Week 2.1 Globalization

The definition of globalization in the context of Organizational Communication given by the textbook is " the process through which the global economy becomes increasingly interconnected, through which global and domestic organizations merge, and through which communication technologies blur traditional spatial and temporal boundaries."

The important point made by the authors is, how it is easy to forget that most of the world's population does not even have access to the technologies we normally talk about when we discuss global communication. The "exclusionary segmentation", increasing divisions within a society or culture between those who can access the benefits of globalization and those who cannot, is very common in real world where people from generation to generation, economic situations etc., have different expertise or knowledge of using these technologies.

One interesting thought that came to my mind while reading through the first few pages of the chapter is "How much of the globalization is really globalization and how much is westernization?"
I will try to read more about this and will share the details if find anything interesting.

Week1: Points of Interest in Chapter 1

While reading Chapter 1 I tried to highlight the points that sounded interesting or important,which I never did before to see if it helps. After reading only the highlighted text again I am still not sure if it does but will give it a try few more times. Here are few of the things that interested me and will also try to share my experience with a seminar on email usage that I attended this week.

Metaphors, I never knew some of them were metaphors or I never cared to understand English properly. "re-engineering" , "whistle-blower" etc., sub-consciously I always thought were words. And while reading these I was thinking how the meanings of these Metaphors might be different or will be understood differently in various cultures and various parts of the world. In a global organization, I think using some of the metaphors might be confusing for some people for whom English is a second or third language.

Theory makes us think. Any well thought theory I think "is never just a theory", they make us think and provides a means for us to think about the concept and as textbook says provides frameworks of understanding so that we don't have to start from scratch with new ideas all the time.

This week I attended a seminar about e-mail and how to save time with some techniques on reading e-mails, writing them etc., What was interesting was there was no mention of how to use e-mail. The problem with e-mail is "too much e-mail". Most of the e-mail I see is not needed. I am surprised to see how many people thought that the amount e-mail they get is proportional to their importance in the company and copying more people in the e-mails they send will make people think they are working hard.

Finally, I want to share details of an interesting assignment in one of my classes. The professor gave us a sheet with some common likes and dislikes and asked us go around the class and guess looking at a person to which category they might fall into, if our guess was correct we mark their name, if not we move on the next person after introducing our self. I normally have great difficulty in meeting people and introducing myself on my own. But I was amazed at the success I and others had when we were given a task and lot of the people in class know at least 5 people they did not know before which I would have never been able to do on my own.

Thanks for reading.