Communication and Globalization

Week 2

Globalization is the term used to describe the growing interdependence of the world’s
economies, cultures, and populations brought about by cross-border trade in goods and
services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information. Countries have
built economic partnerships to facilitate these movements over many centuries.

Effects of Globalization on Global Communication

1. Creation of a Global Village. “Global village” is coined by theorist Marshall

McLuhan when distance and isolation do not matter anymore because people
are connected by technology, widespread telephone and internet access.

2. Increased Business Opportunities. With modernization through technology,

globalization has reached out to many countries. Today, many companies hire
employees that are located in other countries. Communication vehicles make it
simple for people to converse with colleagues across the globe, connect with
suppliers and customers worldwide, order food and products, and perform other
transactions at a massive pace, and shipment is onward. By these means, the
economic status of the country is improved. Thus, globalization is an asset in
business; the operation has become modern at a large scale across the globe.

3. Fewer Cultural Barriers. Culture is crucial in any type of people interface.

Through globalization and global technology, cultural barriers are becoming less
prevalent when interacting with people. Communicating effectively and frequently
with various people across countries contributes to understanding their culture
progressively.

Impact of Communication in the Society and the World

Communication plays a significant role in the existence of human life. Science

and information technology prevail in the 21st century. Email, the Internet, phones, and
televisions are now common and make communication across countries easier, faster,
and more reliable than the traditional means of communication.

1. Creates family ties. Communication creates an atmosphere that allows family

members to express their necessities, love, admiration, and differences. It also
prevents conflict among family members.
2. Enables society to be connected. Various organizations use electronic
communication in day-to-day operations, and individuals use it for personal
purposes, such as video conferencing, communicating with customers online,
paying bills, socializing, etc.
3. Reduces distance considerably between countries, eliminating time lags.
4. Transforms the world into a global village.
Illustration 1

Connected, but Alone Excerpt

Jimmy Fischer

In Connected, but Alone Ted talk, Sherry Turkle talks about how technology has a
considerable influence on our social interaction today. The technological world brings
us together but also separates us from the real world. Sherry explains that many
people who look for acceptance, companionship, and interaction mostly go to their
phones to seek that interaction. This phenomenon is becoming a huge problem in our
society because instead of relying on others, people are relying on their phones. In
Sherry’s speech, she explains that when people need to interact socially, they turn to
their phones and do not give their full attention to others who are present at the time.
Friends, coworkers, and family members feel neglected, and they do not receive the
interaction they need. It is not late to change this behavior. The way we interact with
people can be improved if we keep away from our phone to “help” us with social
interaction.

Excerpt is from: https://connectedbutalonesummary.blogspot.com/

The excerpt above raises several insights into how technology touches people’s
lives. We have begun to lean on technology in our day-to-day routine. Everywhere we
are in this world, we are connected in some way via technology devices, such as
phones to text and email, to socialize. Such devices are psychologically powerful that
they change what we do and who we are. Thus, we expect more from technology and
less from each other.

The following article by Sherry Turkle titled, “The Flight from Conversation,” will
help us further understand how technology has changed our ways of communications.
(Turkle, 2012).

Illustration 2

The Flight from Conversation

By SHERRY TURKLE
 We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And
yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work, executives
text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes
and when we are on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves
maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it is hard, but it
can be done.

Over the past 15 years, I have studied technologies of mobile connection and
talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives.
I have learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they
change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We have become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.”

Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere,
connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to
move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over
where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of
one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what
interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from
one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He does not

stop by to talk; he does not call. He says that he does not want to interrupt them. He
says they are “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I am
not telling the truth. I am the one who does not want to be interrupted. I think I should.
But I would rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost
wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I would like to learn how to have a
conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation

show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the
campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of
us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A
senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates
lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they
put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With
the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be
broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot
of people — carefully kept at bay. We cannot get enough of one another if we can use
technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far,
just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.

‘A Place Where Everybody Can Shop’ Is Closing Its Doors

Why Intellectuals Support Dictators

To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This
means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh,
the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.

Human relationships are rich; they are messy and demanding. We have
learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation
to connection is part of this. But it is a process in which we shortchange ourselves.
Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a
big gulp of real conversation. But they do not. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these
have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how
valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for
saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in
sips does not work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another.
In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it is derived from
words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In
conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we

communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the
volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get
these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications,
even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable
news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consumed with that which we were
nourished by.”

And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So,
our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-
reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what is “on our mind,” but we
have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in
conversation requires trust. It is hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends
except connect.

As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with

less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse
about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore
confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead
of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database.
Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s
iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more like a best friend — one
who will listen when others will not.

During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with
technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this
feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed
— each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why — against all
reason — so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us.
Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be
companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I

brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care
facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot
seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The
woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants
advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer
psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with
connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that
accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we
want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of
human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?

WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem
increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without
the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful
fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want
it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed, our new devices have turned
being alone into a problem that can be solved.

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a
device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive
impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves

by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we are having them. We used to think, “I have
a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to
send a text.”

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in
our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather
ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but do not
experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to
support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is
true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we do not teach
our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first,
deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room.
We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of
conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so
busy communicating that we often do not have time to talk to one another about what
really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should
introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between
texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring
bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter
and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked
the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their
heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they
often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners,
children, everyone is on their own devices.

So, I say, look up, look at one another, and let us start the conversation.

Excerpt is from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-

conversation.html