This was a lecture that kind of continued off lasts week ethics one as the theme of globalisation, sustainability and the Media can be linked well into the overall subject and today we looked into all three of these and then worked out how they are influencing capitalism.
At the current state of time the dominance of the Western World is spreading and we can now say that Americanization is the proliferation of new technologies and the Internet Revolution. There is also cultural globalisation to consider which is the spreading of one cultural objective usually being spread from the Western World which can be referred to as McDonalisation. Theoretically American's are taking over the world through globalisation with a wide-ranging culture process in which fast food is dominating more and more countries worldwide. Its now all about eating quickly without worrying about your health - just as long as you can eat it in the fastest time possible, eliminating the social time you spend eating with friends and family that would have occurred previously.
Marshall McLuhan (1964) came up with an interesting theory that 'New technology is just an extension of our own nervous system' in a way that radio and TV have become such a part of our lives that we would find it hard to function without it. He also theorised that this was part of a sudden implosion that has occurred to the world. In many ways we believe that the world is growing and we feel apart from people who live across the other side of our vast world, but McLuhan's theory is that this sudden implosion of the world is making it shrink and we are becoming closer to the world and it is merging into one 'global village' where people will act more like they know everyone like neighbours due to technical advances. We can see what is happening by just going on the internet, in which we have massive access to.
Despite what McLuhan states we are more separate and the electric age has not brought us together into one tribe . But there is rival globalisation due to advancements in the Western World. War breaks out constantly because other countries lower social values have been taken over by this Western Globalisation and it is bigger and better than what they have - in which the other country either doesn't like it or wants more from it.
But there are 3 distinct problems with globalisation, in which:
- Sovereignty challenges the idea of the nation-state
- Accountability in which we are unsure who controls transnational forces and organisations
- Identity in which we question who we are and where we come from
We can then move into looking at bigger companies who have become effected by globalisation but strived from it and have become better because of it. Oligopolies can be a term used for these companies who are huge but them have a number of sub companies under them that they also control and run, and some of them aren't even obvious. Estée Lauder is an excellent example of this as they are a company that not only have one cosmetic counter under there belt but they also own companies such as Aveda, Mac, Bobbie Brown and Jo Malone. Each keeping there own names and funding but will be influenced and controlled by the main company. Time Warner is another good example of this as they too own many different companies, where it be film companies or just magazines, they own a lot more then first imagined and there list is about 100 companies long. Effectively whatever country you are in and if your using something from that company, you are therefore creating a bigger Wesern globaisation.
New corporations are also under the influence of globalisation and they are significantly effected. They are divided into territories and different markets of globalisation which is based on how much money they can make from it:
1. North America
2.Western Europe, Japan and Australia
3. Developing economics and regional producers, India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe
4. The rest of the world
Chomskey and Herman (1998) came up with five basic filters that apply to the news corporations of the western world:
- Ownership: We only have one company which controls others, much like the way Rupert Murdoch did with the companies that he owned and brought throughout his life
- Funding: Advertisers will withdraw money it its not what the want to here so we can confirm that the news is biased, much like the way that if something big is happening in London the rest of the country will hear about it, even though it won't affect us in any way
- Sourcing: The stuff that's reported has already been checked to make sure it isn't going to offend anyone who is being interviewed or reported about
- Flak: Manipulating the news further, much like Global Climate Condition's did as they were a group who were told to get things into the newspaper to make the oil companies seem better and shun down global activists
-Anticommunist Ideoloy
Al Gore also has some interesting theories on the topic of globalisation, so much so, that he created an idea for a film that was published in 2006 entitled An Inconvenient Truth, which highlighted everything that was wrong in the world in a very dramatic fashion by showing the facts that if we continue at the rate we are doing, we are going to drown our world. He came up with some solutions to be able to combat this:
- Release less CO2
- Plant more vegetation
- Try to be CO2 neutral
- Recycle
- Buy a hybrid vehicle
The solution to the world problems is to apparently buy more things to replace your old CO2 creating ones; this is not the solution, this is just a form of capitalism.
Moving lastly onto sustainability, which is a very broad subject in which everyone has an opinion on. Created in the 80s as a means to preserve our planet, the development of sustainability meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. A subject which is linked to this is Greenwashing. This is the process that many companies have now started to go through in which they will take there existing products but put them in 'green' packing to give the illusion that they are helping the environment by doing so. But some ridiculous examples of this have been brought up like turning every colour of the inside of McDonald's to green, and the Earth Chair, which is essentially a sack, which is just a recycled bag, which you stuff with plastic. People aren't realising that capitalism isn't working, and the solution to the world globalisation is definitely not this fake green world.
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