Small World? Read Nil about It
The word “globalization” is bandied about so often, it has taken on a life of its own. Opinions differ as to whether it’s good, bad, or something in between. Yet everyone seems to agree that globalization has made the world smaller and its people more closely intertwined. But has it really?
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil some decades ago, I saw how the arrival of electricity — and a television mounted in the public square — changed life in my rural village. The outside world became visible. Other peoples and places were introduced to a backwater town that had been curious about, but only vaguely aware of, the larger world.
Today in the United States, I see the opposite happening, a closing-off of the world, in this the most media-intensive society in the world. If by “globalization,” we infer engagement with the rest of the world, how do we explain this phenomenon? As is well-known, newspapers are dying in the age of the Internet.
As newspapers cut back on staff, one of the first things to go is the foreign bureau, which is expensive to maintain and whose reporting is deemed not as interesting to readers, nor as profitable, as coverage of local news. (A similar trend is occurring in cable and broadcast TV.) Indeed, just three years after 9/11, front-page coverage of foreign news in American newspapers had dropped to its lowest point ever. If it were not for Iraq or the occasional natural disaster somewhere overseas, would there ever be foreign news on the front page?
There is a hunger for foreign news. The BBC World Service is a successful global venture; America’s National Public Radio has millions of loyal listeners, many drawn by its coverage of international news. A group of investors, including cable TV pioneer Amos Hostetter (MBA ’61), is financing Global News Enterprises, the first U.S.-based Web site to feature only international news.
Valuable as those outlets are, however, they serve only a niche audience. With a declining presence in newspapers, foreign news is increasingly absent from the national conversation and therefore increasingly easy to dismiss as irrelevant by general readers.
So can globalization truly be said to exist or prevail where people have little interest in, knowledge of, or exposure to world affairs? From my experience of living in Latin America for a number of years, America gets into trouble economically and politically when its citizens don’t pay attention to what’s going on overseas, be it what their country does in their name, or be it by forces beyond their control. And consider the next generation: American students’ ignorance of geography and current events, compared to other students around the world, is well-documented. They are the generation that will probably preside over and witness the death of newspapers in their lifetime.
So here’s a question, especially for those Bulletin readers with international experience or business interests: In an era of globalization, how important for America’s economic success is a citizenry that is informed about the world?
