Blog 1: What Is Globalization? - Gyuhyeon Park

1. What I Understood from the Reading and Class


In class, globalization was explained through three dimensions—economic, cultural, and political—and the economic side was covered in the most detail. It was defined as the growing dependence between countries' economies around the world, and we also learned a formula that shows how dependent a country is on trade. The reading covers more ground than this. Robertson and White say globalization is not just economic interdependence. They break it down into two things: connectivity and consciousness. Connectivity is the physical connection of the world through transportation, trade, and communication, which is close to the economic definition from class. Consciousness is about people starting to see themselves as part of one shared world. Looking at globalization through these two ideas also makes it clearer why it happens in different dimensions at the same time.


The reading talks about the same three dimensions taught in class, but adds a fourth: the social dimension. This means relationships and interactions between people that continue across borders. The authors give the example of Polish immigrants in the early 1900s who kept in contact with their hometown through letters. They say none of these four dimensions is more important than the others because they are all connected to each other.


For the economic dimension, we learned about World-Systems Theory in class. This theory divides the world into core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries. Core countries hold most of the capital and technology, while periphery countries end up providing cheap labor. So globalization does not spread benefits equally between countries, it creates an unequal division of labor. There is also a different idea called glocalization, which is about how global things get changed depending on the local place. The reading uses McDonald's as an example, since in India, where beef is not eaten for cultural reasons, McDonald's sells other menu items instead of beef burgers. This shows that global companies and products do not spread in exactly the same form everywhere, they adapt to local cultures. The authors say the global and the local are not opposites but two sides of the same coin.


2. What I Found New or Interesting


The most interesting idea I found in this reading was that globalization does not weaken the power of the state, but instead the state becomes a component of globalization itself. It is easy to assume that as globalization progresses, borders lose their meaning and countries become weaker, but the idea of connection between nations cannot even exist without the unit of the nation-state. This becomes clear when looking at the media industry, especially through Netflix. Netflix is a global platform that provides service around the world at the same time, but in practice it operates completely differently depending on each country's culture and political system. For example, Netflix is blocked in China, while in Korea it has to go through review by the Korea Communications Standards Commission. This means that the global connection Netflix provides only works through the unit of the nation-state. This shows that as globalization progresses, borders do not become less meaningful, they become more clearly defined.


This kind of national-level regulation also connects to the reading's conclusion that a fully globalized world is impossible. As shown in the Netflix case, globalization cannot reach complete homogenization. If globalization really erased all boundaries between countries, there would be no reason for Netflix to offer different services in different countries. But as media becomes more globalized, national media regulations and distinctions are becoming even more detailed, and this confirms once again, through the media industry, the authors' claim that a fully globalized world cannot actually be achieved.


3. A Question and Discussion Angle


The authors argue that even as globalization progresses, content and ideas are still adapted to each country, so complete homogenization can never be reached. But when we look at how fast AI-generated videos and animations are spreading on SNS and other media right now, this claim starts to raise some doubts. These kinds of content don't really reflect the cultural characteristics of any particular country or region. Instead, they tend to come out in a fairly uniform style, based on whatever data the AI has been trained on. In other words, the same type of content is spreading around the world without really going through a process of adapting to each country. If this trend keeps going, even though AI's media generation technology still has limits for now, it makes me wonder whether the claim that complete homogenization is impossible in the media industry will still hold up in the future.



AI Use: All the analysis in this post is my own, AI was only used to help with translation, grammar, and phrasing.

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