Globalization and the Internetworked World

Ways in which the term "globalization" is used in the context of the Internet:
  • The use of the Net to communicate local, ethnic, religious, and national cultures to a worldwide and international audience. This could be called optimistic multiculturalism on the Net where anyone with access can participate.

  • The worldwide diffusion of dominant cultures through the global marketplace (Western and American cultures globalized through ownership of infrastructure and production), reading "globalization" as another case of  hegemony, cultural imperialism, or Americanization.

  • The general homogenization or "internationalization" of culture, favoring Western developed nations and their languages and values, accompanied by an awareness of a resulting dilution or disappearance of local and minority cultures.

  • In the political economy of communications, the movement toward worldwide access to communications technology and connectivity across territorial boundaries. The goals of global access and ubiquity of the Net require dealing with two forces, one toward technology development and diffusion, the other toward governmental and institutional controls over international interconnectivity.

  • International business and worldwide Internet ecommerce, promoted by transnational corporations, for access to friction-free worldwide markets.
  • Globalization and  positioning of arguments: globalization discussed from what socially grounded perspective? from where about whom?

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  • Post-Internet and Post-Mass-Media globalization exposes the reality of mediated cross-cultural communication.

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  • The globalization question concerns the "always already mediatedness" of communication.

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  • Example from Ron Scollon: Chinese model of education with direct parental involvement; students now left alone to use computers and the Internet without parental control. An effect of globalization?



    • Contexts and arguments for thinking about globalization

    Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, I) (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996)

    • "our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self" (1:3).

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    • "New information technologies are integrating the world in global networks of  instrumentality. Computer- mediated communication begets a vast array of virtual communities. Yet the distinctive social and political trend of the 1990s is the construction of social action and politics around primary identities, either ascribed, rooted in history and geography, or newly built in an anxious search for meaning and spirituality. The first historical steps of informational societies seem to characterize them by the preeminence of  identity as their organizing principle." (Castells, 1:22) 
    • Emergence of regional and local "global economies".

    Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998)
    • The centrality of the "global informational city" (concentration of communication infrastructure, economic base, law and government policy/regulation, labor, and capital).

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    • Global cities as points for flows of labor, capital, information, and technology.

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    • Consider metro Washington ("the digital beltway") as a global city: infrastructure ownership concentration, information and money flows, national and state policy and regulation in place to support infocomm industries, labor markets and migrations--all in the service of a transnational information economy.

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    • Aren't we talking about networks of cities when we talk about "globalization"? Where are non-urban regions without an infrastructure in the idea of the "global"?

    • Parallel view with Wriston's Law: "capital goes where it's wanted and stays where it's well treated".

      • All types of capital follow this law: financial, intellectual, cultural.

      • Globalization is really the networked matrix of capital concentrations in cities.

    Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)
    • Weakening of nation-state in political identities; importance of trans-national civilizations.

    • World Increasingly divided between Eastern and Western civilizations.

    • Civilization-identity requires an "other" against which identity is defined.

    • Huntington's major premises:

      • The forces of integration in the world are real and precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness.

      • The world is in some sense two, but the central distinction is between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them. The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many.

      • Nation states are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs, but their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors.

      • The world is indeed anarchical, rife with tribal and nationality conflicts, but the groups that pose the greatest dangers for stability are those between states or groups from different civilizations. (The Clash of Civilizations, p. 36)
    • Problems with Huntington's argument? Where is diversity? Positioning of argument?

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    • In Huntington's model, how could the Internet world deal with "otherness"? (Create it? perpetuate local identities?)

    Benjamin Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World  (New York: Random House, 1995)
    • The world is becoming more and more divided into two cultural, political, and economic camps: homogenized transnational consumerist capitalism now extended to global information, communication, and entertainment (McWorld), and fragmented tribal identity wars by groups rejecting transnational and international influences (Jihad) (p.4).

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    • The Jihad group is like Benedict Anderson's "imagined political community": a unity across borders.

    Paradox of global localization: making local identity politics a global issue through the Internet.
    • Local identity groups using the technologies of globalization to promote political interests.

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    • For example, the Taliban in Afghanistan. (See www.taliban.com with a Netscape pop-up advertising window!).

    World Trade Organization and Globalization Issues:
    Complexity of World Trade, Labor, and Corporate Ownership
     
    • Complexity of solving world policy issues through a trade organization.
    • "Digital Divide" confusion. John Chambers (CEO, Cisco Systems) argues that the so-called "digital divide" is industrial, part of the old economy, not an effect of the Internet or the digital economy.
      • But there are continued problems of concentration of capital in global informational cities.
    • Labor and corporate ownership: unions are dishonest in portrayal of workers today. Unions are losing power and membership.
      • Many have company ownership in stock and most have pension funds almost totally invested in stocks.
      • Internet economy businesses are led by people with ownership in the company, and most employees are given stock options to keep the invested in the company's success.

    Further Study:
    Martin Irvine, 1999