Essay on TECHNOLOGY HAS IMPLICATIONS WHICH DRIVES GLOBALIZATION AND HAS CONSEQUENCES FOR NATION STATES

Studying the development of civilization, considering complicated tangle of global problems, scientists tend not to take into account the impact that rapidly developing new technologies, including the so-called global impact technologies may have on the process in their forecasts. There exists a completely reasonable explanation to the fact that it is hard to learn, understand and properly assess existing and emerging technologies, their technological trends, and to realize their relationship and impact on social, political and other processes to humanities scholars due to their educational background and specific traditional topics which they study. At the same time, experts on technology foresight put forward various science-based technological forecasts, which we believe is essential to take into account when considering any contemporary global issues, including those which are little affected to the impact of different technologies, at the first glance.

The main impact of globalization on humanity is the loss of the sense of the complex systematic vision of integrated picture of the world by the modern western man in the frames of a constant distraction to the mess of current events. As it paradoxically sounds, modern information and telecommunication technologies play the main role in the process. Not without reason Napoleon Bonaparte said in the early XIX century that the four newspapers can cause more harm than one-hundred-thousand-strong army. There is no doubt that XXI century is the age of the Internet, and the Internet allows to make both mass campaigns and various “color” or “network” revolutions, and the unconscious, and yet unobtrusive softening of complex paradigmal human thinking. Thus, we are going to prove the thesis that new information technologies have implications which drive globalization and have various consequences for the well-being of different nations.

At the beginning, we need to state that new technologies in the field of electronics and communication are not a set of tools and production methods within the industrial landscape nowadays. They are the landscape and surround us from all sides. According to James (2002), communication systems in the new economy are not only new means of production, they are new and fully programmable space for work and economic activity, which changes everything – both in terms of quantity (profession and skills), and qualitative (management and occupation of dominant positions) development. In such a way, it would be good to define what we mean by the term of anthropogenic globalization before we made the first step toward the recognition of such a development.

According to the classic definition of globalization, we see that it is the process of global economic, political and cultural integration and harmonization. From another point of view, its economic, political and cultural aspects are only consequences of the development of information and telecommunication technology, which became possible due to globalization, in its modern everyday sense. Thus, anthropogenic globalization is a natural and pervasive development of information and telecommunication technologies in the social world that spread primarily from a single center, which is located in the leading countries of the West such as the U.S. and some EU countries. The most important anthropogenic globalization’s feature is the advantageous (to the west countries) distribution by the use of channels created from the center to the periphery of Western culture, as well as, to a lesser extent – economic models (market, financial capitalism) and politics (democracy), as well as other social concepts.

Taking into account the scale of transformation, perhaps we can talk about this change as a change of the entire system of concepts on the axis of the transition from the industrial age to a postindustrial age. Using specific examples of changes, Alozie (2005) stated that this transition process is accompanied by the process of computerization and related automation in the 70’s and early 80’s. The transition continued by the implementation of computers and communications that led to the creation of the office workers’ subsystems in the world of management and management information systems to work with clients. With the development of mergers, integration has spread from small and local subsystems to large national and multinational entities within which the internal and external functions were fully united. Gradually, the linkage came to the first place resulting in network tools that are not as important as the hardware software. By the early 90’s, according to Kumar et al (1998), the concepts for systems also became a subject to change. Moreover, corporate and other networks were seen as a means to the achievement of other aims, and networks themselves were regarded rather as a goal. Global information superhighway has become a new post-industrial network infrastructure, and only then the paradigm has changed completely. Networks have become the context of the new economy. They are increasingly being used as a field for commercial transactions, as well as a means by which there is a distribution of goods and services, as well as the work itself. Networks are also key to the modernization and restructuring of the industrial economy, at least in the international sector of the economy, which is dominated by multinational corporations that act as monopolies. Global information networks and production companies provide a marked advantage over the developing and just walked out of the state of the development countries in all performance indicators – beginning with productivity and finishing with the scale and speed of production. The networking can push such corporations to the new phase of “colonization” if they want it.

For instance, according to Clark (2003), there exist three technologies that most clearly demonstrate the transformation which takes its place in the process of globalization. They are information superhighway, planning tool known as a “fast response,” and production and organizational strategy known as “flexible restructuring.” Thus, high technologies is the edge of the human thought, and the degree of responsibility of those who generate, develop, promote, or borrow them, is immeasurably high in international integration.

This restructuring has had a huge impact on the scope and nature of employment for the following: the rise of structural unemployment in proportion as machinery and machine “intelligence” take over functions previously performed by humans and the human intellect; the strengthening of the process of polarization in the labor force, which is characterized, on the one hand, by a group of employees, full-time workers and chronically working people in overtime, and on the other hand, by the ever-increasing “reserve” contingent of people on the periphery, which is partly occupied on the basis of time or short-term contracts; transformation of the labor process, especially for secondary workers who are placed in a fully computerized work environment where computers determine both planned work and output indicators.

Continuing the discussion of our topic, it is possible to say that creation of a global information space is impossible without the development of information technologies and telecommunications. Yuen, Westfahl & Chan (2005) mentioned that blurring of boundaries occurs not only between states but also between nations and contacts of many individuals. It is a fact that creation of virtual groups and organizations will no longer be tied to a physical location of the participants. Collection, analysis and control of the information flow will increase the efficiency and predictability of the effects on the people, and therefore, have an impact on the political, economic and social life in the world.

However, the originality of nations and cultures depend on many factors, and the development of technologies is not the most paramount in the case. The world is changing, and nowadays almost every person is permanently connected to the universal information space at any point on the globe. It gives an opportunity to simply disconnect an offender and he will fall out of the social life. In this regard, it is possible to state, according to Beck, Sznaider & Winter (2003) that culture of people is made ​​up of traditions, with the story, the own world view, etc., i.e. culture grows from the past. On the one hand, development of information technologies in itself can not affect the past. This is nothing more than a tool for accessing information. And, ideally, the information will be more reliable, because each member of a particular event is free to express the own point of view on the world. Here, the main challenge will be to filter the necessary data which includes collection and analysis of information noise. The role of information technology in the development of the society is to accelerate the production, dissemination and use of new knowledge by society. On the other hand, culture of the people is not a static element. It is constantly changing and interacting with other cultures. This is a separate stream which flows into the river. One culture is closely intertwined with the cultures of other nations, and it can be a base to the emergence of a new nation with its culture.

In conclusion, we have discussed the place of technologies in human life nowadays, and proved the thesis that new information technologies have implications which drive globalization and have various consequences for the well-being of different nations. Indeed, at the time when mankind was exposed to the process of globalization with its complex and controversial character for the first time, different ethnic and civilizational conflicts were aggravated and relationships between opposition supporters of globalization and active antiglobalists have also changed. In addition, thinking about different implications of technologies in the frames of globalization, we can provide an example that communicative incompetence borders on professional ignorance in the era of globalization. The paces of international communications are extremely high and require high efficiency of interaction, mobility, as well as permanent accuracy of the information, while anthropogenic disasters are the highest fee for incompetence in the XXI century. Thus, the phenomenon of globalization goes beyond the purely economic framework in which many researchers tend to interpret this theme, and covers virtually all areas of public life, including politics, ideology, culture, way of life, and the very conditions of human existence.