Education and Development
Lecture 2.1
Globalziation and Education:
Globalization: Conceptual and Historical Accounts
A. Globalization: A Conceptual Account: What is globalization?
1. David Harvey (1989): Time-space compression as The Condition of Postmodernity
“The concept of ‘time-space compression’ refers to “processes that so revolutionize the
objective qualities and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways,
how we represent the world to ourselves.” (1989, P. 240)
2. Anthony Giddens (1994): The Consequences of Modernity “Globalization is really about
the transformation of space and time. I would define it as action at distance, and relate its
growth over recent years to the development of means of instantaneous global
communication and mass transportation.” (1994, p. 22)
3. Manuel Castells (1996): The Network Society Globalization as a separation of
simultaneous social practice from physical contiguity and the transformation the
traditional notion of space of places to space of flows.
4. Zygmunt Bauman (1998): Globalization as “annulment of temporal/spatial distances”
(1998, p.18).
B. Globalization: A Historical Account
1. Origins of globalization
a. A.G. Frank & Grill (1993) World History Perspective: Originated 5000 year ago
b. Braudel (1979) & Wallerstein (1974) World-system Approach: Originated from the 16th
century and the rise of mercantile capitalism
c. J. W. Meyer (1979) World Polity Perspective: Originated from the late 18th & early 19th
century and the constitution of inter-state competition world polity
d. M. Castell (1996) & M. Carnoy (2000) Global IT Economy Perspective: Originated
from 1970s
2. Globalization and Information Technology Revolution: A Historical Account
a. Norbert Wiener’s formulation of Cybernetics since the end of the Second World War
i. Cybernetics: Control and communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948
ii. The Human use of Human Being: Cybernetics and Society, 1950
iii. Cybernetics is defined as the study of messages, which is “to develop a language
and technique that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and
communication in general.” (1950/67, p. 25)
b. Cybernetic practices of IT during the Second World War
i. The invention of radar and the victory of the Battle of Britain
ii. The war of intelligence and the code-breakers, Colossus developed in Britain in
1943, as the pioneer of computers
iii. The practices of war games and the development of Operations Research
iv. The psychology of war
c. The developments of the hardware for the Information Technology Revolution
i. The development pf microelectronics
- 1947, Bardeen, Brattan, and Shockley invented the transistor in 1947 at Bell
Laboratories
- 1954, Texas Instruments in Dallas accomplished the shift to silicon in
manufacturing chips
- 1957, Jack Kilby and Bob Noyce co-invented the Integrated Circuit (IC)
- 1971, Ted Hoff, an Intel engineer, invented the microprocessor
ii. The development of computers
- 1943, Colossus was built in Britain as a machine to decipher enemy codes
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- 1964, Mauchly and Eckert in the University of Pennsylvania, under the
sponsorship of the US Army, produced the first general purpose computer
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator)
- 1951, Mauchly and Eckert produced the first commercial version computer,
UNIVAC-1
- 1975, Ed Robert built the first small-scale computer around the microprocessor
- 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built the first commercially successful
microcomputer Apple I in the garage of their parents’ home in Menlo Park,
Silicon Valley
As member of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hackers who started
meeting regularly in the Bay Area in the mid-seventies, Steve Wozniak used the
information shared freely within club to built his Apple I. Hence, he accordingly
distributed openly the blueprints of Apple I to others and published bits of his
program.
- 1981, IBM introduced its version of microcomputer, which name the Personal
Computer (PC)
iii. The development of telecommunication
- 1970s, telecommunication turned from analog to digital transmissions
- 1970s, the development of optoelectronics (fiber optics and laser transmission
- These two technological breakthroughs constituted the two building blocks of the
so-called Information Superhighway in the 1990s
d. The development of the software for the Information Technology Revolution
i. The development of the Internet
- 1958, Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed by the
Defense Department of the US Government
- 1969, ARPA NET, a computer network was set up within ARPA. The
objective of the ARPANET was to build a military communications system
able to survive a nuclear attack.
- 1970s, Vint Cerf and members of the Network Working Group designed
the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Inter-network Protocol (IP).
Taken together, they formed the TCP/IP, which laid down the standard on
which the Internet still operates today.
- 1983, the defense Department created a separate MILNET, as a result
ARPANET became ARPA-INTERNET.
- Feb. 1990, ARPANET technological obsolete. The US Government
charged the National Science Foundation with the management of the
Internet.
ii. The development of the grassroots computer networks
- 1977 Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two Chicago students wrote a
program they call MODEM, enabling the transfer of files between PCs.
- 1978, Christensen and Suess wrote another program Computer Bulletin
Broad System, enabling PCs to store and transmit message
- 1983, Tom Jennings created the FIDONET in California
- 1981 Ira Fuch and Greydon Freeman created the BITNET
- From the 1970s, a computer network emerged from the community of
UNIX users. It eventually developed into the Usenet.
- In the summer 1980, graduate students in Berkeley developed a program
to bridge the ARPANET and the Usenet. These networks eventually came
together as the Internet.
iii. The “Open Source Movement”
- 1974, Bell Laboratories release UNIX to the universities, including its
source code and permission to alter the source. UNIX then became the
lingua franca of most computer science department.
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- 1984, Richard Stallman, reacting against the decision by AT&T to claim
proprietary right to UNIX, launched the Free Software Foundation,
proposing to substitute “copyleft” for “copyright”. He also created an
operating system, GNU, as an alternative to UNIX.
- 1991, Linus Torvald, a 22-year-old student at the University of Helsinki,
developed a new UNIX-based operating system, called Linex, and
distributed it freely on the Internet, asking users to improve it and to pose
their improvement back on the Net.
- 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed a hypertext system, called World Wide
Web. He then released the software over the NET in August 1991.
- Ray Tomlinson introduced e-mail with the @ symbol he chosen
- 1993, Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
created a user-friendly graphical browser for the PC, which eventually
developed into the Netscape Navigator browser.
3. Lesson from the History of the Information Technology Revolution
a. The imperatives of the power-steering system of the military-science regime
b. The imperatives of the money-steering system of the capital-science
mechanism
c. The imperatives of the free-democratic and equal-meritocratic community of the
grassroots movements
C. Globalization and Postmodernity
1. What is postmodernity?
a. Jean-Fransois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1984/1979)
i. “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is
undoubtedly a product of progress of the sciences: but that progress in turn
presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of
legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy
and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative
function is losing its functions, its great hero, its great dangers, its great
voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language
elements -- narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so
on." (1984/1979: xxiii-xxiv)
ii. “It is fair to say that for the last forty years the ‘leading sciences and
technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of
linguistics, problems of communication and cynbernetics, modern theories of
algebra and informatics, computers and their language, problems of
translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer
languages, problems of information storage and data banks, telematics and
the perfection of intelligent terminals, paradoxology. …The nature of
knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general
transformation, It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only
if leaning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that
anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this
way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated
by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer
language.” (p. 4-5)
b. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1990)
i. “We have been experiencing, these last two decades, an intense phase of
time-space compression that has had a disorientating and disruptive impa`ct
upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as
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upon cultural and social life. …I think it no accident that postmodern
sensibility evidences strong sympathies for certain of the confused political,
cultural, and philosophical movements that occurred at the beginning of this
century when the sense of time-space compression was also peculiarly
strong.” (p. 284)
ii. "What appears to be the most startling fact about postmodernism: its total
acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the
chaotic.... But postmodernism responds to the fact of that in a very particular
way. It does not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define the 'eternal
and immutable' elements that might lie within it. Postmodernism swims,
even wallows, in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change as if that is
all there is" (p.44).
D. Globalization and its Human Consequences
1. Economic consequences
2. Cultural consequences
3. Social consequences
4. Political and administrative consequence
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