Let’s have a look at some related organizations: WTO (World Trade Organization), which promote trading worldwide, WHO (World Health Organization), with the objective of attaining by all peoples of the highest possible level of health, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization), which sharing information of different culture and civilization and so on. The main purpose of setting up these global international organizations is to make our world better and better. All I mentioned above is related to the word — Globalization.
Although this word has a high exposal rate, no matter in newspaper, magazine, internet or even in students textbooks, most of us do not have comprehensive and deep understanding of it, what we know actually is just some combined words and their basic meaning, such as: economic globalization, culture globalization, education globalization, media globalization etc. Somebody think the globalization is westernization or even Americanization. Somebody think globalization is the purpose of solving the global problems, such as environment pollution, terrorism, drug and crime. A study by French and Richards (2000 cited Golding’s 1994), provided a specific summary, listing four key aspects of globalization.
First, the decline of the nation as both a cultural force, where people begin to identify more with supranational cultural affiliations than with those of the nation, as well as the reduction of the role of the nation-state as a political and economic force.
Second, new levels of organization both above, at the supranational level, and below at the regional level, supposedly take over the functions previously performed by national governments.
Third, is what Golding calls the syndicalisation of experience, that is the emergence of major cultural and commercial symbols in the form, most obviously, of internationally traded branded goods.
Finally, he points to the role of major international languages, particularly English, as the vehicle for international culture. Golding’s main purpose is to emphasize that in we are now experiencing cross-cultural communication and this phenomenon is going to continue and becoming more intensive.
It seems that the conception of globalization are various according to authors’ different emphasis. No matter how different the concept is, there is one thing without doubting, that is we live in the world of globalization, which influences our daily life. Exactly like Giddens (1999) wrote in his book “we are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands, but which is making its effects felt upon all of us.For globalization is not incidental to our lives today. It is a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the ways we now live.
