Global forces

Our society is becoming increasingly globalised; influenced by world events; as we connect into a worldwide web of content, networks, people, media and tools. Many of us do so willingly, but there is a very real underlying tension between the effects of the global and the desires of the individual. We all need to make choices, but how free are we to choose? This refers not only to what we buy (clothing, food, goods) but also how we learn, consume news, spend our leisure time as we are continually exposed to media. Ultimately, what is this exposure doing to our values, our beliefs, our wellbeing?

Globalization can be defined as 'the increasing interdependence of world society' (Giddens, 1991: 520). The effects of globalization are being felt around the world. It is a force that affects our economy, travel, exchange of goods and services, access to information, communication, health provision, education delivery and even the way we have begun to reconceptualise the world about us. According to some observers, we have in effect reached the idealism first suggested by Marshall McLuhan, who in mapping the effects of communication and the 'electric age', had suggested that we would all one day be living in a 'global village', where the concept of 'togetherness' would take on an entirely new set of meanings (See Toffler, 1971: 444). The key implication of this was that as a homogenous 'group' of consumer-actors, we would all adopt a common identity, as we were subsumed into an ever shrinking world.

To a certain extent this has happened as predicted. Wherever we travel in the world, transnational commodities are awaiting us. We can eat in the seemingly ubiquitous McDonalds restaurant (but only if we don't value our health), whilst wearing Nike trainers and drinking Coca-Cola (but only if we....etc). Microsoft has long been the killer software application for computer users worldwide, Google has become the prime search engine tool, and victims lie in the wake of progress: In the 1990s VHS trounced the higher quality Beta-Max format to become the established analogue videotape standard for home entertainment, but the digital versatile disk (DVD) format killed it and quickly replaced it. It's dog eat dog. Any self-respecting hotel chain guest room comes complete with TV news updates courtesy of CNN, SKY or BBC World Service, whilst 'the latest Ford car has probably been assembled in one or more than over a dozen countries' (Dicken, 1986: 304). OK, so open source software, rival news channels and other fast food chains are now vying for supremacy and Facebook is mopping up many of the other social networks, but you get the idea. This kind of 'Macdonaldisation' of society has reached every aspect of our world, especially our social lives.

Homogeneity, it seems, has a dominant influence on much of our lives. Yet the effects of globalization are by no means as clear cut as Toffler and McLuhan were predicting. Alain Touraine offers an alternative perspective on the effects of globalization when he states:

"Our world appears to be integrated as a world market, but the counterpart of this globalization is the more and more aggressive defense of personal and collective identity. Instead of living in a cosmopolitan world as some pretend we do, we live in a dualized world in which not only North and South are more and more distant from each other, but where rich and poor districts in cities are more and more separated universes and in which most individuals are split between their participation in a globalized world and their consciousness of individual and collective identity." (Touraine, 1995: 46)

Touraine is arguing that the sense of personal (and collective) identity is more robust than the seemingly all-powerful forces of globalisation, and that individuals and communities tend to resist these forces naturally. In this context, it is perhaps easier to understand how resistance to technological forces comes about. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Marvin Minsky, has argued that intelligence is to be found in the collective behaviour of large groups of interconnected machines (Minsky, 1987). Nicholas Negroponte, Minsky's MIT colleague, applies this connectivist analogy to human behaviour and argues that the process of 'decentralization' (also referred to as 'atomisation') is becoming the antithesis of globalisation. He concludes that it probably has a great deal more power (Negroponte, 1995: 157-159). More recent theorists such as George Siemens and Stephen Downes propose a version of connectivism that describes the many ways we can tap into the huge potential of distributed cognition as and when required through personal and professional learning networks. This is personalisation of content at an individual level within the vast social congregation of the web.

Using these frameworks in a contemporary context, two things become clear: Firstly resistance to technology in general, and technology supported education in particular, may be rooted in the collective and individual identity of those globalisation has the potential to affect. Secondly, individuals will continue to be self determined in their approaches to learning, more or less in spite of the pressures globalisation attempts to exert upon them.

Excerpt from The Death of Distance by Steve Wheeler and Shannon Amiotte

References

Dicken, P. (1986) Global Shift: Industrial Change in a Turbulent World. New York: Harper and Row.
Giddens, A. (1991) Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Minsky, M. (1987) The Society of Mind. Boston: MIT Press.
Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Toffler, A. (1971) Future Shock. London: Pan Books.
Touraine, A. (1986) The Crisis of 'Progress' In M. Bauer (Ed.) Resistance to New Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Image source

Global forces by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.