Thursday, June 14, 2007

chapter3, detailed outline

Global Economy and International Telecommunications Networks



I-Introduction

- The global economy is not an abstraction; it affects our personal lives in several ways.
- The Global economy is closely related to global communication, because global economy requires global communication to control and coordinate global division of labor.
-Global division of labor has transformed the world and gave birth to both the global economy and global communication.

II-Premodern World

- The premodern world was different from the world today.

- The personal possessions of our predecessors were all made locally.

III-Division of Labor

-A big difference between the premodern and the modern world is the extent to which division of labor was used in the production process.

- With specialization the expertise increases.

- Division of labor crates independencies.

- The system based on division of labor requires coordination.

- Division of labor increases productivity via specialization, which in turns creates problems of coordination and control.

- The problems of created by division of labor were taken care of by managers who coordinated and controlled the activities of individual workers performing specialized tasks, however, these problems become more severe when division of labor occurs across geographical space as companies seek to capitalize on the location advantage of each place.

- Nowadays, division of labor transcends national borders.
- This would not have been possible without modern communication technologies. Therefore, global division of labor is intricately tied to modern communication technologies.

- Telecommunications technologies allow for global coordination and control, transportation technologies move raw materials and products form one corner of the world to another.

IV- Imperialism

- In the 13th century the world was multipolar, that is, they were multiple centers of power, such as China, India, and Italy , which dominated decentralized trading circuits.

- This changed during the 14th and 15th centuries during the emergence of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires. These western powers transformed the world into a monopolar world.
-The development of science gave them technologically superior weaponry that overwhelmed the people of Africa, America, Asia and Australia. Therefore, although they were small countries they could conquer nations with larger populations.
- This was called the era of imperialism.

- Theses new empires were different form earlier ones in history.
- They were disjointed.
- They hardly knew anything about the nations they conquered.
- The economic relationship was different. The imperial powers were interested to gain access to raw materials for their growing industries.
- After the raw materials were processed into finished goods, the empires used the colonies as captive markets for selling their factories' output.

- They maintained control over their colonies through different means.
- Brute military power played a critical role in the creation and maintenance of empires.
- Educating the native elite in Western ways and then giving them positions of privilege in the administrative hierarchy.
- The imperial administration also hampered collaboration among native groups to prevent the emergence of united opposition to colonial rule.


- The global telegraph network that the brutish used to manage their vast Empire:
- The network was totally London-centric
- Lateral lines were rare.

V-Electronic Imperialism

1- Global Media Flows

- After WWII the United States became the center of the world.

- The main source of power of the U.S is economic rather than military.
- The U.S projects its power through economic and cultural means.
- There is a relationship of dependency between the rich and the poor countries.

- Developing nations consider the import of the U.S culture such as movies to be a new kind of invasion.

- The flow of information from the south to the north and lateral flow of information between periphery countries is small.

- Many nations called for a new world information order that would change this asymmetrical pattern and make it more balanced. But this creates problems:
- It encourages regulation of information flows by governments.
- It is difficult as the technology becomes ever more subtle to control.

2- Transborder Data Flow:

-With the improvement in transportation technologies, international trade progressively moved beyond light items with a high value to heavier commodities, however, services remained local because they required an intense amount of interaction between the service provider and the consumer.

- Modern communication changed this.

- The trade in services assumes a great importance in the global economy.

- The perspectives and interests of the United States and the developed countries are different on issues related to global economy.

- The similarity between imperialism and electronic imperialism is that they both display a strong center-periphery relation.

- The difference between the two is that the center uses more delicate means to dominate the periphery rather that brutal ones.

VI- Emerging Network Structures

- There is a U.S centric nature of global Internet.
- Network investment patterns suggest that in the future we will see the emergence of regional networks in Europe and Asia.
- However, it seems that the U.S centered structure of the global Internet is going to remain for a long time.

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