Globalization and the Digital Divide

This chapter reviews the role that information technologies have had in the globalization of our world. As you read, pay attention to the many positive and negative changes that globalization has brought.

The Network Society

In 1996 social-sciences researcher Manuel Castells published The Rise of the Network Society, in which he identified new ways economic activity was being organized around the networks that the new telecommunication technologies had 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". Having a world connected via the Internet has some massive implications.