Lesson 2

Communication and Globalization

What to achieve?
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
• explain how cultural and global issues affect communication;
• appreciate the impact of communication on society and the world; and
• write a reaction paper on communication challenges in a global atmosphere and
methods for effective and ethical global communication.

What to ponder?

1. What is the image saying

about the world today?
2. What do you think has
contributed to the easy
access and exchange of
information these days?
Why?
3. In transacting or
communicating in a global
setting, what vital
preparations must be
done? Why?

What to learn?
Globalization
• The communication and assimilation among individuals, ethnicities, races, institutions,
governments of various nations supported by technology and compelled by international
trade.
• Not a new process or concept since years before the advent of technology, people had
been purchasing and selling each other properties, goods, and other objects of certain
value.
Assimilation
• the integration of new knowledge or information with what is already known
• the process of becoming part of or more like something greater
• the process in which one group takes on the cultural and other traits of a larger group

Possible cultural barriers to effective communication in a global environment:

1. Cultural relativism
• The view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are relative to the individual within
his own social context. In other words, “right” and “wrong” are culture-specific;
• what is considered moral in one society may be considered immoral in another.
2. Lack of knowledge of other’s culture
3. Discrimination and harassment
4. Language differences

Strategies to become effective global communicator (Krizan, 2014):

1. Review communication principles

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2. Analyze the message receiver
3. Be open to an accepting of other cultures
4. Learn about cultures and apply what is learned
5. Consider language needs

What do you mean?

• Discrimination - unfair treatment of one person or group, usually because of prejudice
about race, ethnicity, age, religion, or gender
• Harassment - behavior that threatens or torments somebody, especially persistently, to
annoy or bother someone in a constant or repeated way
• Prejudice – preconceived judgment or opinion, an unfair feeling of dislike when it is not
reasonable or logical

What to do?
• Watch the video “Wiring a Web for Global Good.” Study the speech. Here is the link of
the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rrJAC84FA
• Write a reaction paper about the content of the video (minimum of 3 paragraphs).
• Introduction
- Write about the content of the video
- What global issues have emerged because of miscommunication?
- What can you say about the issues being discussed in the video?
• Body
- Strengths & Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT Analysis) of
technology in creating a truly global society
• Conclusion
- How can effective communication and language use contribute to the creation
of a truly global society?
- Sum up your ideas & give recommendations
- Specific examples/actions that you can contribute in creating a truly global
society

Note: If you cannot access the video, you can just read the attached manuscript of the video.

TED Talks, Gordon Brown: Wiring a web for global good

Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of Westminster and
Whitehall?

This is Kim, a nine-year-old Vietnam girl, her back ruined by napalm, and she
awakened the conscience of the nation of America to begin to end the Vietnam War.

This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15
minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued
is one that went round the world. This is Tiananmen Square. A man before a tank
became a picture that became a symbol, for the whole world, of resistance. This next is
the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a
picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty. This is

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Neda, the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only
a few weeks ago, and she is now the focus, rightly so, of the YouTube generation.

And what do all these pictures and events have in common?

What they have in common is what we see unlocked and what we cannot see.
What we see unlocked: the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together
to become a human community. What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the
pain of others, however distantly. What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do
believe in something bigger than ourselves. What these pictures demonstrate is that
there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents -- a
moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others, and believe in something
bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that
need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be
rectified.

There is a story about Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, going to see
Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s.

Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said -- and he was the Swedish Social
Democratic Prime Minister -- "Isn't this man a communist?" The reply was, "No, Mr
President, he's an anti-communist." And Ronald Reagan said, "I don't care what kind of
communist he is!" (Laughter) Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme, the Social Democratic
Prime Minister of Sweden, "Well, what do you believe in? Do you want to abolish the
rich?" He said, "No, I want to abolish the poor." Our responsibility is to let everyone
have the chance to realize their potential to the full.

I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from
people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith.

But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate
instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to
find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the
Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the
capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an
injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in
human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global
society.

Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William
Wilberforce and all the protesters.

They protested across Britain. They won public opinion over a long period of
time. But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. What could they have done
with the pictures they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of
communication to win people's hearts and minds?

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Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90
years ago.

She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First
World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families
of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house,
leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually
gave birth to Save the Children, an international organization that is now fully
recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. But what more
could she have done if she'd had the modern means of communications available to her
to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately?

Now look at what's happened in the last 10 years.

In Philippines in 2001, President Estrada -- a million people texted each other

about the corruption of that regime, eventually brought it down and it was, of course,
called the "coup de text." Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert
Mugabe a year ago. Because people were able to take mobile-phone photographs of
what was happening at the polling stations, it was impossible for that Premier to fix that
election in the way that he wanted to do. Or take Burma and the monks that were
blogging out, a country that nobody knew anything that was happening until these blogs
told the world that there was a repression, meaning that lives were being lost and
people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi, who is one of the great prisoners
of conscience of the world, had to be listened to. Then take Iran itself, and what people
are doing today, following what happened to Neda, people who are preventing the
security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran, changing
their address to Tehran, Iran, and making it difficult for the security services.

Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral
sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally.

That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally

change the world.

Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites; it's got to
be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are
communicating with each other around the world. 200 years ago the problem we had to
solve was slavery. 150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was
how young people, children, had the right to education. 100 years ago in most countries
in Europe, the pressure was for the right to vote. 50 years ago the pressure was for the
right to social security and welfare. In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism, anti-
Semitism, racism, apartheid, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and
sexuality; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns by people to
change the world.

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I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago when he was in London.

I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation
of new resources for his foundation. I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela -- I was very
privileged to do so -- when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage and Nelson Mandela
was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the
time who she was. Amy Winehouse said, "Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common.
My husband too has spent a long time in prison." (Laughter) Nelson Mandela then went
down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all. He said in his lifetime he
had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial
oppression and defeating apartheid. He said that there was a greater challenge ahead,
the challenge of poverty, of climate change, global challenges that needed global
solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society.

We are the first generation that is in a position to do this.

Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate
and organize globally with the challenges that we now face, most of which are global in
their nature. Climate change cannot be solved in one country but has got to be solved
by the world working together. A financial crisis, just as we have seen, could not be
solved by America alone or Europe alone; it needed the world to work together. Take
the problems of security and terrorism and, equally, the problem of human rights and
development: they cannot be solved by Africa alone; they cannot be solved by America
or Europe alone. We cannot solve these problems unless we work together.

So the great project of our generation, it seems to me, is to build for the first time
out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together, a truly
global society, built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society
and make for a different future.

We have now, and are the first generation with, the power to do this. Take
climate change. Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know
that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we have
to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that, when we want to
create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been
able to agree upon to deal with this problem? One of the things that has to come out of
Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global
environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole
of the world to move along a climate-change agenda.

(Applause)

One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have to
persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well, so you need that
global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations.

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Take the financial crisis. If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that
starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America. If
people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many,
many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain, and people's
ordinary savings are affected by it, then you cannot rely on a system of national
supervision. You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well
as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be
sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this
world is indivisible.

So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect
our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last
stage of financial development over these recent years.

Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries
and the rest of the world, the poorest part of the world. We do not have the basis of a
proper partnership for the future, and yet, out of people's desire for a global ethic and a
global society that can be done.

I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone.

This is a country of six and a half million people, but it has only 80 doctors, it has
200 nurses, it has 120 midwives. You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six
million people with such limited resources.

Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania, a girl called Miriam.

She was 11 years old, her parents had both died from AIDS, her mother and then
her father. She was an AIDS orphan being handed across different extended families to
be cared for. She herself was suffering from HIV, she was suffering from tuberculosis. I
met her in a field, she was ragged, she had no shoes. When you looked in her eyes,
any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future, but there was an
unreachable sadness in that girl's eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of
the world for that moment, I believe that all the work that it had done for the global
HIV/AIDS fund would be rewarded by people prepared to make donations.

We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest
countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the
investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of
food, but an exporter of food.

Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many
countries around the world.

Burma is in chains, Zimbabwe is a human tragedy, in Sudan thousands of people

have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent. In the Rwanda Children's

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Museum, there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the Children's Museum is
commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million
people died.

There is a photograph of a boy called David.

Beside that photograph there is the information about his life. It said "David, age
10." David: ambition to be a doctor. Favorite sport: football. What did he enjoy most?
Making people laugh. How did he die? Tortured to death. Last words said to his mother
who was also tortured to death: "Don't worry. The United Nations are coming." And we
never did.

And that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty
in Rwanda, and we never did.

So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and
humanitarian aid, but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden
states of the world.

So my argument today is basically this. We have the means by which we could

create a truly global society. The institutions of this global society can be created by our
endeavors. That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary
for these institutions to work, but we should not lose the chance in this generation, in
this decade in particular, with President Obama in America, with other people working
with us around the world, to create global institutions for the environment, and for
finance, and for security and for development, that make sense of our responsibility to
other peoples, our desire to bind the world together, and our need to tackle problems
that everybody knows exist.

It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people
used to turn to each other and say about Cicero, "Great speech.

"But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences,
people turned to each other and didn't say "Great speech." They said, "Let's march." We
should be marching towards a global society. Thank you.
(Applause)

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