Global Economy and International Telecommunications Networks

El Mehdi Zeroual
Dr. Ibahrine
COM 2303
18 September 2007

Global Economy and International Telecommunications Networks

Premodern World

- In the 13th century, the world was very different from the world of today.
- The personal possessions of our predecessors were all made locally.
- Foreign products were rare, and foreign products were basically exotic.

Division of Labor

- One of the things that distinguished the modern world from the premodern world was the extent to which division of labor was used in the production process.
- Division of labor creates specialization that in turn increases efficiency.
- The interdependencies created by the division of labor require coordination and control to keep the production going smoothly.
- Coordination and control problems can be handled on a face-to-face level, but these problems become more severe when division of labor occurs across geographical space as companies seek to capitalize on the locational advantage of each place.
- When business owners started realizing that some components could be made more cheaply in other parts of the country, they moved away.
- The global division of labor is intricately tied to modern communication technologies.
- While telecommunications technologies allow for global coordination and control, transportation technologies move raw materials and products from one corner of the world to another.

Imperialism

- The world was interconnected but in a loosely coupled way.
- The picture changed dramatically with the emergence of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Western powers transformed the multipolar world into a monopolar one.
- It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire.
- Britain alone controlled about a quarter of the world landmass.
- These new empires were not like earlier ones in history. First, they were far-flung and disjoined, unlike the old empires, which were created through the conquest of neighboring countries. Second, the economic relationship between the imperial powers and the subject territories changed in the age of imperialism.
- One of the main reasons the imperial powers were interested in acquiring colonies was to gain access to raw materials for their growing industries.
- People who are culturally closer to the mother country than their own native traditions are less likely to revolt.
- The network was totally London-centric such as telegraph.
- If people at any two points in the empire wanted to communicate with each other, they had to do so through London even if they were geographically adjacent to each other.
- Today, in the eyes of many scholars, we have moved from an era of imperialism to one of
electronic imperialism.

Electronic Imperialism

Global media flows

- The center of the world moved across the Atlantic to the United States.
- The main source of U.S power was its economic rather than its military strength, even though the importance of the latter should not be discounted.
- U.S projects its power not brazenly, but subtly through economic, and more lately, cultural means.
- The global political structures created during the age of imperialism remain in place. These structures create a relationship of dependency between the rich and the poor countries.
- The United States overwhelmingly dominates the cinema and TV screens all over the world.
- Developing nations consider the import of U.S film to be a new kind of invasion-cultural invasion-that is more subtle and insidious.
- When we look at global communication flows, we can easily see that they are disproportionately from U.S (center) to the rest of the world (periphery) (one-way-flow).

Transborder data flow

- With the improvement in transportation technologies, international trade progressively moved beyond lightweight, high-value items to heavier and bulkier commodities. However, services remained local for the most part.
- The service provider and the client need no longer be in the same place; technological developments finally made even services tradable.
- U.S favors both free trade and free flow of information.
- If one were to use the brain-brawn analogy, the industrialized countries remain the brains of the world system and the developing countries the brawn.
- U.S and industrialized countries view free flow of information as a normal commercial activity essential for coordination and control of business processes.
- What U.S exports are intangible products.

Emerging Network structures

- The high costs of program production and transmission make television a top-down mode of communication where the sources are few and the receivers are many.
- The cost of production equipment has dropped sharply.
- These days, an ordinary citizen can shoot video with a camcorder and make it accessible via the internet to anyone interested.
- Rich countries, with only 16 percent of the world’s population, have 97 percent of all Internet hosts.
- The global Internet exhibits a center-periphery relationship similar to that of the British imperial telegraph network and African telephone networks.
- Unlike the telephone system, in which the cost of the international circuit connecting two countries is evenly split between them, Internet service providers in other countries pay the entire cost of the circuit connecting them to the United States.