Will ‘Globalization 4.0’ create a new media revolution which is more humanitarian in its approach?

I remember more than twenty years ago when I was preparing for my master’s study on globalisation and intercontinental cultural values, I was resisting the concept of globalisation because of what it might do for poor people, especially in third world countries.

Even when we check Theodore Levitt contributions — the first one who introduced the ‘Globalization’ concept in the 1980s — the  American economist and a professor at the Harvard Business referred to Globalization at that time as a powerful force that drives the world towards a converging commonality, and that force is technology. It has proletarianized communication, transport, and travel. It has created isolated places and impoverished people eager for modernity’s allurements. Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.

Levitt had forecasted that the globalization will be a new commercial reality — the emergence of global markets for standardised consumer products on a previously unimagined magnitude. Corporations geared to this new reality will benefit from enormous economies of scale in production, distribution, marketing, and management. By translating these benefits into reduced world prices, they can decimate competitors that still live in the disabling grip of old assumptions about how the world works.

And that was exactly what happened in the nineties and what is followed until now.

Globalization 4.0: I can say that in Globalization 4.0 there is a purpose-oriented transformation happening, a shift from profit-first (international trade) to people-first mindset.

Globalization 4.0 is taking shape only now. However, Brexit, the Trump administration’s shift in US policy, and developments surrounding such issues as immigration, data privacy and security, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, multi‑speed European integration, and automation’s impact on the future of work and economic development strongly suggest that we have entered a distinctly new era in which many of the assumptions of prior periods no longer hold.

Like its precursors, Globalization 4.0 will be shaped by a combination of governance decisions and technological developments, according to the World Economic Forum.

The international media has turned into big transcontinental entities, and the media institutions include armies of journalists and writers working in various countries of the world over the span of 24 hours. The media turned out to be fully compatible with the rules of global trade globalization, and with what was provided by the Third Industrial Revolution at that time. Significant technical technologies have contributed to the emergence of the media-based role of large corporations, whose role has increased since the beginning of the current century. This has led to the growth of institutions such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, BBC, and the emergence of an information and data empire and means of communication such as Facebook and Twitter and other global institutions that control all big data and information of people and governments.

With the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the great jump in modern technology, many today call for a new era of globalisation — Globalization 4.0 — or we might call it more human globalisation. Globalisation, that will harness all modern technologies to serve man, just the opposite of globalisation from the last century.

Thus we will create a media platform that is more human. A media capable of elevating human interest above other interests, and creating content that seeks to employ technology to learn, educate and treat everyone equally within the single country, and all over the world. And to create a media that is capable of ending poverty while ensuring a balanced standard of living for all individuals.

Globalization 4.0 can support the role of the media in terms of:

Creating media based on completely individual ownership – not institutional ownership – where many individuals can own and manage their own media, just like YouTube channels, but more influentially and be more accessible to the public, in terms of the availability of technical technologies, and host direct broadcasts without geographical or political borders.

Increasing global competition between various media, as the number of international media is expected to increase more than 500 times from the current number. This will allow greater employment of human labour in addition to relying on artificial intelligence journalism techniques in a more developed manner, thereby ensuring greater reach.