It takes a (global) village

I remember visiting Disney’s Epcot theme part sometime in the mid-1990s and riding on Spaceship Earth. The ride inside the iconic sphere at the park’s entrance takes visitors on a journey through the history of human communication. Riders start in the Stone Age and move along to the invention of the printing press and then the birth of computers. I recall vividly the scene toward the end of the ride where a young boy in America – probably younger than me at the time – is using a computer to communicate via video chat with a girl in Asia. If I recall correctly, the program they were using was translating for them on the screen.

While the idea of having a computer in your home at the time wasn’t so novel, the concept of chatting with people around the globe, via a video streamed through the internet seemed like something we could only dream about in the future. Back then, with dial up, it took forever for a webpage to load. I couldn’t imagine streaming video or having a program that translated what someone around the globe was saying. By this time, we had moved from our first computer to one with colors and graphics, but I wondered how you would meet people to communicate with around the world. And although there was this new program called America Online, which allowed us to send letters over the internet, it wasn’t anything close to what it turned into or what Facebook is today. Yet now we are living in that future. In fact, Disney updated the ride in 2007 because that futuristic ending to the ride had become a snapshot of the past.

I use this example to illustrate Sukanta Acharya’s point in her paper, “Identity, Technological Communication and Education in the Age of Globalization,” that technology has allowed us to embrace the idea of a “global village” and learn about other cultures outside the bounds of our own communities. “Such a condition is profound because it fundamentally challenges the diverse locality and traditional values, reduces the sense of social and cultural distance between communities, and affects our relationship to time and space, the fundamental coordinates of experiential reality,” she wrote.

We don’t even have to be sitting at home hard wired to the internet to communicate with others, thanks to smartphones and apps like Skype. Technology enables us to not only communicate with friends and family around the world, but also to do business globally. Large companies now employ workforces on various continents. Thanks to computers and conference calling features they can “meet” and work collaboratively on projects.

Similarly, technology allows people to communicate in a way that they feel comfortable. Someone who is shy and has difficulty communicating with another person face-to-face can do so from the comforts of their home. And people who are concerned about putting themselves out there also have the ability to communicate anonymously through the internet. Technology even allows us to change our identities.

Just last week we got a great example of this in Marie Hicks’ article, “Why tech’s gender problem is nothing new.” Hicks highlighted Stephanie Shirley, who had difficulty advancing her career in computer programming, because of her gender. Shirley launched her own company in the early 1960s to create opportunities for women with dependents. Shirley used a masculine nickname, Steve, to counteract the discrimination she faced in the male-dominated field. While there are more programmers today than there were when Shirley started her company, women are still grossly underrepresented in the industry.

I've seen the affect that names can have firsthand. My family is white. For the most part, our surnames sound white too (I’m more than half British and Irish and about a quarter German). But my cousin married into a family with a last name that is also common among African-Americans. The name change didn’t seem like a big deal, until it became an impediment on job applications (this was before people could search Facebook to see what an applicant looked like – not that this is an appropriate practice). This country has come a long way, but we still have so far to go. And unfortunately discrimination appears to be more overt now than it was just a few years ago. Just look at the so-called Muslim ban the President tried to enact. And the people who are spreading this discrimination – and in many cases hatred – are using social media and other technologies that enable them to reach a large audience.

As I've mentioned before, while I believe technology has this amazing ability to bring people together, it can also be used to create divisions by enabling people to vilify others simply for being different.

Acharya talks about how globalization can also lead to a loss of cultural traditions and identity. But the issues extend beyond that. Companies in the United States have let go of workers and replaced them with cheaper labor in other countries, which is made possible through technological advancements. While this move helps the local economies in those countries, it has caused resentment among American workers, which I believe has also stoked racism. And the media industry only adds fuel to the fire. Dana Mastro takes an in-depth look at this issue by analyzing how different races and ethnicities are portrayed in television programs, advertisements and video games, in in her paper, “Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Media Content and Effects.”

Mastro notes that while black people are being more fairly depicted on television, this isn’t the case across all genres, particularly the news media. She notes that Latinos are the subject of stereotypes and some racial and ethnic groups are so underrepresented there is little data on how they are depicted. How we’re portrayed affects how people perceive us. We all want to see positive depictions of people like us. It’s demeaning to be portrayed as an ethnic stereotype or to be ignored altogether.

While politics in our country is perhaps the most divided it’s been in my lifetime, I can’t help but think of a positive political example of the importance of treating all races and ethnicities equally in the media. On a very cold day in January 2008, I was working as a reporter in Burlington County, covering a predominately black community. In the wee hours of the morning (about 4 a.m.) I joined a caravan of people who rode buses from New Jersey to Washington, D.C. to witness a historic moment – the inauguration of our country’s first black President, Barack Obama.

Covering the inauguration was exhausting and overwhelming. We were so far back, we were practically at the Washington Monument (see photo above) and lucky to catch a glimpse of the event on big screens that had been set up amid the crowd. But that didn't matter to a father from New Jersey who brought his young son with him to the event. I lost sight of them in the crowd on the National Mall, so hours later when we got back to the bus I asked them to recount for me what the experience was like and why they made the trip. The father told me he brought his son because he wanted him to see in person that someone like him could be President of the United States. He wanted his son to know that he should dream big, maybe even as big as occupying the Whitehouse one day. They were both glowing reflecting on the remarkable day they had had.

That moment has stuck with me, more than a decade later, because that father had so much hope for his son. Sure this was a historic moment for our country. We had finally elected a black person to be the leader of the melting pot that is our country. But for this family it was an incredibly personal moment, one that I’m sure they still reflect on as I do. So I wonder, how many more children could we inspire to go onto greatness in the future if the media showed people of all different races and ethnicities doing remarkable things rather than acting out the stereotypes they’ve been associated with.

This blog post is an assignment for an Identity, Technology & Communication course at NJIT.