Globalisation

My choice of spelling globalisation with an S, as opposed to globalization is, immediately, some kind of statement about the system. My Microsoft word processor allows me to spell it in both ways. The spelling with a Z is, I’m deducing, the more “US” spelling, as it follows the trend, while with an S I feel it is more British English and I choose that as it is holding on to our culture in a medium that is increasingly becoming more and more homogenised and less individual.
That’s putting it rather grandly, for the mere spelling of a word, but I’m trying to illustrate a point, and since the internet and computer technology are some very specific examples of globalisation, it works.
I am publishing this on my own personal blog and, the chances are, other people will (at least begin to) read it – however interesting, well or poorly written it is. Had I written anything similar ten – maybe even five years ago, even if it was word processed it would not be as easy to publish on the internet. I could have had a similar effect that this will by printing it off and handing it to my friends, but then there would be no chance whatsoever that an outside party could accidentally stumble across it (for the record, I am not writing it for the purpose of an outside party reading it at all, it is merely an exercise in active learning and exploring my own views that does not involve reading), but in the format I have now – a ‘blog’ on a widely used system of blogs, there *is* the chance someone will read it who, as well as being unknown to me, might live in another country, continent, culture to my own.
This is down to globalisation, as far as I can tell. And, at least currently, globalisation is all about change. Some see it as a positive force, bringing things to people who would otherwise miss out – amongst examples given are, work brought to “less developed” countries in the form of call centres, factories, etc, working for multinational, usually “western” corporations, whose workforce is often largely “overseas”. Less developed countries can contact the west [it may be politically incorrect, but for simplicity I choose to see “the west” as being the so called first world; north America, and western Europe] and have access to similar “resources” as them in the spread of brand named products like coke, McDonalds, Starbucks etc.
There is a question as to whether having these “facilities” is a positive or a negative fact for developing countries: does it make them feel more like the west? If so, is this a good thing? It is, indisputably, changing their culture; it is changing ours. The every day butcher, grocer, baker is far rarer now we can just drop into tesco’s and get everything there. But does this matter? And if so, why?
I’m not going to get anywhere by asking these questions, we all know there are no explicit answers, that’s the whole point of education, it seems; the higher you go the *less* answers there are.
So, for what it is or isn’t worth, here’s my opinion:
Globalisation is a force. It is probably unstoppable by now, it has been going on for a long time and is just another name for change in the world. The world has constantly been changing, everything and everyone is constantly changing, trying to stop the flow of globalisation as I see it is like trying to stop day following night, it’s just how things go. We cannot say “globalisation is thoroughly bad, it is causing debt in Africa”. For one thing, globalisation is a massive thing and it cannot be blamed for specific problems. Governments cause debt in Africa. Multinational corporations start sweatshops. Globalisation has allowed them to do this, by making the world smaller, but ultimately, it is a two way force – the corporations have searched for a cheaper workforce and it has led them overseas, they have shrunk the world.
Back to culture: in my opinion, keeping your culture is a great idea. People talk about the convenience of buying everything in the same shop, but the question might be, why do we need convenience? So we can spend more time concentrating on our job. In the office of a corporation that is conveniencing others? I think it would be so much nicer to not worry so much about convenience and take the time to go between shops, in each of which you know the assistant, and the assistant knows their job well enough..

It’s getting too complicated and I’m not explaining well. I’m caught between being objective and having an opinion. It is so hard to have an opinion whilst seeing things objectively. I am concluding, once again, that higher education might be slightly pointless..