Dr. Mohamed Abdulzaher
I remember more than twenty years ago when I began preparing for a master’s study on globalization and intercontinental cultural values through the international media and advertising, and I was like many at that time resisting the concept of globalization and what it might bring from a pure evil for poor people especially in third world countries.
Even when we check Theodore Levitt contributions’, the first one who introduced the Globalization concept in the 1980s, the American economist and a professor at the Harvard Business when he referred to Globalization at that time as a powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology. It has proletarianized communication, transport, and travel. It has made isolated places and impoverished peoples eager for modernity’s allurements. Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.
Levitt had forecasted that the Globalization results as a new commercial reality—the emergence of global markets for standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude. Corporations geared to this new reality benefit from enormous economies of scale in production, distribution, marketing, and management. By translating these benefits into reduced world prices, they can decimate competitors that still live in the disabling grip of old assumptions about how the world works.
And that was exactly what happened in the nineties and what followed until now.
Globalization 4.0
I can say that; in Globalization 4.0 There is a purpose transformation happening, a shift from profit-first (international trade) to people-first mindset.
Globalization 4.0 is only now taking shape. However, Brexit, the Trump administration’s shifts in US policy, and developments surrounding such issues as immigration, data privacy and security, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, multi‑speed European integration, and automation’s impact on the future of work and economic development strongly suggest that we have entered a distinctly new era in which many of the assumptions of prior periods no longer hold.
Like its precursors, Globalization 4.0 will be shaped by a combination of governance decisions and technological developments, according to the World Economic Forum.
The international media turned into big transcontinental entities, and the media institutions include armies of journalists and writers working in various countries of the world over the 24 hours, and the media turned out to be fully compatible with the rules of global trade globalization, and with what was provided by the Third Industrial Revolution at that time of significant technical technologies have contributed to the emergence of the media-based role of large corporations, whose role has increased with the beginning of the current century and the great growth in institutions such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, BBC, and the emergence of an information and data empire and means of communication such as Facebook and Twitter and other global institutions that control all big data and information of people and governments.
With the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the great jump in modern technology, many today call for a new era of globalization: globalization 0.4, or what we might call it more human globalization, globalization that harnesses all modern technologies to serve man, just the opposite of globalization in its past version of the last century.
Thus we will create a more human media. A media capable of elevating the human interest above other interests, and creating media seeks to employ technology to learn, educate, and equalize everyone within the single country, and all over the world level, and to create media capable of ending poverty, ensuring a balanced standard of living for all individuals.
Where Globalization 4.0 can support the role of the media in terms of:
Creating media based on completely individual ownership – not institutional ownership – where many individuals can own and manage their own media, just like YouTube channels, but more influentially and more accessible to the public, in terms of the availability of technical technologies, and direct broadcasts without geographical or political borders.
Increasing global competition between various media, as the number of international media is expected to increase more than 500 times from the current number, which is allowing greater human labor to be employed, in addition to rely on artificial intelligence journalism techniques in a more developed manner, which ensures prevalence greater spread for new media.