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The world is a global village. Over the last few decades, scientific progress and technological innovations have made it possible for people all around the world to be in touch 24/7. Companies and organizations are increasingly expandingbeyond the borders of their own countries.
Modern people have so many exciting opportunities that were beyond the wildest dreams of their parents. With an instant click a Russian student can attend a webinar delivered by an outstanding professor from Oxford, anti-crisis managers from different departments of an international corporation can create a think-tankvia Skype to brainstorm genuine ideas to help the company survive, young band musicians can post their songs on Internet to attract some sponsors from foreign countries, senior students can find international grants and internships for their projects or search for a job offer to participate in the Work&Travel Program. Chances are really infinite!
Global communication at the turn of the 21st century has brought about many effects. It is destroyingtechnological, economic, political, and cultural boundaries. Print, photography, film, telephone and telegraphy, broadcasting, satellites, and computer technologies are quickly merginginto a digital stream of a binary system of zeros and ones in the global telecommunications networks which violatenational borders by broadcasting foreign news, entertainment, educational, and advertising programs.
Worldwide communication gives a modern man an eyewitness view of events in remotest locations; we participate in political events of global, regional or even local importance, besides we tend to share different knowledge, values and ethics, aesthetics, lifestyles which are based on global contacts.
Economically, separate industries are joiningto service the new global environment; the expansion of WTO comes to mind here as a graphic example. Politically, global communication is undermining the traditional boundaries and sovereignties of nations. So, in order to meet the requirements of new technologically advanced reality people should interact much closer and intensify international contacts.
International communication has its own history. News have already been 'inter-nationalized' in the fifteenth century: the wheat traders of Venice, the silver traders of Antwerp, the merchants of Nuremberg and their trading partners shared economic newsletters and created common values and beliefs in the rights of capital. The commercialization of mass print media (due to steam engine technology) has led to internationally operating news agencies (Reuters, Associated Press, AFP) in the nineteenth century. World wire and cable systems allowed international communication between France, Germany and Great Britain to their colonies in Africa and Asia. Transnational media organizations such as Intelsat, BBC, founded in the middle of the 20th century were the starting point for a new idea of international communication. It was the establishmentof internationally operatingmedia systems, such as CNN and MTV by individual companies which have finally opened a new age of global communication by distributing the same program "around the world in thirty minutes" (as a CNN slogan states) - across nations and cultures.
The moon landing, broadcast 'live' worldwide, was indeed a large step for mankind: simply because for the first time Planet Earth was seen as a common habitat, without borders, a blue planet of landmasses and oceans. The idea of the 'world' seemed to have switched from a metaphysical concept into a material reality, and finally has become the basis for such phenomenon as "Globalization."