| Global Village in Digital Age |
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| May 2012 | |
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The spread and power of the Internet has reduced the world to a digital village. Some people call this globalisation but digital village sounds cooler. People inside a village know each other and work closely together. This is indeed the case with several large scale projects such as Hubble Space Telescope. It involves people of several continents as it circles all of them every 90 minutes 550km in the sky above. Wikipedia is another wonderful example. As the village has 7 billion people, it is important to have law and order there. Standards for open interfacing have been developed as in democratic countries. TCP/IP is the best example. Like world politics, not everyone is happy to be open. Another observation is in polarisation of people into producers and consumers. For example, designs are being done in top tier countries (the brain of the information age), merchandise is made in tier three countries (the sweat shops) and consumed by the rest. A country consuming more than it produces is bound to be in trouble sooner or later. New Zealand must produce and create now in order to stay as a responsible and respectable villager. <Click on picture to enlarge>    Click to return |