Monday, May 4, 2009

Globalization is Alive and Personal


If we think that globalization is only about trade: ships, products and money flowing we’re thinking to narrowly. It’s more. It’s personal, alive and growing. It’s information flowing around the world from person to person. According to to Moises Naim writing in Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com), thanks to our internet connectivity, today’s globalization differs significantly from historical versions. It’s individualized not just institutionalized. Teenagers in Africa and Scotland can share music, we can read the newspapers from around the world, set your own personal Google Alert and learn what’s new in Dongguan, Santiago or Karachi. Talk (via Skype (www.Skype.com)with your friends who live in Lithuania while they vacation in Dublin. We are personally connected globally as well as locally.

We not only are able to talk, shop and get local news from places we may never visit, but many of us are now global by our choice of what we eat. We enjoy Sushi and spaghetti in Chicago as well as Tokyo or Rome and almost everywhere we visit. We find Starbucks in Paris, KFC in Beijing, Ethiopian restaurants in Los Angeles and Indian food everywhere in London.

We are all changed, enriched, challenged in subtle ways by the reality that we can reach out and touch the world with the click of a mouse. We are global whererever we are.

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