Globalization and the Flattening of the World: A Book Review of “The World is Flat”

There is no doubt the world is changing. In cultures, in politics, and in economies, increased awareness of foreign and domestic practices has become a focal point of society. Trade has always proven beneficial to a nation due to the laws of absolute and comparative advantage, but in the modern world, international relations go beyond the boundaries of exchanging products. Now, services and collaboration are added to that realm. In his book “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman pinpoints the history and future of globalization in economics. Highlighting how globalization has made the world “flat” by allowing fair competition between large and small companies, corporations and individuals, and countries and continents, Friedman gives insight into how the world has changed because of innovation and history colliding at the right time

A minority language in the globalizing world: The Buryat language on the Internet

A minority language in the globalizing world: The Buryat language on the InternetThe situation of languages on the Internet seems to reproduce their situation in offline reality: dominant languages with a large number of users and support from state and society are more widespread. This does not mean, however, that minority languages are not present in the Internet. In this paper, using the example of the Buryat language, we are trying to show that websites or webpages in minority languages are created not only for instrumental but also autotelic reasons. Buryats make efforts to preserve their own language and culture; they are driven by a desire to emphasize their activity or by comparison with other nations which have websites in their own languages. An important issue in our discussion is the relationship between efforts aimed at the preservation and development of ethnic language in spoken and written form and the development of web content in that language. We thus show the relationship between “on-line” and “off-line” problems faced by Buryats today. Język mniejszości w globalizującym się świecie: język buriacki w InternecieSytuacja języków w Internecie zdaje się reprodukować ich sytuację w rzeczywistym świecie: języki dominujące, z dużą liczbą użytkowników, mogące liczyć na pomoc państw są bardziej rozprzestrzenione. Nie znaczy to jednak, że języki mniejszości nie są w Internecie obecne. W niniejszym opracowaniu, posługując się przykładem języka buriackiego, staramy się pokazać, że witryny czy też strony internetowe w językach mniejszościowych są tworzone nie tylko w celach instrumentalnych, ale także autotelicznych. Buriaci podejmują wysiłki, by chronić swój język i swoją kulturę, kierowani są chęcią podkreślenia swojej aktywności, porównaniami z innymi narodami, które mają witryny internetowe w swoich własnych językach. Ważną częścią naszej analizy są związki między wysiłkami mającymi na celu zachowanie i rozwój języka tnicznego w formie mówionej i pisanej a rozwojem treści internetowych w tym języku. Pokazujemy więc związki między problemami on-line i off-line, z jakimi borykają się współcześnie Buriaci

The Importance of Place in Corporate Identity an Investigation on the Presence of Old Dutch Firms on the Internet

This paper investigates how old Dutch firms display their corporate identity on the Internet, with special attention paid to location and place. Several scholars argue that the Internet would create the ‘end-of-geography’. Current empirical investigation found that incumbent firms display a strong sense-of-place in the presentation of ‘self’ on their websites. Location is important for old firms' images, underlining the importance of embeddedness. Location remains important when firms compete on the ‘global level’ on the Internet. This paper therefore contributes to the understanding of place and local embeddedness of firms in the ‘global internet space’

Legitimacy and Expertise in Global Internet Governance

Over the course of the past decade or so, attention among Internet policymakers and scholars has shifted gradually from substantive design principles to the structure of Internet governance. The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers in particular now faces a new skepticism about its legitimacy to administer the essential Internet Assigned Numbers Authority function. ICANN has responded to these doubts by proposing a series of major governance reforms that would bring nation-states more into the organization\u27s decisionmaking. After all, transnational governance institutions in other substantive areas privilege nation-states as a matter of course. This Symposium Essay shows that these changes reflect a new era in which ICANN and other Internet policymakers no longer view the Internet as uniquely immune from the geopolitics of the physical world

Networks, Urban

For much of the twentieth century, urban networks was a term used by sociologists and others to describe social networks, their importance for bonding within communities and bridging between communities, and their relationship to the geographical mobility implied by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urbanization, mid-twentieth-century suburbanization, and late-twentieth-century globalization. This relationship is often assumed to be one in which social networks are threatened by geographical mobility. From sometime in the 1980s, in a context of globalization, network became a metaphor used across the social sciences to describe how people, ideas, and objects flow between nodes in a globalizing world, and urban networks became a term used by geographers and others to describe at least four more or less connected things: (1) archipelagos of world or global cities, in which centrality depends on networks of producer services and information and communications technology infrastructure; (2) this information and communications technology infrastructure, among other networked infrastructure, which has become unbundled in recent years, leading to fragmented or splintered cities; (3) other smaller networks of humans and nonhumans – actor networks – that help to maintain urban life; and (4) twenty-first-century social networks, characterized by their transnational geographies and relatively high levels of institutionalization and self-consciousnes

MOBILITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development focuses on meeting the needs of present without compromising future generations’ prospects of meeting the same needs plus those which will be present then. The concept of sustainable development was internationally established within the report “Our Common Future” of the World Commission on Environment and Development (a commission convened in 1983 by the General Assembly of United Nations). Reaching global sustainability, satisfying the needs of present without compromising the ability of future generations to satisfy their own needs, is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Where can we place transportation among the sustainable development issues? Transportation is the activity which creates a bond between companies located at different distances from each other. Under such perspective, it is necessary to analyze “the sustainable transportation system” as a part of “sustainable mobility” in order to respond to the requirement of using certain logistics circuits which could lead to an economical transportation between industrial enterprises and distribution companies. The timid, but globally noticeable, trends to overcome the crisis at the beginning of 2010 give high responsibilities to carriers, as they are forced to focus on the quality of transportation and to reconsider the distance concept (together with their beneficiaries) by using “sustainable mobility.”mobility, sustainable development, environment, transportation, development strategies.

The Current Status of Social Risks on Educational Systems. An Analysis Through Social Media

Este trabajo ha sido publicado en las actas del citado congreso, y revisados los documentos donde ha sido publicado, no se muestran impedimentos legales para que pueda ser publicado el documento.Social Risk in education such as bullying, are usually invisible to teachers and parents, at all educational levels. However, these risks remain a reality everywhere in the world, turning into a problem that is rapidly globalizing due to the widespread access to the Internet. The Internet has permeated our entire society and is now present in almost every activity. The education and most aspects associated with it, such as Social Risks, are not exempt of this new form of communication within our society. This has led to a significant increase in damage Social Risks can exhort on the victims, due to several causes such as their capacity for dissemination, repetition and virality; greater anonymity of aggressors and the chance for more people joining them; continuity over time even when after school hours; display of intimacy before an endless crowd of people; ease of permanent control through geolocation, control of online statuses and connections; and even the risk of easily impersonating a victim. The first step to prevent these issues is to carry out a study on the current state of Social Risks. An updated snapshot would allow to draw up action plans based on reliable data and develop countermeasures to minimize the damage caused by current Social Risks to minors. The objective of this work is to conduct a study on unsolicited data obtained from Social Media on three of the most prominent Social Risks of our society, namely Bullying, Addictions and Xenophobia within the field of education, with the aim of obtaining an updated snapshot of their current status. The study was carried out during the second semester of 2017 and the first semester of 2018, quantifying the presence and emotion of said risks in Social Media, determining the most relevant terms, as well as the most used communication channels

Global cities: Global parks: Globalizing of digital leisure networks.

This paper proposes to understand the globalizing of online Social Network Sites (SNS) through the spatial metaphor of global parks. It builds upon a commonly accepted ideation of the city as socially-constructed and that which has been harnessed to understand the spatiality of the Internet. Over the decades we have learnt to conceptualize the Internet with the aid of metaphors, including that of the city to grasp its intricate information highways, networks and connectivity, the underlying logic that dictates movement within these spaces and nodes of concentrated social action. By equating the Internet to the city, we are compelled to extend our imagination by applying our understandings of urban planning and geography to current vital conversations on the shaping of Internet spaces. The persistence of this parallel has matured our thinking significantly from the utopic notion of the web as a frontier of limitless and depoliticized space to a more architected and socio-economic phenomenon of a propertied and contextual digital place. Given that the city has been a useful analogy for the Internet to confront its directionality and political intent in design and usage, this paper takes this parallel further, delving into a segment of the Internet that is currently in the midst of tremendous speculation- that of Social Network Sites (SNS) and its seemingly open, democratic, social and inclusive nature. If we narrow our attention to a domain of the city that is imbued with a similar rhetoric of being open, social and leisurely