Evelyn Bleed: What's faster than a speeding bullet?
Superman? No, globalization.
The rapid advance of technology in the past decade has
enabled ideas, people, money, and materials to flow between
national borders faster and more frequently than ever
before. This movement of knowledge and capital is referred
to as globalization. And it spurs interaction and
integration between cultures, governments, and economies
worldwide. While globalization can refer to the
international physical transferring of goods, like merchants
traveling along trade routes, it also refers to the
economic, political and cultural impacts of global
integration. Economic globalization first boomed after World
War Two and is most prevalent in industries with vast supply
chains. Think about the auto industry, which relies on
thousands of suppliers and employees worldwide with hundreds
of overseas distribution centers. Today we commonly see this
with online retailers literally shipping goods across the
globe. Political globalization refers to organizations that
transcend national political systems, like the United
Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary
Fund. Cultural globalization is more loosely defined,
referring to the state of near constant contact of the world
as a result of networking technologies. Developments such as
blockchain and advanced mobile communications continue to
drive global integration on multiple fronts. For instance,
blockchain technology, commonly associated with Bitcoin and
other cryptocurrencies, is useful for creating a
decentralized database to maintain records and securely
exchange data in industries such as healthcare, government,
and banking. And the introduction of 4g and now 5g wireless
technology has dramatically increased the speed and
responsiveness of wireless networks supporting faster and
more consistent communication across networks worldwide.
