Washington IV

“In the reading of chapter 3, I came across a section that struck me as disturbing. On page 75, quote: ” Cultural homogenization is one widely feared affect of the globalizing economy as English, the language of business, becomes increasingly commonplace along with blue jeans, training shoes and American fast food.” This would insinuate that the United States is a “big bully”. Are we? Do we insist on English being the language of business because that makes us more comfortable or because we are such a world power that we can inflect ourselves upon other nations? Or do other countries idolize us to the point that they conform to our customs? I don’t like the thought of being so overbearing that a country will change their customs just to do business with us, by the same token I don’t want to change for them either. Why can’t we embrace each other’s diversity and just revel in the differences?”

My response;
I think we need to take a close look at the semantics of business and then discuss the current changes in the global economy when analyzing cultural homogenization. Look at the expressed meaning and interpretation of the complex constructions of signs and the derived meanings from the said signs. Signs being as ubiquitous as one can imagine. Just like an alphabet, letters and characters have implied meaning that is specific to the culture in which is utilizing the set alphabet of their preference. Signs and symbols have different denotations and connotations depending on where one is raised and one’s exposure to culture. As we continually shape and form the knowledge based economy we are currently operating in, people are adapting and perpetuating the new evolution and interpretation of semantics on a global scale. “Think of a global alphabet of sorts” As in business semantics, we live in a world that is based on highly intergraded information systems. An information system can be a data warehouse that stores the data mined from crawling websites or one’s personal data files digitally filed on her PC. The internet is the new “Silk Road” for trade and commerce on a global scale that is currently in the process of shaping the interconnectivity of the world-wide marketplace. Analyze the web ontology, as in the graphical relationships and networks associated with the internet. There is still a language barrier between nations, however the way in which individuals interact on the web sets up the crux of the convergence for this cultural paradigm shift towards a global marketplace in which there is a medium in which a number of information assets are being exchanged and the signs and symbols being used become increasingly universal in appeal and understanding. Context is king! We are currently in a state where we are establishing the nature of knowledge in working with knowledge intelligence as in the cataloging, retrieval, and dissemination of data with full text, parametric, and hybrid search engines. People are metadata tagging bits of personal and business information for the web each and every day without really understanding what they are doing and the effect that is happening when they do it. Take for instance when one posts a pic on a social networking site or on their personal webpage, the individual usually assigns a title to the picture and usually tags who is in the photograph and where the photograph was taken, etc. By doing this and submitting it online, the search engines crawls through the websites and recognizes these new information bits and assimilates them into a global catalog that can be accessed by virtually anyone in the universe. So next time someone types in your name or the location of where the photograph was taken, your picture could come up. What I am trying to achieve in this post is that the language of business is electronic and whether you speak English or not becomes ancillary. In electronic commerce you have matchmaking, negotiation, content formation, and content fulfillment. It isn’t necessarily about the conforming to US customs as it is about understanding and integrating oneself in the context of the changing climate of how one does business in the information based economy. If one loses diversity in their own customs its probably because either a) something else is more appealing in their quest to establish individuality in this world full of collectivism or b) it is the byproduct of becoming “efficient” through competition on the continual goal of maximizing revenue.