Short history of the global village

So you grow up in Tel Aviv, and by the age of ten your dutch in The Hague, but in what society do you live? Who should you pledge alligiance to?
Most people would choose the country where you live in. For nostalgia or for the political unit. But one should realise we live in one political unit, one economical unit and one social unit.
The terrorists attack of 9/11 showed us a global conflict become local, and personal. Osama Bin Laden, the rich Saudi prince rebelled against the American influence on Saudi-Arabia and decided to build a terrorist network. This network was not build in the oldfashioned way, but in a modern and very global way. Al Quaida recruited all over the world using the Industrial Information Revolution that really got to a start in the nineties of twentieth century.
The fact that I from my own desk can now point at products from France, Finland, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Taiwan, China, America and Israel show that the local supermarket I visit every couple of days is economically futile for my monthly budget. And as the worlds economic networks expand more and more products will spread to more and more people, all over the world, all the time.
The internet has connected people in a faster and deeper way than ever before, and now it is time for us to single out the positives and the negatives of this development. Our national governments, international institutes, media forces and terrorist networks combined with dangerous ideologies all work intensly with this medium, and have become dependant upon them.

The three mentioned aspects of this global village all influence my personal situation as the global market secures our lives. This makes us one society, esspecially through the eyes of an historian. This society is offcourse not equal. Living standards differ due to income difference. Income difference then is a result of globalisation. This is visible ever since the first traders walked this earth. The fact that human being tend to attach to material objects - as is nicely portrayd in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy - created the impuls to grow towards a global village.
But it were the Europeans that decided to break the 'rules' big time. Like their Arab neighboors some centuries before, they decided the world was to bend to their ideology. One they had secretly developed during the dark middle ages, when the rest of the village was uninterested in - or purposely kept out of - Europe.
This ideology was one of God, one Politics but mostly one of trade and money. Not only because it were the actual traders and entreperneurial companies that actually colonized, but also because of the only way Europe could was with the money of the globalised (or in this time continentalised) inhabitants of the village.
So money made the world go around, or at least money moved the world. This is the theory of late Prof. Andre Gunder Frank, that has made a deep inpact on my way of thinking.

Now, the Imperial Europeans really got going after the Industrial Revolution, and now society seems to start thinking and ideas managed to spread. Information and technology that globalised created a chance for the colonised to revolt and claim independence. But it was too late. The global economic network only needed several hundred years to monopolise the world. But some resisted and managed to make contact other than trade. They got the world moving by posing serious challenges to the rulers. Information began to get free. At first fysical contact was liberalised and then virtual contact emerged. After the telephone came the PC/Internet. Personal Computer hooked on a network.
Here is one machine that can calculate information and transmit this information to the other side of the world within seconds. This created anarchy and provided a great escape for the Black market. illegal music, illegal movies, terrorist ideas, illegal drugs and other unaccepted ideas travelled freely and incited a global cultural revival.
Anthropology, Cultural studies, World Histories and Fashion are on the rise. Our global hobbies are beating the national and traditional ones. Because of the huge capital invested in this global economic market, black and white, our global cultural products are beating our local cultural products.
The more energy we dig from the ground, absorb from the sun or receive from wind and water, the more money we put in the system. Earth Machine is on the march, and there is no way of turning back. So, the least we could do is talk to one another and try to agree. Coincidentally the blogosphere does exactly this, like the scientific and religious world has always done. Only this time there are no borders to cross but only applications to install, preferences to configure, markers to calibrate and pc's to calculate. Culture is free again...