Page 284 - Beyond Methods

272 Raising cultural consciousness
change and evolve, so as to meet the challenges of today’s emerging global reality.
What is the global reality today? It primarily manifests itself in the twin processes of economic globalization and cultural global- ization. A 1999 United Nations Report on Human Development points out that globalization is changing the world landscape in three distinct ways:
• Shrinking space: People’s lives—their jobs, incomes, and health— are affected by events on the other side of the globe, often by events that they do not even know about, much less control.
• Shrinking time: Markets and technologies now change with un- precedented speed, with action at a distance immediately affect- ing people’s lives far away.
• Disappearing borders: National borders are breaking down, not only for trade, capital, and information but also for ideas, norms, cultures, and values.
In other words, the world has now truly become one big global village affecting economic growth as well cultural change.
One of the engines that drives both economic and cultural glob- alization is global electronic communication, the Internet. In fact, without global communication, economic growth and cultural change would not have taken place “with breakneck speed and with amazing reach” (UN Report, 1999, p. 30). The impact of this elec- tronic communicational concept on cultural globalization is as- tounding. “Contacts between people and their cultures—their ideas, their values, their way of life—have been growing and deepening in unprecedented ways” (p. 33).
Thus, economic and cultural globalization along with electronic media have vastly increased the opportunities for the people of this planet to know more about each other, and also to shape and re- shape each other’s thoughts and actions. In other words, the infor- mational resource necessary for an individual to construct a mean- ingful cultural identity is only a click away. What the individual needs more than anything else to make proper use of that resource is a critically reflective mind that can tell the difference between in- formation and disinformation, between ideas and ideologies.
What guides an individual in such a critical self-reflection is his or her own value system sedimented from his or her own cultural heritage. One’s learned knowledge and experience of other cultural