Internet and Digital Economy

Internet has been kind of revolutionary thing in our world today. Internet has changed our habits in playing, learning, and collaborating with other people. It is now easy for me to access much information for my assignments / research. That is a simple example on how Internet has created the information revolution era. It is the era where the information is the most important thing to have in order to survive especially in business environment. The old economy says that the bigger will defeat the smaller but now in new economy information-based, the faster will defeat the slower.

E-Commerce becomes popular in previous year, people now can sell and buy the goods from all around the world. Although the e-commerce is still considered the less secure to do the trade but still it is one of the promising way to do a business. Social media and networking that enables user generated content or consumer generated media has been the best example of Web 2.0, a new form of web that has many more interesting features like interactivity between peer to peer, attractive web content such as multimedia.

In conclusion, Internet is not about the substitution of the physical real life but it is a tool to improve our life. It is not important on how good we are in using Internet but it is very important on how Internet can be used to improve our quality of life. Therefore, we don’t have to be so dependant on Internet, but we should know when and how Internet is needed to solve the problems in our life.

Cultural Diversity againsts Globalization

The globalization helps to reduce uncertainty in communicating with people which has different cultural background. Communication and transportation technology enable people around the world to live and understand the life of other people culture. This may be good for some reasons but on the other hand the globalization may threat the cultural diversity into cultural extinction. For example in Indonesia, our people are influenced heavily with westernization brought by fast food, TV cable, Internet, and MTV culture for the teenagers. Those things can be a serious threat for our national cultural diversity.

Intercultural communication is not only about communicating with people between nations or continents, it can also between the ethnic in one country or even between different company / organization. Ethnocentrism is still one of our sociocultural issue until now. People in Indonesia are depended on stereotype that people used to believe long time ago. We may hear about this following stereotype such as Padang known as “pandai berdagang” and stingy, Sunda as “suka dandan” and materialist. This stereotype may create a gap between one ethnic to another ethnic in Indonesia.

Therefore, communicator should have intercultural competence to be able communicate with other culture. The basic competencies that communicators should have are sensitivity and self-consciousness. These two things can help communicator to start a conversation and maintain relationship with other people background.