Welcome to todays lecture on globalization and human development. Globalization is intriquetly linked to the information revolution.
In only 150 years.
Information communication technologies have made our world an extremely small place.
Before 1858.
It took weeks to communicate a message between Europe and the United States by ship and now a day.
Of course, we cannot really tell a difference if we telecommunicated with someone who is down the road next block or half way around the globe.
The information travels on the speed of light and instantanous communication.
Doesn t recognize distance in a geographical sense, So globalization is a very national topic to talk about.
Let s start with a little exercise to understand the importance of why we have to deal with this topic of communication to talk about the information revolution Close your eyes and imagine somebody shopping for digital information.
Communication technology Go ahead, do it And try to look at what kind of ICT this person is shopping for and then take a look at the person What this person is wearing. If this person is a man or woman, the age of this person, you have in mind Try to look at their face the race as well.
Where do you think this person is coming from And now imagine a poor person shopping for ICT? You can open your eyes again How many of you imagined a poor person at the first time already, If you are like most people, You imagine someone very similar to you or your friends during the first exercise and only during the second exercise.
Imagine somebody living in poverty – and this is completely normal.
Our default outlook on the world is that the entire world is kind of like us And we have to train ourselves to gain different perspectives on the world.
So we have to learn and study that so at the same, you can, in this picture, see a white waste or two black faces, and you flip around between these two perspectives.
We have to train ourselves to obtain different perspectives, so we can switch around between them, and that is one of the ambitions of this lecture today that we gain these different perspectives.
This is especially important in the information age, because in cyber space most people are extremely different than you Actually in cyber space.
Most people are from the developing world.
They are from poor countries SO worldwide.
For example, 20 of the population live in the 60 s most highest income countries, So these 20 have 70 of the world s income. So it s a very small percentage for those who people who live in developed countries.
At 20 of the people 70 of the income, However, when it comes to cyberspace, these 20, they only get 30 of the world s.
Ict subscription 80 of the world that live in developed countries.
They have 70 of the world s.
Ict subscriptions lots of mobile phones, but also computers with internet connections, So in cyberspace.
We almost have in terms of very fundamental basis, access A 1 to 1 representation And since most people in the world live in developing countries, most people will access cyberspace and live in developing countries.
So it is our ambition today to train ourselves gaining these new perspctives.
We really have to learn them; they are not just intuitive.
Our intuition fails miserably at that, and so you saw on this first exercise, For example, have a look at this picture here? What do you see? Okay and now have a look at this picture here.
What do you see So now we can flip back and forth and back and forth, And let s see if you see something different And now let s check that out What if we turned this picture slowly but surely around. What do you see And let s go back again? What do you see now And let s go ahead again.
What do you see now Now, even if I expose you to that, you might be able to gain a basic intuition, but it s still unnatural.
Now I ll show you a trick.
Look at the tools at the bottom and the top of the image Look at these tools and keep on looking at the tools.
Look at the tools, look at the image a little bit and now keep on focusing on these tools.
And now what do you see? So there are some tricks that s.
What I want to tell you feel free to look at it again.
There are some tricks that we can learn that enable us to take on different perspectives, and once you know this trick and you can take them on whenever you want And that s the ambition, because if you will work in a globalized information age, you have to Train yourself to take on these views whenever you have to And if eighty percent of the world live in the developing countries, you have to kind of like know how they are living and if you want to do business in a global world or probably policy in A global world or work for a NGO in a globalized world.
It is very important for you that you are able to take on these different perspectives.
It s kind of like training yourself to look at the globe. Look at the globe here that s how usually the world is represented in a world map with Europe at the center And now look at this world map here It looks a little bit different.
I think I was maybe 15 for the first time in my life when I saw the united stated in the middle, But you can get used to this world.
What looks a little bit different, but you can get used to it Now check out at this world map here It s the exactly the same world map just upside down And actually geographically, it is completely justified to look at the world like this.
I mean planet earth is just a sphere in space and there is no up and down in space.
Why do you think it is that we usually look at the world like this and not like this? Well, the Basic reason is because the first map makers were living in the north and they drew the world as like.
They are on top and the other ones on bottom, but geographically and physically there is no up and down.
It is completely justified to look at the exactly like this, So you can also look at the world, for example, from the top from the North Pole, like this, The United Nations logo actually the emblem that s what it takes.
So this is the look at the united nations.
There is nobody really in the corner.
Nobody left at right so that s why the United Nations represents us like that, And there s different world views you can take on. You can get used to a map like this, you can really get used to it And what we want to do in the following segments is we try to train ourselves to get used to different world views and we can just take them on whenever we need Them .
