The impact of the spread of the Internet on the uniformity of different cultures around the world Introduction With the development of Internet technology and enormous needs of networking around the world, the Internet is becoming dominant appliance in many sections such as business, communication and education. The spread of Internet in some degree has influenced uniformity of different cultures. However, cultures are not geography boundaries, they should not be considered as a result from spread of the Internet. Kaplan,2009) There are several reasons for the rapid spread of the Internet. Firstly, with the economic and technological developments in recent years, the spread of Internet around the world has sped up. Secondly, the improvement of networks makes the Internet more convenient and accessible such as wireless technology. Finally, with the rapid growth of people’s computer literacy and globalization needs, the Internet is becoming prevalent in business and daily communication around the world.
Although there are numerous conveniences the Internet brought to our life, the spread of Internet in some degree influenced diversity or uniformity of different cultures around the world. In the following sections, we will focus on the causes and effects of uniformity of cultures resulted from the Internet and the importance of diversity of different cultures around the world. Main body The spread of Internet has resulted in the uniformity of cultures and with the coexistence of providing an opportunity for maintaining different cultures worldwide.
The spread of Internet influenced the cultural globalization in several aspects such as business modes, communication, and education. There are several reasons of uniformity of cultures worldwide. Firstly, the development of economic globalization has played an important role in last decades, which means e-business is becoming dominant in many countries and learning the global cultures especially western cultures for developing countries to grow international businesses is becoming important (Voiskounsky, 1996).
Secondly, the spread of English influenced people around the world to use the Internet. With English is becoming the official language to communicate in international conferences and events, there are increasing numbers of people are learning English language and English speaking countries cultures around the world(Pollack, 1995). For example, there are a lot of academic articles and websites are in English, which means if people want to understand the information, they need to learn the language.
During entering a webpage that just shows with English, it leads people want to learn this language. It is benefit for people to know about other cultures. Finally, the uniformity of different cultures around the world is mainly reflected in westernization. For example, American cultures of fast food and movies have a great impact on people around the world. However, the Internet has played an important role as a media to spread these cultures (Milner, 2003). The impact of the spread of Internet to the homogeneity of different cultures is beneficial to people around the world.
Learning global cultures can help people around the world to communicate with different people and understand global issues such as human rights (Kaplan,2009). However, there are problems with the uniformity of different cultures because most people lost their local cultures when applying to global ones such as minority languages. The diversity of cultures would disappear around the world. The spread of the Internet resulted in the maintenance of culture diversity. Firstly, there are many websites are in their own languages, which means it is not necessary for people to learn English to browse the internet information.
Next reason is because cultures are not passive objects; we could not expect people around the world to learn global culture through the Internet(Coffman and Odlyzko, 2001). Finally, people around the world communicate through the Internet in some way results in maintaining diversity of cultures. For example, people from different communities can participate various groups via Internet such as jazz music clubs or classic opera fans. The effects of maintaining cultural diversity are in two aspects. One is people would develop their local cultural; it is good for the development of diversity society rather than westernization world. The other one is local people with different cultures would compete with each other and possibly would cause society instability. Conclusion The spread of Internet has influenced the uniformity of different cultures especially demonstrated with global cultures. In the meantime, as a media for maintaining diversity cultures, the spread of Internet has impact for the result. However, cultures are not geography boundaries, therefore, the Internet has not significantly resulted in the uniformity or diversity of different cultures.
