
Featherstone, Tomlinson and other post-modern writers describe the consumerism like a way to revel our plurality, our difference and our membership in a group.
5) SHAPING GLOBAL CULTURE: THE ROLE OF THE LOCAL
Shopping forms an essential and relished part of leisure, especially among women. Indeed, Clammer argues that Japanese are quintessentially post-modern in their concern with constructing distinctive styles of dress and other forms of consumption and the need to express subjectivity through creating the right atmosphere at home.
In the case of consumption, the rediscovery of declining or extinct traditions is especially obvious in the case of cuisine. Competition from a western foods had played a role in this revival but so, too, had the growth in the city’s busy working population, searching for lunchtime sustenance at a time of rising inflation and the impossibility or returning home for midday meals in the face of growing traffic jams.
Unlike indigenization, where the global is used to express essentially local cultural forms, the mixing of ingredients involved in creolization generates altogether new, fused inventions. We can suppose that such creative blending has always occurred throughout human history. Of course creolization has encompassed many cultural forms and not just consumerism.
CHAPTER 6: MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS
- The medium is the message was the disarmingly simple motto of the pioneer guru of contemporary media studies. (Marshall McLuhan 1962).
- Generally systems of communication depend on a sender, a receiver and a means of transmission from the first to the second, and sometimes back again.
- This third mechanism is the medium or in the plural sense, the media.
- Hitler and Goebbels shows how the radio, which operated via the centralized transmission of content received in privatized circumstances, could be commandeered as a propaganda device to be monopolized and manipulated for stated purposes.
- TV is best suited, like many conversations, for impressionistic, contradictory or unreasoned discourse (Castells 1996: 331-2).
- The central role of the medium can be seen in two examples:
· Academic used to delivering scholarly papers to a respectful audience of colleagues or an attentive class of students usually find themselves at sea in a TV studio, even though both are oral media and the intended message is similar.
· Listener to a radio programme absorbs highly selective messages. Sometimes they do this subconsciously, sometimes they choose what they want or need to hear in competition with other sound.
- The media foster globalization just as they are themselves changed by stepping up to a global scale.
- In this chapter, we will provide a definition and characterization of the media and also examine issue of ownership and content in relation to the growth of electronic media.
WHAT ARE MEDIA?
- The media are agencies and organizations that specialize in the communication of ideas, information and images of our environment, our communities and us.
- The media also project images about ‘others’ and their communities.
- Many other commentators (and indeed audience) believe that the media are doing all sorts of other things than reporting the news neutrally, whether the wider effects are intentional or unintentional.
- Information, news, emotions, values and opinion are, in short, intermingled by media themselves and also interwoven in the minds of the audience.
- The consequences of this confusion may be seen, at a trivial level, by the fact that actors report that many of their fans are unable to distinguish between a fictional character in a TV serial and the actor who plays the part of that character.
- The media divide into the print media (books, magazines, newspapers) and the visual/ aural media (movies, radio and televisions).
THE POWER OF THE MEDIA
- The media’s conflation of fact and fiction, or reason and emotion, is important in other ways too.
- Large media corporations may contrive to use this facility to project images and ideas that work to their own interest rather than the national or international interest.
- This statement might be thought vastly exaggerated if not for the fact that some corporations have achieved a near monopolistic, complex, and overlapping control of newspapers, film archives, television networks, radio stations and satellites).
- The combined ownership of different media gives such corporations a global reach that is sometimes seen as threatening democracy, diversity and freedom of expression.
- The media moguls are able to influence business, international agencies and national governments, which often attend to them as if they were suppliant courtiers presenting themselves for royal approval.
- The control of global communications in the hands limited number of players began in the nineteenth century and followed the lines of European expansion, imperialism and colonialism.
- The ownership and control of the cables- and later the satellites- is, of course, strategically and diplomatically vital, but it is also commercially and culturally important.
- Those who own the means of communications can link together vast audiences and potentially feed them with similar and selective messages.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
- The fear of control by governments and owners of large news corporations over the global media is somewhat offset by the capacity of many people to circumvent the media by direct lateral communication.
- This is particularly true of the telephone system and more particularly of long-distance telephones.
- The global telephone network is now very dense, while the cost of calls is rapidly declining.
- Cairncross (1997a) argues that the costs of connectivity will be dramatically driven down by the arrival of wireless systems and the gathering pace of privatization of the telecoms companies.
- Clearly such links have provided a more democratic and less controlled form of communication between friends, families and business and professional associates across the world.
- Values and social constructions of reality are also less amenable to manipulation by powerful interest groups.
THE COMPUTER AND INTERNET
- The arrival of the internet, which links individual computers through computer networks and modems, also raises democratic possibilities.
- News groups can be set up out of the reach of the media, while opinions, ideas and attitudes can be formulated in dialogue with other people linked to the internet, often on the other side of the globe.
- By 1995, the internet covered no more then 2 per cent of the world’s population, but its exponential growth over a very short period suggests that there is plenty of room for further expansion.
- The media have attempted to get in on the act, with the production of home pages on the World Wide Web, but these have been notably unsuccessful in containing the explosion of information outside of their control.
- The democratic possibilities of the Internet are, as yet, unknown and remain controversial.
- The very structure of decentralized control has prevented business and media from getting too close a control over it.
- Such is the level of Internet activity that the expression ‘informational society’ has been used to describe how important are flows and links that criss-cross the globe.
- Despite the increased commercialization of the Internet, there is little doubt that lateral links have proliferated faster than business interest predicted and that much of the Internet will escape regulation and commercialization.
- The anarchist spirit that underlies much of the communication on the Internet has also been heartening to those who have felt oppressed by the global power of the large media corporations.
THE RISE OF INFORMATIONAL SOCIETY
1. A persistent theme is that communication technologies and computer technologies are both developing rapidly in their own right and converging into a set of share information technologies.
2. The convergence of communications and computer technologies can be seen in the often bewildering overlap of hitherto separated functions.
3. As the machine- human interface begins to naturalize through such emulative technologies as memory chips, virtual reality and artificial intelligence humans will begin to lose the primacy of their own sensory perceptions.
4. In the days of mass production, the notion of ALIENATION was used to suggest that the social relations of production were artificial and that human nature was being altered to fit in with the rhythms of machine and assembly lines.
5. Alienation in the informational society is even more profound.
Informational society: economic effects
- in post-modernity (1989) Harvey was particularly interested in the reduction of time it takes for the capital to accumulate. Salaries are now normally credited through automated clearance system, while transfers of funds are virtually instantaneous. Dividen, interest and profit can be remitted relatively freely while investment, loans and credits can flow just as quickly in the opposite direction. The sale and purchase of stocks and share is also virtually instantaneous.
- The very speed situations make them impossible for the national to track, police or tax. Bretton Woods system in Germany and USA stopped trying to control the inflow and outflow of capital.
- This move was followed by the incoming Thatcher government in Britain in 1979, later by the de-regulation and the freeing of the exchange control mechanisms in many other countries. The financial became global in character within a few years.
- As the circulation of money gradually moved outside the control of national governments, new markets in their currencies developed.
- As the circulation time of capital is reduced, the effective size of the globe shrinks and it is possible trade stocks on 24-hour basis. By linking to the key ‘global cities’ firm and individuals can use these different space instantaneously for trade, investment and banking thus compressing both time and space.
Informational society: social effects
- Lerner…he noticed that rural villagers had developed a passion for owning radios, which help them to access stories and information about the world outside. When connectivity increased, the power of the village patriarchs decline. (there was a major shift in power relations)
- When television arrived, women or people can learn anything about the outside world like as lifestyle, fashion and other.
- The media have also to disseminate mass education, provide some encouragement to mass literacy and provide mass entertainment a grand scale. Cultural may give rise to sentiments of common humanity or at least to a recognition of cultural diversity.
- Three principal effects are often mentioned:
1. the effects of TV on patterns of violence; sexual mores and educational competence
2. The creation of global culture which is becoming increasing homogenized and Ersatz a reduction to the lowest common denominator.
3. The growth of destructive consumerism.
- Negative effects of TV viewing…
Ü US homes the TV is turned on for an average of seven hours a day until it is estimated that by age of eighteen the average American child will have witnessed 18000 simulated murders on TV.
Ü It is only reasonable that many parents, particularly those with young children, are disturbed at the though of their children arbitrarily drawing images, ideas and behavior pattern from the screen.
Ü However the connection between lived violence and mediated violence is much debated.
Ü Violence is not only caused by TV.
Ü TV might produce some kind of osmosis effect where people, children in particular are unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.
- the ‘dumbing-down, of culture
§ A culture collapse to the lowest common denominator has long been the subject of theoretical debate.
§ Intellectual in Frankfurt School argued that the products of what they termed the ‘cultural industries’ were characterize both by culture homogeneity and predictability, encouraging conformity among audiences and discouraging criticism of contemporary social relation under capitalism.
§ Marcuse ‘they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood’.
- Consumerism
§ Mentioning in this context the way in which consumerism has been effectively diffused by the global media.
§ Process of consumer imitation and emulation even had profound effect in fuelling the neo-liberal opposition to state communism.
§ The effect of mass media and mass tourism can come together in a negative sense, in that other countries and culture become mere objects for consumption.
§ Communications do not always lead to multicultural understanding and mutual respect for other peoples instead the need to annex the media to consumerism leads to an appropriation of other cultures in the greater interest of profits.
Gender and representation
- Through the power of the image the media can also strengthen stereotypes or legitimate long standing inequalities or class, race and gender.
- Women normally narrowly portrayed in three ways
1. as wife, mother & housekeeper
2. As sexual referents that confer their sexual attractiveness onto a prosaic object.
3. As sex objects to be use by men.
- The increasing feminization of work force and increased recognition of domestic responsibilities by males have now significantly altered the representation of women in the media.
The media race & social identity
- in capitalist market economies, the audience is treated not as citizens in a given community but as customers in a market and together the proliferation of choices and the increasing interactively of the media allow producers to monitor, segment and target audiences as consumers increasingly sophisticated ways.
- Complexity is also at the heart of media consumption in a detailed ethnographic study of young Punjabi people living in Southall, London
- One can draw from this rich study is that there is a high level of cultural survival power among many minority groups.
- The media provide a means of asserting a minority identity.
- Provide a means of affiliating to a cosmopolitan culture and showing loyalty to the country of settlement but doing so without providing undue offence and provocation to the older generation’s values and religious persuasions.
- The consumption of media is in short, a complex and ambiguous matter.
Review
- the media cannot exist without social actor
- The message is significantly change thought the medium of communication and this gives a special power to the technology itself and to those to own it, work it or understand it.
- As to a revolution in telecommunications we have argued that the increased sophistication and use of the telephone and its adjunct technologies as well as internet have many democratic possibilities that remain to be exploited.
TOPIC 7-Globalism: A New Phenomenon
- The emergence of ‘globalism’ are still new in this world today
- Globalism concerns those ‘values which take the real world of 5 billion people as the object of concern… everyone livings as world citizens… with a common interest in collective action to solve global problems’ (Albrow:1990)
- Globalism defines as ‘consciousness’ of the (problem of) the world single place (Robertson: 1992)
- In short, globalization mainly refers to a series of objective changes in the world that are partly outside us. Globalism refers to subjective realm
- Some of the major aspects of globalism are:
o Thinking about ourselves collectively while identifying with all humanity
o The end to one-way flows and the growth of multicultural awareness
o The empowerment of self-aware social actors
o The broadening of identities
Thinking about ourselves collectively
· Humankind is not just a small coterie of intellectuals, has begun to be capable of thinking, about itself collectively as one entity. For some time at least, our shared concerned with the category ‘humanity’ is beginning to extend beyond our affiliation solely to people of the same ethnic, national or religious identities as ourselves.
· Robertson argues that while we are still a long way from the world being capable of acting ‘for itself, the idea of this are becoming more and more significant and pressing
Growth of multicultural and transnational awareness
- Perlmutter (1991: 898) argues that previous attempts by imperialistic power to impose ‘civilization’ on the rest of humanity were based on what we calls as dominance-dependence mode of interrelationship. Here, incorporating other groups and societies normally involves conquest
- Similarly, access to the benefits of the victor’s civilizing values required a willingness to submit to its ‘superior’ laws and institutions.
- Now, ‘ we have our possession the technology to support the choice of sharing the governance of our planet rather than fighting with one another to see who will be in charge’ (Perlmutter,1991)
- At last, nations and cultures are more willing to recognize and accept cultural diversity
- Giddens (1990) makes the similar point, although most of the features we associate with modernity originated in the West, this forces spread and flourish autonomously around the world
- Each country is capable of determining its own version of modernity and projecting it on to the global world
Topic 8-Reflexive social actors and modernity
- All human reflect on the consequences of their own and others’ actions and perhaps alter their behavior in response to new information.
- Reflexive individuals tend to be self-conscious and knowledgeable. They seek to shape their own lives while redefining the world around them.
- The widening exercise of reflexivity is partly linked to the development of mass education and the wide dissemination not just of scientific knowledge but of the principle of doubt on which scientific method is built.
- Beck argues that modernity and its consequences – relentless economic growth, the unchecked powers of military, technological and scientific institutions – now seem to threaten the viability of the planetary biosphere.
- Beck also argues that the once powerful identities provided by some classes have been destroyed. This has helped to enlarge the scope for exercising individual freedom, especially for women. Thus, we are our own; our lives have become more insecure. We have greater freedom and more personal responsibility for managing our own lives.
- Because globalization has brought knowledge of other cultures into the heart of our daily lives it has become yet another major force that fosters increasing reflexivity and individualization.
- However, technological change, especially the revolution in microelectronics, has played the greatest role through speeding up the flows of ideas, images and information that crash through national boundaries, reminding us of our growing transnational interdependency.
- Reverse process also important to us, we need to judge and reach some decision on how we feel about other cultures in the light of our participation in the particular and the local. We can respond to the reality by selection, adaptation or resistance.
Chapter 8: UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT; THE VICTIMS
Globalization impacts very different regions of the world. With the collapse of alternative models, market-driven economies are now ‘the only show in town’ .Yet they seem intrinsically to generate enormous discrepancies in terms of income and opportunity both within and between countries. Many accept this outcome as natural or inevitable. Even if many people are socialized to accept a differential outcome fatefully, for sociologists the problem is more taxing and fascinating. Is it therefore in the interests of rich and powerful to maintain a differential between rich and poor or does that consequence also provides a long-term threat to their continued dominance in powerlessness and social marginality context.
World System Theory.
Wallerstein’s theory (1974, 1979) argues that capitalism and not nation states have always created world border. The world system became stabilized into three types of country belonging to the dominant core, semi periphery and periphery. Positions in this hierarchy are not fixed and movement between them is possible. Gradually capitalism has created an increasingly integrated world economy dominated by the logic of profit and the market. This has also generated excluded, marginal, dispossessed and poor people. The consequent was based on the ever-shifting world division of labor based on two processes. These are:
1. The increase in more countries into the global market as specialized buyers and sellers of commodities.
2. The tendency of capital to maximize their economical advantage in any country by the prevailing forms of labor process and class relations.
World capitalist system works to safeguard and expand the capitalist nature, of overall system at all times and to protect the interest of the leading players.
There have been many criticism leveled at this theory-mainly concerning the lack of interest in the political dimensions of power, privilege and dispossession and how challenges to the established order are mounted. Despite the bias towards the economic level, the theory has several advantages for those seeking to develop a global sociology, as Wallerstein:
- holistically and historically treats the world
- how proto-globalization gave way to the age of globalization
- underlines inequality and unevenness in the world system
- possible but with limits to move up and down the hierarchy
The New International Division of Labor (NIDL)
In response to the perceived deficiencies of the world system theory, a German research team propounded the idea that the (NIDL) had emerged. Advocates argue that the locating of manufacturing processes in cheap labor havens had not enhanced the living standards and development prospects in those poor countries affected. But like the world system theory theorists, they are skeptical that the periphery will overcome its condition of relative backwardness despite its recent, partial shift from dependence on raw material exports to the export of cheap manufactured goods. By contrast, the export of capital contributed to the growing unemployment in the West. The only winners, they argue are the TNCs.
Globalization and Poverty
It emphasized on phenomenon of marginality by more recent processes of globalization. Globalization is needed for great prosperity. The summit estimated that more than1 billion people live in degrading poverty in the world. Sociologists have distinguished between relative poverty and absolute poverty. Relative poverty is destined rather than basic material needs
Workers in the Industrializing Countries
Global free market has wrought great change in lives in old industrial heartlands of advanced countries. Peet (1987;21) Between 1974-83 approximately 8 million relatively highly paid manufacturing jobs representing a crucial volume of purchasing power disappeared in Europe especially Britain and Belgium. The decline of regional or city manufacturing generated a falling local tax base as incomes and retail values collapsed. The falling living standards and unemployment causes psychological and social effects. There was ups and downs of industrial revolution in worldwide might had waned in the face of growing competition due to the establishment of rival textile industries in America, Europe, Japan, India and Egypt. By the mid 1980s, well over 2/3 labor forces in advanced countries had left manufacturing and were classified as service workers.
REFUGEES AND DISPLACES PEOPLES.
Euripides, an ancient Greek writer once said that the greatest sorrow on earth would be the loss of one’s native land. But little has been done in protecting people from this curse that the twentieth century can be characterized as the century of the refugee. The legal definition of a refugee arose as a consequence 0f a UN Resolution of 1950, which was later incorporated in the 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967 Bellagio Protocol, both of which were signed by many countries.
Refugees in the period 1914-89
· At the end of the First World War there were an estimated 9.5 million refugees and 11 million at the end of the Second World War.
· The independence of India lead to the creation of Pakistan generated large numbers of refugees as Hindus and Muslims crossed to their respective ‘sides’. In the same year, the formation of the state of Israel created the problem of Palestinian refugees which were estimated at about 2.2 million people including the descendents of the refugees.
· Refugees fleeing from communist regimes during the Cold war were often welcomed in the West as they provided useful opportunities for scoring propaganda victories. East Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Russian dissidents and Cubans all fled to the West.
Refugees after the Cold War
The numbers of refugees started to increase in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and accelerated later on. The total number of ‘persons of concern’ recorded by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) rose from about 10 million in the 1970’s to 17 million in 1991 to 27 million in 1995 before falling. At the highest point, one out of every 255 people on Earth was a forced migrant. The expression ‘persons of concern’ indicates that the definition of ‘refugees’ cannot be strictly confined to the letter of the Geneva Convention.
Although there are considerable continuities between forms of refugee migration before and after the Cold War, there are three distinctive shifts to:
1. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall a new migratory space opened up. The switch by the by the former Soviet Union and its allies to a policy of open borders, meant that the western countries were confronted with a large number of unwelcome migrants. In places like Israel, Greece and Germany where there was a policy of welcoming co-ethnic immigrants no great problems arose. With the end of the Cold War, the political refugees of yesteryear are the economic migrants of today.
2. There is a considerable number of refugees that are from Africa and Asia, and from these regions it is the poorer countries that were most affected. War, famine and ethnic conflict commonly trigger forced migrations.
3. The collapse of the Soviet Union also generated Balkanization all over the former eastern bloc, particularly in former Yugoslavia. In the early month of 1999 over half a million refugees fled from Kosovo to nearby Macedonia and Albania.
Internally displaced persons
While the causes of refugee flow have not gone away, the increasing restrictions on entry to stable countries have blocked many possible entry points. This resulted in a phenomenon called the internally displaced peoples (IDPs). This category has been recognized by the UNHCR and based on an extensive report from all affected countries claim that by the mid 1990’s there were already 20-22 million IDPs. Most were displaced by either ethnic conflicts or civil wars-Four million in Sudan, 1.45 in Afghanistan and 1.2 million in Angola.
In addition, IDPS also arise from environmental changes, natural disasters and ambitious development projects.
The Urban Poor
The migration of those from rural areas to more urban areas in poorer countries has been described as ‘of epic historical proportions’ (Harrison 1981: 145) because those in rural areas are incapable of sustaining a self-sufficient life and with the prospects of a better livelihood they migrate to urban areas that in 1940 185 million were housed in towns and cities of the poorer countries and by 1975 the number had swollen up to 770 million, over half of which was because of migration from rural areas. The conditions of these people were so bad that a number of post-Marxist writers conceived the idea of a class below that of the proletariat described as the lumpenproletariat by Marx in reference to dispossessed peasantry who flooded nineteenth-century Paris.
Chapter 9: The five problems: policing the Electronic world
Ithiel de Sola Pool, one of the early thinkers on electronic communication and their implications for our lives, called them ‘Technologies of freedom” and argued that they create an unprecedented opportunity for freedom of speech that should be reinforced rather than constrained. So they also bring problems.
The main ones can serendipitously be grouped under the letter P:
POLICING
- Apply in cities, states, countries.
- Individual government lack the power to regulate much of what happens on the internet
PORNOGRAPHY
- Shorthand for the many disagreeable sorts of material that are easy to communicate on-line
PROCTECTION
- Essential to vigorous growth of electronic commerce of consumers, contracts ,brands
- Unless business has an environment as secure as the one enjoys in the off-line world, it will not thrive.
PRIVACY
- Electronic networks are the finest technologies ever invited for collecting personal data.
PROPERTY
- The ideas, knowledge, and creativity that are the main non-human assets of most business in the electronic world are harder to protect from theft than old-fashioned drop on your toe property.
POLICING THE ELECTRONIC WORLD
- The internet makes it harder for governments to enforce their will, party because it is international and so brings together incompatible jurisdictions and party because its technological characteristics make enforcement difficult.
GOVERNING ON-LINE MATERIAL
- Tracing its sources can become more difficult than it is when there is a paper trail to follow.
- Intellectual property is often as hard to regulate as bomb making
- One of the successes of the internet has been a market place for prescription drugs
- Three issue of policing
1)plenty of charlantans sell their wares on-line
2)even where a drug is legal and approved in one country, it may be banned in another
3)differing rules on advertising
SELF REGULATION OR REGULATION?
- Authority comes mainly from the quality of the training courses and testing materials that its designs.
- Bottom-up consensual governance of the internet may provides a model for some regulatory bodies.
PORNOGRAPHY
- The debate over regulating pornography in particular reveals the difficulties of setting rules for a border-hopping medium.
- The internet has almost certainly extended the market for pornography, including the sort of pornography that most people feel should be unavailable anywhere.
The problem of drawing a line.
1. Broad and vague provision made it a criminal offense for a person knowingly to transmit obscene or indecent material to anybody under eighteen to display such material in a manner available to a minor or to allow use of any telecommunication facility under his control for such prohibited activities.
2. The law was thrown out as unconstitutional a judgment upheld the following year in the Supreme Court.
3. The Philadelphia judges poetically decreed, represented a never-ending worldwide conservation as such, it deserved the same light hand of regulation that touches private discourse.
The problem of accountability
1. The line between public and private is blurring.
2. The same network can deliver a newspaper, a broadcast, or a private letter the same terminal can receive all of these.
3. Arguments about all sorts of on-line issues copyright, sexual harassment, indecency quickly turn into debates about free speech.
Self-censorship or no censorship
- A certain amount of undesirable material can be blocked by the use of screening technologies.
- These are used by governments of countries such as Iran or Syria to control what their citizens’ watch, by companies that want to prevent their employees from looking at dirty pictures when they should be working and by households keen to control what their children see.
- It is because the same software can be used by dictatorial governments and innocent homes, its development has made civil libertarians uneasy.
- America online unintentionally shut down a forum for discussing breast cancer because it mentioned breasts and software from another company closed off access to the official white house site because of a reference to the presidential couple.
- Several companies market filters to screen sites, the equivalent of the “V” chip that filters televisions material, allowing parents automatically to block programs they do not want their children to see.
Protection
- Plenty of electronic fraud is there for consumers to buy into a large number of sites offer fake identification.
- A consumer group, for the European Commission, researchers in eleven countries each ordered a common list of eight products on-line, aiming to buy where possible from sites in other countries, and then returned most of the items bought.
- A buyer however might want reassurance on these points, if only to know where to complain if a transaction goes wrong and which jurisdiction the company trades in.
- In electronic retailing as in so many other on-line areas, the role of government will inevitably be curtailed. Either consumers will have to re-learn the law of caveat emptor or private sector intermediaries will spring up to provide some of the consumer protection that governments cannot offer.
Privacy
- The networked computer makes it easier than ever before to collect information that once was largely unrecorded, and then to store, retrieve, analyze and sell it.
- The brief period of privacy that came between the end of village life and the coming of the networked computer is ended.
- Privacy previously survived be default there was often no way to collect or analyze information.
- Protection of privacy will require deliberate decisions by government, companies, and above all individuals.
- Only when people regard the loss of privacy as a threat are they likely to be willing to accept the burden that privacy as a threat are they likely to be wiling to accept the burden that privacy’s protection, ironically, will entail.
THE ACCUMULATION DATA
· The networked computer is the most efficient tool ever devised for collecting personal information. Governments collect information on people as student, taxpayers, hospital patients, benefit recipient, law-breakers and immigrants.
· The internet adds enormously to the amount of information collected. Some is surrendered knowingly by users, as when sites offer free content in exchange for personal detail.
· The mobile telephone, with its ability to track a caller’s movement, has ready proved a gift to the courts.
· More electronic devices and software packages contain identifying number to help them talk to one another.
· People will come to embody their identity, thanks to the advance of “biometrics” which will create inexpensive and reliable ways to identify people from voice, eyeballs, thumbprints, or any other part of their anatomy.
THE PRICE OF CONVENIENCE
· Much of this data collection brings not just commercial gains, but also benefit to individuals and society at large.
· The government collect data they generally use it for the greater public good ex: to tackle traffic jams, track fraudulent welfare claims, monitor book loans from libraries and catch criminal.
· However, many people worry about the collection of so much personal information.
PROTECTING PRIVACY
· The Federal Trade Commission which had initially supported self-regulation, eventually grew exasperated with the failure of most Web sites voluntarily to develop adequate standards for pricy protection.
· The EU has always had a regulatory, rather than self-regulatory, approach to privacy. It passed a directive on the protection of personal information which came into force in October 1998.
· In European, where so many internet transactions cross borders, the desire for privacy protection in understandable.
· Commercial services to help people protect their privacy will flourish only if people really want them.
· People may then begin to see their personal details in a new light: as their intellectual property, perhaps, to be protected as carefully as a valuable or a unique idea.
Brands, trademark, and domain names
- Companies who publicize products on the Internet run into a problem that sounds abstruse but it is fundamental to the use of global brands: domain names.
- The allocation of domain names is the power at the heart of the Internet.
- The most valuable names, the Upper East Side of on-line real estate are ending in “.com”.
- They are more popular than “.org” or “.net”.
- Domain names are the Internet’s equivalent of telephone numbers and they are unique.
- By June 2000, more than ten million domain names had been registered.
- A domain name thus assume as much importance to a company as a trademark.
- Although trademark law allows many companies legitimately to share a name in the high street or telephone directory, on-line one name can serve only one company, because it is a unique locator.
- The desirable permutations of useful names are finite and rapidly running out causes all manner of problems.
- The Internet’s commercial role grew in the mid-1990s, many giant companies found that their obvious domain name had been snapped up.
- An alternative is to use money rather than the courts to acquire a coveted name.
- The resolution of disputes over domain names has become a pressing problem.
- The World Intellectual Property Organization deal with disputes made an important ruling in 2000 on Internet address bearing the names of living people.
Copyright and copying
- With domain names, the intellectual-property problem is ultimately one with a legal solution: a set of rules must determine who has the right to each name.
- The problems more complicated with copyright.
- Not only legal issue of ownership, there are also technical questions about how far legal rights can be enforced.
- Much of the material bought and sold on electronic networks depends for its value mainly upon copyright.
- The initial cost of developing software or recording a song may be high, but once it has been incurred, the product can be copied and distributed electronically many times at virtually no cost.
- It also presents problems when such products are sold. The price is vastly greater than the cost of producing each additional item.
- That in turn creates a huge temptation to cheat.
- Consumers and pirates share an interest in changing the original creator of the product out of the payment that the copyright law would normally guarantee.
Paying the copyright
- People generally pay for the copyrighted material each time they use it.
- Among the ways in which copyright holders might make money in a digital world is one proposed by Esther Dyson, an American cyber-guru.
- She suggested that content could be sold outright to advertisers or sponsors who would give it away happily in order to attract attention to their own products.
- Advertising has been the main way free music sites have made money.
- It has long been the way that most conventional forms of content, from newspaper to television broadcasting are financed.
- Another model is to sell the razor cheaply but charge mainly for the blades.
- A third proposal is what de Sola Pool dubbed “serviceright”- whereby a charge is made not for reproduction but for continuing service, in the form of, say, updating the original material.
- Even if the product is available free on-line, people may still choose to pay for it.
- In the first quarter of 2000, when Napster’s popularity was at its height American music sales were running 8 percent than a year earlier.
- But people might be willing to pay to receive music on-line because of convenience or quality of service.
- The tale of the music industry does not suggest that it is impossible to make money from selling copyrighted material on-line.
- If the new models are created, they may ultimately make more money for copyrighted owners, not less.
- However, if the industry embraces a new model, he principal beneficiaries are likely to be the artist and the audience.
Policing Global Networks
- In a world of national jurisdiction, poses intractable difficulties for regulators.
- National laws cannot provide the means for dealing with many of the regulatory problems that the Internet, in particular creates.
- Governments will have to cooperate more than they now do on subjects as diverse as taxation, terrorism and Internet governance.
- Many issues resist effective electronic policing, except at a cost that rich democracies will be unwilling to carry.
- A necessary trade-off will result between policing and access to information.
- Just as in the non-electronic world, where societies choose to accept some risk in exchange for a certain level of personal convenience and freedom, so it will be in the electronic.
- The cost of effective control will be simply too high.
- Countries will have to adjust their expectations or levels of tolerance.
- For example, copyright holders will find different ways to earn revenue learning to exploit the potential of electronic communications rather than regretting the difficulties they cause.
- Regimes that censor their citizens will also face a trade-off. They may be willing to accept more inconvenience and economic loss than rich democracies, but the costs will rise over time.
- In a world where for the great majority, knowledge flows freely, the penalties for restricting it will be impoverishment and marginalization.
CHAPTER 10: KNOWLEDGE AND THE NEW MONOPOLISTS
- Its stock market valuation was the largest. And yet Microsoft, whose commercial ferocity and acumen laid the foundation for American dominance of the new economy, was found guilty of a host of antitrust offenses and ordered by a court to split itself into two.
- Microsoft case underlined and awkward aspect of the communications revolution. In the new economy, many big companies dominate their respective markets. In hardware, thinks of Cisco, which bestrides the market for internet routers, or inters (microprocessor), or Oracle (databases).
- As a early, three-quarters of all business-to-consumer e-commerce went through a mere five sites: Amazon, eBay, America online, Yahoo! And Buy.com. In few other industries in the capitalist world was such a level of monopoly, usually state owned, up until the state 1990s, and often the dominant state owned broadcaster too.
- In the United States, the telecommunication Act of 1996, intend, as a liberalizing measure, was followed by a surge of mergers which may, perversely, have increased concentrations in some markets.
The dilemma for regulators
- In particular, they depend on networks, which rise steeply in value the larger become. At the same time, many communications, businesses have another peculiarity: theirs overheads and start-up cost a high, relative to the very low costs of producing each item they sell.
- The combination of networks with low additional coasts of production meant that a new economy monopolist has different incentives from the typical old-economy monopolist.
- The more people use the software, the greater the incentive for developers write new applications to work with it and so for even more people to acquire it. As the market for Yahoo! or Windows expands, their respective companies do not have to invest to build new plants as a car factory would have to do.
- The only incentives to produce anything are the possession of the temporary monopoly power,” which become” the central driving thrust of the new economy. Joseph Schumpeter, a Harvard university professor who was one of the pioneers of the theory of economic development, argued that the protection that the monopoly confers on innovators might lead to a faster rate of progress than competition would do.
- Which new companies innovate in order to take over markets previously dominated by others? ‘The question for governments is how far they should allow competition and how far they should protect the evanescent innovations of the new monopolists.
Are Communications Monopoly-prone?
- It may seem odd that an industry in the throes of such a revolution as the communications businesses should be so full of market giants. It is even odder in the case of the internet, which counts openness as one of its most striking characteristic.
- Essential though competition is usually assumed to be for economic growth, the essence of the communications businesses is frequently monopoly.
The economic of network
- Communication and information technology are dominated by networks.
- These have a peculiar characteristic: the points of access, the more valuable they are.
- Thinks of the fact machine, urged Lawrence Summers when describing the oddities of the new economy.
- One of the most powerful forces driving communications industries toward concentrations is the ‘network effect.
- Many industries in and around the old-established communications business are based on physical networks, such as telephone lines or cable-televisions systems.
- In most countries, governments reinforced the natural tendency to concentration that networks always have. Only in the late 1990s did most countries starts to privatize these networks and allows competitions with them.
- When computers came along, they created a new kind of “virtual” network. If you happened to use an Apple Mac, it was hard to send files to your friend who had a pc. Mobile telephones brought new networks too. Europe’s (global system for mobile communications) digitals standards is as boon, because is cavers the continent as well a large tracts of an Asia and Africa.
The prevalence of systems
- One of the main complaints against Microsoft was that it ‘bundled’ some of its products with others, so that costumers who acquired a computer equipped with a windows operating systems would also find an in internets Explorer or a Microsoft Network icon on screen.
- Another force encouraging monopoly in the communications industry is that is products are rarely used in isolation.
- Systems are so important that companies controlling one part frequently level their way into others. As more and more American homes becomes connected to high capacity cable networks, the merged firm will have a powerful hold on the whole system for delivering entertainment, news and information.
- Often, the governments regulators for the telephone industries, investigated BT because is was claimed that Cell nets, its mobile telephone-subsidiary, had programmed some of the handsets it sold to go first to BT’s own initial menu page, or portal, genie.
The important of standard
- Thinks of the internet itself and the way it enables lots of different computers to talk to one another. Or thinks of the English language, in its role as the global tongue.
- All the hugely successfully standard. Standard bring benefit for consumers. That much is clear from the irritation caused by situations where none exists.
- Thinks of the inconvenience involved in taking a laptop computer abroad with a pocket-full of telephone jacks and a bag of different converters for electric plugs, or the annoyance of having to convert a videocassette recorded by a friends in Germany to play on a televisions set in the united states.
- Thinks of how much a rapid development of digital mobile telephony in Europe owed to the early emergence of a common standard, the GSM, which mean that a simple handset can be used to make a call in Ireland or Italy and in shanghai or Sydney.
- (But not infuriatingly, in the United States or Japan.) In the past, it has been rare for anyone to own a successful standard.
- In communications, the rapid evolutions of new technologies creates lots of opportunities for companies to try to set an industry standard. When a company owns an established standard, it clearly has a license to prints money.
The dangers of dependence
- One example of the power of a bad standard is analogue televisions. Of the three main standard-the united state’s NTSC (said by cynics to stand for “never twice the same color”), France’s SECAM and the variations of PAL (‘perfection At last’ say wags.) but some of the example that people tend to thinks of a proving the perils of becoming locked in turn out, on closer examinations to be unconvincing.
- Once a standard becomes widely accepted, the costs of changing it may be high
- In fact, a study of the QWERTY story doubt on the supposed inferiority of the keyboard’s layout.
- Its authors, in a subsequent book, pointed out that inferior products do sometimes lock in consumers. But only if the costs of switching are greater than the benefits will rise, because inferiority is a spur to come up with alternative.
- Giving away cut prize typewriters or running cheap training courses to give potential switcher encouragement.
Creating Competitions
- The issue arose less often elsewhere, simply because the United States was only country in the world in which both industries were entirely in private hands. In most other countries, the stated owned the telecommunications monopoly.
- Televisions outside in United States was largely broadcast, not cable, and was generally also either state owned or at least publicity financed. Only in the 1990s, as technology changed, did both industries start to move into the private sector and open to competition around the world.
- In both industries, two arguments recur particularly frequently. The first concerns the myriad ways in which a big network can shut out smaller rivals to prevent them from reaping the huge economic benefit of connecting with it.
- A big telephone company overcharges a smaller one for the right to connect to costumers call. A lasso’s cable television network may refuse to carry its rivals program.
- This issue arises in newer communication industries too. The second argument is over the extent to with large, established players should carry obligations that upstarts rivals do not.
- Government that saw the change of raising even larger sums by privatizing the telephone monopoly worried that, if they threw open the market to competition too quickly, they would devalue their precious asset.
- Creating effective competition in telecommunications is the single most important step that government around the world needs to take to bring benefits of the death of distance to their people.
The benefit of competition
- In communications, as in most industries competitions brings benefits to consumer. In the mind-1990s there was s striking contrast between telephone advertising in the united states- preaching the benefits of talking on the telephone to subscribers who made around three thousand calls per line per year.
- In countries that were quick to allow competition in the televisions business, not only do people use the telephone more intensively, but they are also more likely to enjoy new services and state-of-the-art equipment.
- The internet to develop more rapidly in countries where telephone services compete than in those where they do not. All the evidence suggest, however that the best way to stimulate the availability of telephone and internet access in poor countries is to open the field to competitions.
- The benefit or choice in televisions and radio are had to measure, but the speed with which the audiences of the established public broadcaster declined in the 1990s.
The obligation of size
- Once telephone monopolies began to see their market under threat, they too began to talk a great deal about universal service.
- True the telephone is an essential part of modern life. It can be indispensable for finding a job, reaching a doctor or staying in touch with family and friends.
- They have invented new products to reach people whom even governments never promised “universal service’.
- The growth of pre-paid telephone cards, for example has brought the telephone to millions of people whose lack of credit-worthiness would never allow them to have a mobile telephone of their own.
What government can do?
- They need to open markets to competitions, including competition from abroad. The next step is to set up dependent regulators-in a surprising number of countries, government begin by letting the old telephone monopoly decide the basic for connecting with its new competitors face two challengers and draw up clear rules.
- There are two main approaches. Some countries, such a Germany and Britain have chosen rules that are deliberately asymmetric, imposing heavier obligations on the old giants than on the new entrants.
- The alternative is to split up dominant giants. America used that approach to reduce the power of AT&T in the 1980s. Now, it seems likely to apply it to a new behemoth, Microsoft.
- In the case of AT&T, the split helped to create competition in long distance service and to drive down prices.
The need for new rules
- An important study of industries such a software, semiconductor and computer and computer finds that a strengthening of patent protections in the 1980s was not accompanied by a surge in research and development intensity and productivity.
- Instead R&D stagnated and even declined in those industries and firms than patented most. The problem, argues the author of the study, is that innovations is sequential.
- It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it theirs business to watch the advancing wave of improvement and to gather its form in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the art.
TOPIC 11
SOCIETY, CULTURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Like a good revolution, the technology changes that are rushing forward are essentially liberalizing. They bring to the mass of people what was once available only to the elite, and to the individual what was once available only communally.
Other technological changes have had similar effect : think how the radio enable every family to hear Yehudi Menuhin play a violin concerto, and how the Sony Walkman then allowed every individual a personal performance. Both the mobile telephone and the Internet are personal technologies, giving individuals access to services (a telephone call, a research library ) that were once communal or even inaccessible.
Arthur C.Clarke once point out, people exaggerate the short-run impacts of technological change and underestimate the long-run effect. Really, big technological changes permeate our homes, our personal relationship, our daily habits, the way we think and speak.
The main impact of the death of distance is to make communication and access to information in all its forms more convenient. On balance, that will surely be good for societies everywhere, although the nature of the effect will depend on why people communicate and on what knowledge they choose to acquire and how they use it. Like the automobile, telecommunication technology is a tool that can be used for bad purposes as well as good but it should, overall make people’s lives easier and richer. More communication is generally better than less.
In broad terms, the societies of the rich world are being altered in at least four main ways. The role of the home is changing, as it reacquires functions it lost in the last century. It is becoming not just a workshop, but a place where people receive more of their education, training, and health care.
New kinds of community are emerging, bonded electronically across distance, sharing work, domestic interest, and cultural backgrounds.
THE LOCATION OF THE WORK
Many already spend sometimes telecommuting from home. Others increasingly work on the move, or in places that never used to be thought of as offices : hotel rooms, cars, airport departure lounges. Some mobile worker including sale representatives, service personnel and repair crews are engaged in various kind of maintenance or in delivery (of people as well as goods).
WORKING FROM HOME
Several experiment have suggested that home-based teleworking, properly organized, can bring benefits such as greater job satisfaction and less stress. An experiment conducted in the far north of Scotland by British telecom, a large British telephone company, found that home-based directory assistance operators, connected to a supervisor and the customer by a telephone link and a computer link were particularly reliable.
Companies see telecommuting more as a perk than as a way of boosting productivity. Some companies have a more subtle approach, for example has a plan to give eligible employees a computer, printer, and internet access access at home for a nominal fee. That is to encourage employees to develop technology skills at home, improve access to corporate information and foster new ideas.
WORKERS IN TRANSIT
Changing communications have made it easier for companies to use mobile workers efficiently. A controller can use satellite-positioning equipment to track a repair crew, a computer to calculate the most efficient routes for worker to take, and mobile telephones to maintain contact between despatchers and workers.
To hold together a business with global scope, which may have production, distribution and alliance partners spread among several countries, requires not only an efficient electronic network but an enormous amount of travel by managers and suppliers.
THE FUTURE OF THE OFFICE
In the future, then more work will be done outside offices. Some will take place in the home, some in transit. That will have long-term consequences for cities, where work has increasingly been located.
THE FUTURE OF HOME
People not only entertain, relax, and sleep at home, they increasingly find there a range of services, from health care and education to investment and employment. From their homes, people can study any subject from astronomy to zoology, seek legal advice, participate in a political debate, or bid in an auction.
NEW COMMUNITIES
The concept of cyberspace- a computer-generated, multidimensional world in which people live in virtual reality-was conceived by William Gibson, a science-fiction writer, in a book called Neuromancer, 1984. The disembodied world he presciently portrayed symbolizes for many people the danger that electronic communications will be isolating and human as people find a social life in the chat rooms of the Internet.
The main impact of better and less expensive communication is likely to be to create new ways to socialize and build communities of interest, independent of geography. Both will enrich people’s lives and mitigate the effects of separation that go with the increase in international migration, overseas employment, and business travel.
THE FUTURE OF SOCIALIZING
Communications alter social contact. By far the most popular use of the Internet is electronic mail and social calling constitutes the fastest growing area of international telephone traffic.
International migration, business travel and tourism all increase the number of people separated from their friend by distance. More telephone call go from Germany to Turkey , for example, than from Germany to the United State , because although the United State is more import trading partner for Germany than is Turkey , Turkey has been a bigger source of immigrant. Electronic communications enable friendship and to survive separation.
Now, the internet may partly replace the telephone call. Indeed, when people have access to the internet at home, some of the time they spend online would once have been spent talking on the telephone or seeing friends. A large study conducted by Stanford University found that the main reallocation of time by time by regular users is from watching television and reading news paper, call friend and family and seeing them.
The internet offers forms of communication that some people may prefer. It facilitates contact with strangers, a typed message need carry no information about personal appearance, age, race or gender. Bulletin boards and chat rooms offer scope for one to many contacts that create opportunities for discussion and debate.
Chatting to strangers becomes easier when based on a shared interest. One of the earliest uses of the internet was to connect geographically scattered groups with shared minority interests. These virtual communities of people linked electronically may meet occasionally for what cyber-enthusiasts call face time-or may never meet. Such horizontal communities, scattered around the world may have more in common with one another than with their next door neighbors.
Such horizontal contact becomes more important in commercial life as companies fragment. It might allow the emergence of on-line equivalents of the professional and craft guilds that united workers in the Middle Ages, for example. If growing numbers of employees switch to self-employment, they may seek out on-line associations to set standards for their trade, help them sell their skills, and provide professional and social support.
In politics, on-line communities can be used to help to build cross-border alliances that challenge specific organizations or their actions.
One of the most basic building blocks of cultural identity a knowledge of one’s origin, has been transformed by electronic communications and especially by the Internet.
A NEW LINGUISTIK STYLE
Electronic communication have been changing the use of language for over a century. Developments in the telecommunication have brought other cultural innovation.
Electronic mail and internet chat have produced yet another linguistic innovation : the written conversation. Unlike a reply to a letter, which takes at least forty eight hour to arrive, a reply to an email can be more or less instantaneous.
The Coming Global Togue
The coming global tongue standarzing makes communication easier and cheaper, creating a virtuous circle so that more of it occurs. Used by something like a quarter of the world’s population, it makes many forms of communication. In this, it is like a shared currency or a shared set of tastes.
Besides, the spread of English has depended on two factors, first the legacy of colonialism and the emergence of the united states as the world’s largest commercial power. English is the aim language when we are using internet and as world trade language.
Other Language
In spite of English is important other language olso have their advantages like digital, television with its multitude of channels, will make it easier and less expensive to produce and distribute niche programs in minority language.
Indeed, one of the clearest lessons of the new technology is that it increase the scope for niche communities of all sorts. Nowadays youth can sending shorts messages from a cellphone in both countries is cheap and hugely popular with the impecunious young for example young Japanese luckily already use a slang that condenses words and so is ideal for the telephone.
Cultural Protection
European countries have subsidized their film and television industries, partly to keep theem alive and partly to tend off the power of Hollywood . They ableto flow out the big costs of Hollywood movie-makingare not technical, they include multimillion dollar payments to stars, directors and scripwriters as well as the immense expense of global marketing and distribution
Winners and losers
The new world of electronic communication will include winners and losers, haves and have-nots.
In the rich world
Currently college degrees were eight times more likely to have a PC at home and sixteen times more likely to have internet access at home than those with an elementary school education. In short the very people with most to gain were the least likely to have access.
The costs of access to the digital world are falling and convenience is rising. Moreover, an internet ready PC can now be bought for less than the price of most television set, which are standard items in almost everyhome. Now most of the services now available only with a PC will soon be widely available on internet enabled mobile telephones and on other devices too governments and companies will make huge cost savings by delivering services electronically, so it will be governments interest to spend some of those savings to connect the unconnected.
The poor may also find themselves more included in the new electronic society than they were in the old one. So participants in low-income home in Newark , New Jersey receive a computer, software and training in exchange for their commitment to try to improve communication with their neighbours. Even in Japanese companies, where age has for so long been tantamount to seniority, older workers suddenly find themselves forced to ask their juniors how to use the most important piece of office equipment, the computer. It is because the young grow up with the idea of almost limit less choice of entertainment of easy accsess to information, and of the screan and computer as gateways to the rest of the world.
In developing world
In developing contry, they have the potential to skip severel stages of technological development and go straight to the most up-to-date networks. It is because developing countries start off with so much less capital investment perworker than rich countries, they have hug scope to grow rapidly simply by buying technology already invented in the rich world and copying first world production methods. The border hopping properties help to bring new idea to receptive poor countries almost as quickly as they spread through the ricg world. Each countries have their policies to allow new communication industries to flourish, they will find that the electronic world creates opportunities rather than suppressing them and opens doors rather than shutting them.
Thanks to my Group-mate and Dr. Reevany Bustami
