cell phone and digital telecommunication

Cell phone and Digital Communications Introduction

We live through one of these rare intervals in history ' as Manuel Castell puts it in his book The Rise of the Network Society : The Information Age . This , as he claims is an interval that is characterized by the transformation of our material culture ' by the works of a new technological paradigm organized around information technologies (Castell ,

. 28

The network society that Castell talks about touches on globalization Globalization is neither a monolithic nor an inevitable phenomenon Its impact varies across countries , societal

sectors and time . It is fragmentary , contradictory , discontinuous , even haphazard . Therefore one needs to be open-minded about its unexpected and unintended consequences . Globalization does not necessarily pose a choice between condemnation and celebration . Rather , it begs to be engaged , comprised and given form (Geertz 1998

Castell considers among the information technologies , the converging set of technologies in micro-electronics , computing (machines and software telecommunications /broadcasting and opto-electronics (Saxby 1990 as qtd in Castel . He posits that Biology , electronics and informatics seem to be converging and interacting in the application , in their materials and more fundamentally , in their conceptual approach (P . 29

Journals started to carry large numbers of articles on globalization during the early and mid 1970s , primarily induced by world-system theorizing . Publications on this have skyrocketed since the early 1980s . Perhaps the most amazing feature of the literature on the new technologies is not its sheer size but the remarkable diversity of researchers that have contributed to it . One can just imagine the spark of interest globalization and new technologies have done to motivate these sociologists to write about this . Offhand , this ranges from social theorists who rarely , if ever , engage in empirical research to number-crunching empiricists to postmodernist scholars to management scholars and consultants (Geertz , 1998

The complexity of a network society needs additional research . There is a great need of more theoretical work to clarify the economic political , cultural and aesthetic dimensions of globalization and how they interact with each other . We also lack theoretical perspectives that bridge the micro-macro gap , i .e . move across levels of analysis from the world-system to the nation-state , the industry , sector community , organization , and group . Many of the disagreements in literature are primarily due to the various levels of analysis at which different researchers operate . Understanding globalization will require us to gather more and better data about its myriad manifestations causes and effects . We still know very little about what exactly causes it and what are its consequences on such key sociological variables as organizational patterns , authority structures , social inequality , and social movements , to name but a few (Hajer , 1996

Technological advances have benefited organizations of all sizes and types to utilize information technology applications in all aspects of organizational management . Above and beyond the benefits that this technology offers , there are many organizations that have not reaped the for using information technology exist which are useful to both practitioners and researchers of the various sectors in the community The...