Globalization and the Digital Divide
Read this chapter, which covers globalization and how it affects individuals, companies, and nations. As you read, focus on how we got to this point and what the world might look like 50 years from now if globalization continues at the current rate.
What Is Globalization?
The Network Society
In 1996, social-sciences researcher Manuel Castells published The Rise of the Network Society, in which he identified new ways in which economic activity was being organized around the networks that the new telecommunication technologies have provided. This new, global economic activity was different from the past, because "it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale". We are now into this network society, where we are all connected on a global scale.