Page 8 - Culture Technology Communication

Foreword

“The world is getting smaller.” This common metaphor is at work in
the term “global village,” which derives its oxymoronic appeal from
the typically small size of a “village” in contrast to the vastness of the
“globe.” Compared to one hundred years ago, we now have more infor-
mation about other peoples and cultures, and easier and faster access
to that information. Moreover, increased contact has led to the
spread—sometimes through imposition, sometimes through voluntary
adoption—of Western (especially US) cultural practices. Traditional
dress has been replaced by suits in business settings in every country
in the world; young people in urban areas everywhere watch films
made in Hollywood, listen to rock and roll, play video games, talk on
cell phones, wear jeans, drink Coke, eat pizza (or McDonald’s ham-
burgers), speak English, and increasingly, frequent cybercafes. Part of
what makes the world seem “smaller” today is that one is more likely
to encounter familiar symbols and practices in geographically distant
places than was the case one hundred or even fifty years ago.
This trend is facilitated by communication technologies. In the
past, highways and railroads enabled information carried by human
messengers or in letters to be transported physically from place to
place. Later, the invention of the telegraph and the telephone made
possible more rapid transmission of messages without people or ob-
jects having to be displaced, and radio and television enabled the si-
multaneous broadcasting of messages to large, geographically
dispersed audiences. Most recently, the Internet has introduced in-
teractive, many-to-many communication that transcends both space
and time. Today it is possible to disseminate a message widely, inex-
pensively, almost effortlessly across the globe to anyone who has the
technology to receive it, and for others to respond at their conven-
ience using the same technology. Message traffic has proliferated in
response to these technological advances, a tribute to human beings’
insatiable desire to communicate with one another.
Some people believe that the increased cross-cultural contact fa-
cilitated by computer networks will reduce cultural distances, trans-
forming the world into an “electronic global village.” Others, noting

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