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This article provides information about the Role of Mass Media in Accelerating the Process of Globalisation !
One of the striking aspects of contemporary society is the rapid development of the information technology for application in different areas of electronic activities with significant implications. If we analyse the progression of global economy we can see that since the 19th century, the story of the global economy has been a regular succession of leading commercial and industrial sectors. From mid-nineteenth century onward, the leading sectors were electric power, chemicals and steel.
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The industries that took off after 1914 were electronics, including telephones, radio and then television and autos plus oil and rubber. Since the 1970s, leadership in the global economy has begun to shift to another set of industries, one that combines computers, the television, the (digital) telephone and other communication tools, which can be collectively called as information industries.
Prominent among these are the computer industry, composed of several subsections including large, hard and software sectors; the revitalised telephone industry transformed into telecommunications with such new sectors such as cellular, wireless and cable and multifaceted ever changing media complete with their content providers and distributors.
Alvin Toffler in the Third Wave describes three periods of economic evolution: the Agricultural wave that lasted from 8000 B.C. to the mid- eighteenth century, the Industrial wave which lasted until the late twentieth century and the information wave which began in the 1960s and will last for many decades to come. According to him, the first wave was driven by physical labour, the second wave by machines and blue-color workers and the third by information technology and knowledge workers.
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The contemporary speed of change, the enlargement of capacity for information transmission and the proliferation of communications media are very different from what has been experienced in the past. The extraordinary explosion of both technology and information has considerably reduced the twin concepts of time and space.
In particular Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has emerged as perhaps the most dominant force in the global system of production although with significant ramifications in all other spheres of contemporary human existence. Improved communication reduced effective distance for the transmission of information. International telephone and fax traffic has become largely instantaneous, cheap and simple for individuals to access.
The Internet provides a genuinely global system of communication and information. Satellite and cable TV and VHF radio have created an abundance of choice in news and entertainment. The augmented expansion of information technology in the past few decades resulted in a phenomenal growth of “outsourcing” of service in the world over.
During the third wave, the process of information handling, transmission, storage and retrieval became the key to prosperity and qualitatively different way of life. Success in just about in any field has become impossible without information technology. In farming, manufacture, education, policing, medicine, entertainment, banking or whatever IT is apparently set to change everything that human beings do in advanced societies. Beginning of computing with telecommunications is considered to spell the start of the new age of information and communication age.
Daniel Bell forecasts vast expansion of information technology and foresees major social changes resulting from the establishment of new tele communications infrastructure and he called it information society. Bell argues in the information society information technology shortens labour time and diminishes the production worker and actually replaces labour as the source of added value in the national product. Here the knowledge and information supersede labour and capital as the central variables of the economy.
To Peter Drucker information society is post-capitalist society in which capitalists and proletarians are replaced by knowledge workers and service workers. And the economic challenge of this society is the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge worker.