Globalization and ICT are everywhere – but are they for everyone?

As Anthony Giddens points out in his book Runaway World (1999), globalization is continuously changing our lives. This includes not only our culture, but also our physical environment. Although globalization as a phenomenon is not entirely new, there are some aspects of it, such as the birth of information technology (ICT) around the 1990’s, that has made it revolutionary (Baldwin, 2006). One of the most remarkable consequences of ICT was that it enabled not only the moving of cultures, customs and ideas, but also their diffusion. For instance, globalization and ICT have played a crucial part in the travelling and diffusion of social movements, while increasing people’s awareness of social justice. No matter where we live or what our socioeconomic status is, the consequences and changes of globalization are felt everywhere. However, a question remains: are the effects of globalization and ICT – both pros and cons – experienced and distributed equally?

There seems to be a rather clear divide between the countries that have experienced the positive effects of “ICT Revolution” and those countries, that have not been as fortunate. In fact, introduction of ICT led to the global South’s industrialization, whilst the global North was deindustrialized. For instance, as factory workers in the global South consisted mostly of local population, the factories themselves did not become locally owned. On the contrary, the ownership of the factories was held in the global North. In other words, instead of educating locals to carry out some more high-skilled work tasks, the know-how was held in the global North. Ultimately, this has led to unequal division of know-how between the global North and South, as well as polarization of the work force.

Another aspect of inequalities engendered by ICT is representation and access. As Tomlinson (1999) suggests, many individuals assume that since they have access to several medium platforms around the clock, there is no limit to the information they can access. However, there are a few arguments against this belief. First, the ownership and control of global media is in fact in the hands of only a few gigantic transnational media corporations, meaning that these corporations have a lot of power when it comes to controlling some smaller news and media agencies. Second, a quite different notion, is that not all people and social groups are equally represented in the digital data. In fact, calling for fairness in the way people are represented and made visible on the base of their digital data production, Taylor (2017) has introduced the concept of data justice. What makes the strengthening of data justice especially significant is the notion that policymaking worldwide is being increasingly affected by ‘data fumes’, meaning the data describing how and when people use technological devices and services. In fact, instead of being only data informed, policymaking is becoming increasingly data driven. Therefore, to develop comprehensive policymaking that takes into consideration all different groups of people, the data used for building those policies needs to be inclusive. However, some studies suggest that there are differences in the authorities’ ability to collect statistical data from different groups of people. For instance, gathering accurate data from some low-income environments has proved to be challenging in some cases.

All in all, there are several aspects to the inequalities produced by ICT. Therefore, scholars such as O’Donnell and Sweetman (2018) stress, that to reach its full potential and enable change, ICT needs to be approached from a social justice perspective. The authors also acknowledge the importance of scrutinizing ICT and its accessibility from a gender perspective. Furthermore, as some technologies have been designed mostly by men, very little attention has been given to if and how these technologies are equally useful to other genders. In fact, according to the findings of a GSMA study from 2018, women in South Asia were 70 per cent less likely to use the Internet than men (GSMA 2018). However, the various factors affecting these figures require closer examination leading to these inequalities. Overall, it is evident that despite all the good that globalization, ICT and access to data fumes embody inequalities on several levels. Despite the fact that these inequalities have received increasing recognition, the mechanisms for combating them are not developing at a similar pace. Therefore, developing these mechanisms requires not only awareness of people as individuals, but also political will to invest in them.

References

Giddens, A. (1999). Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. Oxon: Routledge.

Taylor L. What is data justice? The case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally. Big Data & Society. December 2017. DOI: 10.1177/2053951717736335

Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalization and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.