Globalization Has Helped the World in Technology - Research Paper Example

Prof’s Globalization and the Advancement of Technology Globalization has both its detractors and its fans – some argue that it has increased the economy of the world overall, some insist that it is almost a new form of colonialism, allowing rich countries to get richer without doing much to help the world overall. But the fact remains that globalization is almost like a force of nature it is going to keep advancing no matter – there is a “brodadening, deepening and speeding” of the world that is going to continue apace (Held).

This has certainly helped in the field of technology. The main reason that globalization has helped the field of technology is the fact that it allows an intensification of interconnections between people from different areas, who are, due to advancements in information technology (IT), able to share ideas to an unprecedented degree (Dhruvaraja and Vickers 26). Technology development is something of a self-reinforcing cycle – new technologies make it easier to breed new technologies, and so when something new is developed it makes it much easier to develop something even newer and more interesting.

We see this process occur in many places, but cell phone design is a good example: the iphone introduced a new kind of interface based on a touch screen and small icons in a home screen, and now almost every cell phone has that feature. But beyond that, new cell phones have also moved forward and introduced new elements on top of that, which Apple has then responded to by building off of those. This reinforcing loop is only able to occur to the degree that everyone who is developing new technology is able to know the ideas of other people who have developed technology before them.

If someone does not know something has been developed, they may spend a great deal of time developing a very similar thing themselves – this is called reinventing the wheel, and previously in human history it happened very often. Globalization, however, ensures that reinventing the wheel will happen very rarely. This is because the globalization, and the forces that go along with it, connect people from disparate parts of the globe more closely than they have ever been before, so now anyone anywhere will be able to access the ideas of anyone else.

Not every aspect of globalization has helped the advancement of technology – the freedom of people to move goods around more easily, for instance, has little impact on technological development. It is mostly the internet, and the new developments that came along with it, that have allowed the community of ideas that is so essential for technological development to go forward to fully integrate and develop. The more physical aspects of globalization only encourage technological development in that they encourage competition – Sony can no longer be sure that they have a corner on the Japanese market, just as Microsoft no longer has sole control of the American one – everyone must now compete with companies from everywhere in the world, spurring development.

Works CitedDhruvarajan, Vanaja and Jill Vickers. Gender, Race and Nation: A Global Perspective. Toronto: Toronto UP. 2002.Held, David. "What Is Globalization?" Global Transformations. Polity. Web. 13 May 2012. .