The process of today’s globalization is going faster as compared to ancient globalization because of the technological advances and people are getting more information easily due to internet. Technological advances help us in many ways, for example: It improves our economy, productivity and made our life easier. We could easily get information of what we want easily on the internet and it brings in a new form of communication via internet (emails, online messengers). We could meet our friends in other country real time (online with webcam) and find out how they are doing.
Online Gaming is 1 of the favorite pastime for a lot of people right now. Massively Multi-player online role playing games like World Of Warcraft, DOTA, Diablo3 (coming soon) keep people interested because of the foreign social groups that they could get into and play with people from other countries. We can be playing games with the Dutch, German, Americans, and Portuguese etc and generally the population of these games is high.
On 12th August 2008, in the home.youth online section of the Straits Times, it wrote that a Straits Times poll shows that online gaming has become massively popular among Singapore youth. Mdm Merlyn Tan said “PC locked up to stop son playing all day”. While this 16years old girl, Siti Aishah said “I must, I must complete my quest”. So what is the problem with Singapore youth gamers these day? Social psychologist of NIE said “It used to be that teens would have to play soccer to fill one need and watch television to fill another. Online games let them do both.” What she meant was they were able to multitask in a different world.
In Apirl, research company Synovate released its yearly Asian youth survey, which ranked Singapore’s teen third for time spent playing online games. Online games also reward players for their persistence, which is why many hate it when parents stop them. Some people begin caring more about their online friends that their real life ones, for example: a friend cancelled a movie date at the last minute to game. More than 50 per cent of teens polled admitted that they skipped homework to game. Others passed up outings, even ditched school. A further 30 per cent sacrificed meals. It is not only the online games that parents have to worry about, parents have to watch out of their child’s technological gadgets (PSP etc) on outings, and make them participate more in family bonding and other social activities.
The reason I point out this issue is because childhood socialization is important for the growth of the kids. The emergence of technological advances (More gaming gadgets for kids etc) and the ease of getting the gadgets (Too much global competition causes the prices of the gadget to become more and more affordable) will cause parents some serious headaches. What the parents did during their youth time, playing police and thief with other kids, running around playing other social games are no longer applicable to their child these days. It affects how parents would like to bring up their child and making their social lives link to their career.
I think today’s globalization will create new social problems that was never encountered many years ago and In this course, we learn how Globalization creates social problems and I hope to learn more on how to apply it to our current society.
