The rapid development of digital technology brings about a very significant change in our way of thinking and living. Those changes can in turn bring with them positive and negative effects into our lives, very rapidly. It seems like a long time ago when using the word “globalization” in our sentences makes us look intelligent. Now, hearing someone saying it in a class gives me a secondhand embarrassment. Not because globalization itself didn’t happen, but because it happened so fast, most of us probably didn’t even realize it. The driving forces behind the globalization are the advances of transportation and communication technology, but nothing is perhaps more profound than the rapid development of the internet.
Before we delve deeper into the impacts of technology, e-business, and e-commerce in general, we need to get accustomed with the basics. Modernization is a process in which a society tries to renew, assimilate, or even replace their old values entirely with a new one that have the characteristics of a modern society. Modernization is often met with resistance from old tradition, which is why it can also be defined as a shift from traditional society into a modern society.
Modernization involves a wide range of processes and is relativistic in nature, e.g. depending on space (place) and time dimensions. Time dimension, for example, in the late 2009 to early 2010s, one would definitely say that Facebook was the pinnacle of modern social media and therefore “being modern”. However, not long after, Twitter came along, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc., now TikTok is the jam, and it’s becoming harder and harder to say which one represents the modern social media, even when Facebook (the company) itself owns two of the mentioned above. Because everything is changing rapidly, what we believe is modern today could turn obsolete or “traditional” in just a few years. Remember the time when if you have a MySpace or a Friendster account, you’re a cool person?
Space dimension is dependent on the society that’s in the process of modernization. For example, in some places in Indonesia, internet is still considered to be a luxury. Not because it’s a new thing, but because the network development hasn’t completely reached their location, or it has, but very minimalistic in scale or just the bare minimum. Some people might have never experienced the speed of a 4G or maybe even a 3G connection. On the other hand, in other parts of the world like most developed countries, high-speed internet is probably as natural as breathing.
Modernization also encompasses a transformation from a relatively traditional or pre-modern society which includes the technology and social organization, into a more economical and political that are the characteristics of stable western countries. The manifestation of modernization itself covers modern lifestyle aspects such as mechanization, mass media and digital technology, and therefore, we can’t separate modernization from technology development.
The Impacts
If I were to summarize the impacts of the development digital technology, e-business and e-commerce into a single word, it would be the “shift”, because almost every change in the digital technology has also changed the environment in one way or another.
PERSPECTIVE SHIFT
Modernization is, more often than not, putting more emphasis on rationality. It’s not an outrageous thing to say that today’s youth are more rational than people who were born in the 70s or 80s. In the globalization age, humans tend to put forward their common sense before anything else, and therefore their minds will try to get rid of things that are difficult to process using common sense or logic, such as beliefs in things that are considered to be myth, superstition, mystical, or even religions. There are even cases where some people will use technology to (dis)prove those beliefs. Modern society tends to believe in real things that can be perceived by their five senses and processed by their brains.
In the old world, people could live their whole lives without ever having to change their perspective on things. Some still do, but it’s getting harder in an era where people’s opinions can be shared, viewed, and therefore critiqued by people from other parts of the world and cultures with their own set of social values. And when that happened, usually the most likely option is to either become a Global Homogeneity or developing a Local Cultural Maturity.
For example, one of the hot topics in Indonesia a while ago was the issue of the normalization of LGBT community. It is a big issue in Indonesia because about 96% of our population are comprised of Muslims (86.7%) and Christians (10%), both are pretty outspoken in their rejection of the LGBT community. However, like I mentioned before, there’s a shift in our perspective whereby more people are now detaching their life’s choices from the myth, superstition, mysticism, and even religion. This can be seen by how a lot of developed nations in the world have been allowing same-sex marriage for years now, normalizing and supporting the LGBT community. It has even come to a point where if you post something anti-LGBT on certain social medias (especially ones that are popular in those countries), you’ll probably get a lot of heat coming your way.