Technological globalization

        Technological globalization

For international democratic control of technical systems.

                       Economic globalization is unthinkable without a technological globalization of communications. The latter increasingly valued, can be dangerous.

                       In the current discussion on globalization, it is mostly seen as economic globalization. We think the world market where the importance of local political, regional and even national is increasingly reduced in favor of transnational financial powers. But this economic globalization is unthinkable without a technological globalization.

DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBALIZATION

                        In 1964, the Canadian Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea of ​​the world as a global society, a "global village", the result of the media and especially television: our ears and our eyes can now apprehend the world [1]. It is remarkable that this first conception of globalization has come to reflect on the importance of technology and not a reasoning on the economy. Later, television companies such as CNN and the BBC have fully realized the vision of McLuhan an electronic world that unites humanity in the same global view of reality.

                        It is then Theodore Lewitt, who first speaks (in 1983) of financial globalization using the expression of the globalization of markets if they sell the same things in the same way everywhere in markets converge the whole world. Lewitt oppose globalization as between the markets of rich countries and those of least developed countries according to which multinationals sold to poor countries have become obsolete products in rich countries.

                        In 1991, Kenichi Ohmae extends the notion of globalization in the whole chain of creating economic value, research and development (R & D), engineering, production, commercialization, services or finance. This process results in global integration, when firms in the same group lead their R & D, finance their investments and recruit staff worldwide. Globalisation designates a fully integrated form of management of the multinational firm.

                        Thus, the most internationalized companies can themselves set the rules of the economy and break free of the rules previously imposed by the United Nations. [2] These are proving powerless to strategies of large firms. Governments and national parliaments may then lose all ability to influence national economic developments as and as consumers give in to the temptations of international producers who offer them cheap standardized products and choose a form of production outside any democratic control. Transactions take place directly now internationally where, again, they may be upset by a casino-economy that can cause the greatest loss of capital.

                          The development of globalization transforms the same notion. The world is no longer a global village where all have the same experience at the same time, the global transparency, it became an opaque network of economic and technological manipulations. Globalization does not imply a stronger community life and deep among men, but an exclusion of the weakest in society. The abolition of borders has not led to a release of the men, but has created new divisions between dominant and dominated.

                           While globalization also has its good side: it accelerates the growth of production of quality works and increasing the exchange of information and innovation, fostering the exchange of ideas and the profusion of creations. But without control of globalization, priority is given to the operation of the market compared to everything else: social progress, improved cultural education health, environmental protection, sustainable development ...

                          The economy, that is to say, the symbolic exchange of products and services values, is nothing without communication technologies. Even pure economic speculation does not intervene on the market without being conveyed by the telematic system. If this system does not make the world transparent as McLuhan believed, he had reason to think of globalization as an electronic communication effect. The universal aspect of technology is not only that a "utensil" can become universally applicable, nor that the combination of science and technology is the project provided a global technological civilization. It means that communication between people can integrate all members of humanity and transform the local man in the world man. This development is promising, but also a great danger.

THE DANGERS OF GLOBALISATION

                           As purely instrumental. This danger was often reported by philosophers: if the thought was only one instrument among other means, the man would be unable to understand oneself. Everything is average, but for whom? This question has no answer because we do not think a human being as something other things, such as Immanuel Kant, as an end in itself.

                           However, with technological globalization, the danger of what Herbert Marcuse called the thought of the one-dimensional man, whose ideology and expertise [3] is a manifestation, is still increasing. The technician man who discovers the world as man by his participation in the process of globalization is not only blind to himself, but in relation to communication with others. Man today often believe that communication is an exchange of information. We therefore find ourselves in the paradoxical situation where ever, thanks to globalization, mankind has been greater communication ability but never where also the understanding of communication as affirmation of the existence of others has was so poor.

                           If globalization has great danger that the meaning of true communication disappears, we risk losing control technologies that, without control, become great danger for users, consumers and residents near the factories that use them. Some major technological accidents (Seveso, Bhopal, Chernobyl) have made the public aware of the danger of technologies that are out of control and can lead to global disasters. Control technologies is more difficult than ever, when all major decisions on technology development are taken by the centers of power hidden in international companies, substituting political decisions and thereby threatening all democracies and their power of control.

                        The economic and technological globalization poses a challenge to ethics: it will be met through an ethical globalization itself, that is to say, a fairly concrete idea of ​​a citizen of the world who knows responsible of international democratic control of economic-technical systems, and seeking to establish this global democracy on a dialogue for mutual understanding of different cultures and a respect for others, as both others and as nature conditions us and feeds us.