Professor Lipton mentioned that there are two important programmes: Erasmus and Erasmus Mundus. Erasmus’ programme is to support education, training, youth, and sport in Europe while Erasmus Mundus aims to support education, training, youth, and sport in Europe and the rest of the world. In mentioning this, I thought about what the best approach to globalization through technology is. Ideally, it would be collaboration between countries to unite instead of divide people. However, this does hold its challenges as all countries have their own priorities and interests that may clash with those of other countries. Yet, it’s worth noting that the approach that science and technology research in the EU and Spain are taking aims to fulfill the ideal vision of uniting a larger group. Specifically, its priorities include the strengthening of international cooperation and of societal resilience.
Additionally, Professor Lipton’s lecture reminded me of a few lectures from my First Year Seminar class called War and Technology. In that course, my professor emphasized the idea that technology can be used as a weapon to destroy or a weapon to unite. This stems from the fact that companies, individuals, countries, etc. all have different intents and purposes. A common example of a technology that could be used to harm or to help is computers and the internet. On the one hand, there’s the dark web, phising, etc. On the other hand, the internet can be used to connect people across the globe and provide a variety of valuable information. Thus it falls on us, as a society, to decide on whether there’s a universal purpose to which we should be using the technology to achieve. Ideally, this purpose should be to bring benefit into society and unite people across the globe.
Overall, I feel that this class connects to the following course objective goal: understand how the forces of globalization facilitate and/or hinder our ability to effectively and appropriately interact with culturally different “others.” In a way, how one uses technology (for good or bad purposes) is similar to the way different groups interpret one language. Words do not mean the same thing across cultures. For instance, words that are insulting to some groups may have a completely different (non-insulting) meaning to the other group that used them. For that reason, it’s important that we take to time to reflect on the way in which a language is used in a certain situation so that we do not hinder our ability to effectively interact with culturally different “others” – just as we should take the time to think about how using technology one way will yield drastically different results in relation to other potential approaches.
