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.

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

Our global village

When I reflect on my recent visit to the Gambia, and on other trips to poor countries, I tend to gain some real perspective on my life. I'm left asking what will the future hold for the Gambian children in this picture? How many will survive to adulthood, have happy lives and achieve their dreams? None for sure, will have any of the opportunities I had when I was their age.

I can't help but feel extremely privileged to come from a part of the world where electricity, water and gas are all piped to my home, and where education is free for all children up to the age of 18.

Even healthcare (we pay our taxes) is free at the point of delivery to all British citizens (and of course to anyone else who is visiting the UK and gets taken ill) courtesy of the National Health Service. Hell, I even have broadband wifi in my house, and enough to feed and clothe my entire family. I'm very, very fortunate indeed. I have always been affected by the following scenario, ever since I first heard it several years ago. If you want some perspective on your life, read on....

If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

Our village would be populated by 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific


51 would be male, 49 would be female
82 would be non-white; 18 would be white
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have any electricity (and of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens

33 would be receiving (and trying to live on) only 3% of the income of “the village”

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Digital pervasion and loss of identity

This is a continuation of yesterday's post entitled: Always connected.

“We are all digital now” claims Paul Longley of University College London, in a research report (BBC News, 2006). In so doing, he identifies a global digital tribe. Taking into account the fact that much of the world’s population is more than a day’s walking distance from a fixed line telephone, and even allowing for the growing trend toward mobile phone usage in developing countries, or the paucity of computers in the third world, Longley’s claim could be considered contentious. However, where applied to western industrialised nations, it musters some credibility. There is none the less a need to acknowledge the digital divides that are perpetuated wherever technology is applied. Interestingly, Longley’s claim may hold some truth when contextualised in a world where cable and satellite television channels proliferate, digital mobile communication becomes ever more pervasive, surveillance of civil movement and activity is automated, and where digital identification of individuals, commodities and services is becoming common place. The location of a global digital tribe within this landscape is a feature of interest for this chapter.

Longley’s research team identified digital tribes by their socio-economic activities and by the manner in which they used information and communication technologies. Yet there are more subtle distinctions that can be made, particularly at the perceptual and motivational levels of analysis.

There is an argument that due to the process of globalisation, national boundaries (and therefore tribal boundaries) have been eroded to the point that we are amalgamating into a homogenous mass of humanity, and where the last vestiges of tribal identity are vanishing. In essence, the forces of globalisation have amalgamated us all into one tribe. We are living in a ‘corporate age’ runs the argument, in which all of our decisions are being dictated by ‘those who have the real power’. Therefore, wherever I travel, I can find the same fast food outlets, and the same familiar chain stores where I can purchase clothing and footwear I will be comfortable wearing. I can blend into the background because I am wearing a similar style of clothing to the hundreds of other people milling around in the high street, and I will not be conspicuous, because I am eating the same food and drinking from an identical soft drink can as the natives. Have I therefore blended in to such an extent into the local culture that I lose my identity? No, my individual identity remains intact, whilst my individualism is subsumed into the social melange within which I am located. Identity and individualism are not synonymous, even though there are obvious commonalities. The identity argument may break down when it is applied to the formation of a single ‘digital tribe’, but clearly there are many personal identities represented within the tribe. It is quite possible then, that there is in fact one ‘digital tribe’ in the broadest sense of its meaning, but there are many sub-sets of this large digital tribe – what we can term ‘virtual clans’.

Tomorrow: Virtual Clans

Digital Culture and Education

I was recently invited to join the editorial board of a new and exciting open access journal called Digital Culture and Education. In the words of the journal editors Christopher Walsh and Thomas Apperly: "This new journal is concerned with the changing demands of education and the especially central role of digital culture in preparing students for labor in the context of the ‘knowledge economy’. DCE is a new international, peer-reviewed scholarly journal focusing on research in areas of digital culture which are relevant for education." The editorial board of DCE includes some of my old friends such as Chris Abbott and Victoria Carrington, as well as some of those whose writing I have found extremely engaging, including James Paul Gee, Julian Sefton-Green, Michelle Knobel and Gunther Kress. I'm truly honoured to be listed alongside such luminaries of the digital age.

In their first editorial, Apperly and Walsh provide readers with a clear idea of what they can expect from the journal: "Digital culture has transformed many fundamental parts of our working, public and personal lives in terms of how we communicate and consume, create knowledge and learn and even how we understand politics. The scale and speed at which digital culture has become imbricated in everyday life is unprecedented. Its impact on politics, aesthetics, identity, art, culture, society, and particularly education is thoroughly deictic. In response, we founded DCE to provide a forum for dialogue around the educational, economic, political, cultural, social, historic, legal or otherwise relevant aspects of living in a society increasingly dominated by digital communication and media. DCE is interested in work and scholarship theorizing identity, globalization, development, sustainability, wellbeing, subjectivities, networks, new media, gaming, multimodality, literacies, entrepreneurship and related issues. The journal provides an interactive scholarly context for the uptake of new technologies alongside the emergence of digital culture and its impact on teaching, learning and research across institutional and non-institutional contexts. We are committed to publishing print and digital work that takes a critical approach to the issues raised by the increasing importance of new technologies in all facets of society; in particular, research that examines the uneven uptake of technology, and perspectives on new media that emphasize its materiality, production, or environmental impact."

Well there you have it. An exciting new peer reviewed journal which has engaging and leading edge content for teachers and researchers of the digital age .... and all of it is open access. I hope you enjoy reading it, and perhaps you will also consider contributing in the future.

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