Global Village

Global Village

New technological advances are something that we have faced for centuries. Whether the advance was the printing press, the radio, the telephone, or the TV, all of these things affected us globally. In the past all of these new advances tend to change social and political policies. We are currently in a new era of technology, one that we have many names for: the internet, the web, cyberspace, information superhighway, and many more. All of these computer technologies affect the way many of us live, especially the use of the internet. There are some articles with strong arguments on why this new technology could cause more harm than good to some of us. One article was by a feminist scholar, Dale Spender, who wrote Social Policy for Cyberspace. Another article was by a writer/reporter, Rory J. OConnor, who wrote Africa: The Unwired Continent. Both of the articles share the same idea; with new technological advances, we must remember the social and political consequences, and not just think about spreading these new advances globally.

The internet could be able to bring us farther apart then to bring us closer together. It does have that it has the ability to bring people together, but looking at it on a larger scale, the internet is going to make a larger division of online and offline communities. Spender states, Despite the ideal potential of the new technologies to create a global, egalitarian community, a virtual world without barriers or divisions; the scene down on the ground is strikingly different. This sounds great, to have this ideal global community where everyone can have their say. Yet in the real world, people socioeconomic status is going to affect whether or not they are going to be connected w...

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...to work up to. There will be social and political changes due to the internet, which might bring a larger variety of people to it. We most likely will never be able to get everyone on-line to access information, but in the future we will come pretty close. When we do come closer, then we will also come closer to the ideal global village. We will have a wide variety of backgrounds come into it. Whether a person is black/white, male/female, poor/rich, or anything else, we can achieve a global village in the near future. We need to just let this happen with time and concentrate, perhaps on more important issues.

Works Cited

OConnor, Rory J. Africa: The Unwired Continent. Composing Cyberspace. Ed. Richard Holeton. McGraw-Hill, 1998. 270-274.

Spender, Dale. Social Policy for Cyberspace. Composing Cyberspace. Ed. Richard Holeton. McGraw-Hill, 1998. 266-269.