Blog 1: What Is Globalization? - Haneul Kim

1. What I Understood from the Reading and Class

This text begins with the problem of how to define 'globalization,' and discusses the essential nature of 'globalization' in general—how to define it, the starting point and history of the term, and so on. What this text is trying to say is that, in the end, 'globalization' cannot be defined precisely. Because each person's perspective is different and so each person views 'globalization' differently, just as when you ask "what is happiness?" everyone gives a different answer, 'globalization' too is difficult to define precisely.
Globalization like this is made up of two core elements, 'connectivity' and 'consciousness.' First, connectivity means that the world has become far more densely connected than before in terms of transportation, the internet, trade, and so on, and consciousness is, quite literally, the aspect where people begin to consciously feel that 'we are living together on one earth.' However, the author points out that compared to 'connectivity,' the part of 'consciousness' is being thought of as relatively less important.
Also, the author of this text sees that using the tool of 'globalization' to blame every problem on globalization, as in "globalization has caused so many problems," is dangerous, and that, conversely, an attitude like "since culture is relative, anything goes" must also be guarded against. This is because the former, without any conceptual analysis, simply throws around the word 'globalization,' and so fails to pinpoint the real cause of the actual problem, while the latter is an attitude that abandons conceptual analysis itself and turns a blind eye even when it sees a real problem.

2. What I Found Most Interesting

There are three things I found interesting.
First, the point that 'globalization' is difficult to define precisely.
Before reading this text, I had the thought that I would find out, through this text, the exact definition of 'globalization' that had simply been held abstractly in my head. However, I came to realize that what this text was trying to say was, in the end, that 'globalization' is difficult to define precisely the way it would be in a dictionary, and I was able to realize that I had been caught in a certain fixed idea. Concepts like 'love,' 'happiness,' and 'freedom' are still not defined even now, and continue to be received differently by each person. I was able to realize that 'globalization' could be the same way.
Second, the fact I found interesting was that scholars neglected the 'social' aspect among the four domains of globalization (economy, politics, culture, society). The ones who studied the topic of 'globalization' most diligently in an academic way were, in fact, sociologists, and ironically, the fact that they neglected the social dimension among the four domains of globalization was interesting to me. There were exceptional scholars such as Ritzer, Castells, and Knorr Cetina, but this point still struck me as interesting. If I guess at the reason they neglected it, I think it may be that, because they were focused on the grand-scale matter of "the world gradually becoming one"—that is, because they were looking at it from a macro perspective—they ended up relatively neglecting the social, that is, micro-level, matter of "how people actually communicate."
Lastly, the fact I found interesting was that the concept of "glocalization" may not have been created by scholars first, but rather may have been a term that was already in use first, in business and marketing settings where localization was naturally already being practiced. It was interesting in that it might be a unique case of theory following reality, and I especially thought that, in the case of social science theories, they are often created to explain some new phenomenon, but in the case of 'glocalization,' it was already the opposite case, and it felt interesting that academia had put a name to it only afterward. The fact that it was similar to the case of language, which is my current major, also seems to be a reason I found it interesting. Linguists observe the way people actually speak and "discover" grammatical rules and turn them into grammar. For example, just as when people keep using new coinages or new expressions in everyday life, linguists later observe this and organize it into a dictionary or a theory, the process by which glocalization, which had been naturally used in marketing settings, flowed into academia matched this exactly, and it left a deep impression and felt personally interesting to me.

3. A Question and Discussion

Toward the end, the author of this text says that between the extreme position of 'cultural relativism,' which holds that every culture has its own way and so must be unconditionally respected, and the extreme position of using globalization as an all-purpose target of blame for every problem, we must equip ourselves with an increasingly "sophisticated framework" for discussing globalization in order for a proper and effective critique to be possible.
However, it seems that this sophisticated framework ends up only being refined precisely within academia, and does not properly seep down into the general public who actually need this framework the most—that is, into public discourse such as the news, social media, and everyday conversation that we actually hear and encounter. Also, algorithm-based media environments spread provocative, dichotomous claims (blaming globalization vs. extreme relativism) faster than they spread in-depth analysis.
Because of this, the question that came to my mind while reading this text is as follows.
If so, as long as the sophisticated framework that scholars worked hard to build fails to come down to public discourse, are the two extremes that the author was wary of bound to keep repeating themselves in reality? Why is this gap not being narrowed, and what should be done to narrow this gap?

*This text was originally written in Korean, and AI was used only for translation. The ideas and content of this text are my own.