Global Networks and Social Change

Like migration, rapid technological change also weakened traditional political, cultural, and economic borders and to some extent even made borders obsolete. In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense began to develop a computer network to carry communications in case of nuclear war. This system and others like it in universities, government, and business grew into an unregulated system of more than ten thousand networks worldwide. These came to be known as the Internet—shorthand for internetworking. By 1995, users in more than 137 countries were connected to the Internet, creating new “communities” via the World Wide Web that transcended common citizenship in a particular nation-state. By 2015, some three billion people—more than one-third of the world’s population—used the Internet, creating an online marketplace that offered goods and services ranging from advanced weaponry to organ transplants, which was itself a booming global business. Critics charged that communications technology favored elites and disadvantaged those without computer skills or the financial resources needed to access computers.

The Internet had brought service jobs to countries that had heretofore suffered unemployment and real poverty. One of the first countries to recognize the possibilities of computing and help-desk services was Ireland, which pushed computer literacy to attract business. In 2003, U.S. firms spent $8.3 billion on outsourcing to Ireland and $7.7 billion on outsourcing to India. In that same year, the United States bought $77.38 billion in services from foreign countries and sold $131.01 billion to them, meaning in fact that more was insourced than outsourced. The Internet allowed for jobs to be apportioned anywhere. Moroccans did help-desk work for French or Spanish speakers, and in the twenty-first century Estonia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as well as India and the Philippines rebuilt their economies successfully by providing call-center and other business services. The Internet allowed service industries to globalize just as the manufacturing sector had done much earlier through multinational corporations.

Globalization of the economy via the Internet and other technology affected the West in complex ways. Benefiting from the booming global economy of the 1990s, the Irish and eastern Europeans became integrated into the Western consumer economy, and by the 2000s Asians and South Americans were integrated, too. By purchasing automobiles, CD players, and personal computers, non-Westerners may have taken jobs from the West, but they often sent funds back via their new purchasing power. For example, a twenty-one-year-old Indian woman, working for a service provider in Bangalore under the English name Sharon, used her salary to buy Western consumer items such as a cell phone from the Finnish company Nokia. “As a teenager I wished for so many things,” she said. “Now I’m my own Santa Claus.” Some Western workers often found this global revolution threatening, as it redistributed jobs across the West and worldwide.

On the positive side, digital media enabled widespread information sharing and allowed individuals and organizations to spread awareness of the daunting problems of contemporary life—population explosion, scarce resources, North–South inequities, global pollution, ethnic hatred, and global terrorism—which demand, more than ever, the exercise of humane values and rational thought. Positive social change has occurred, thanks in part to digital media. In 2011, governments were overturned relatively peacefully in Tunisia and Egypt because Facebook, Twitter, and other electronic media brought protesters together with a common purpose, with less public violence than in revolutions a century earlier. Given the dramatic resurgence in conflict in recent years, however, claims that digital communications will ease tensions, advance democracy, and make violence less likely remain unproven.