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The Idea of the Internet Homogenizing Culture

By Bernice Ly

The issue concerning whether the Internet plays a pivotal role in globalization is a highly contentious and debatable topic. Globalization, often defined as “the integration of economic capital markets and culture throughout the world” is seen as a concept that has both negative as well as positive benefits. The rate of growth in the globalization of nations and geographical regions is seen to be heavily assisted by the speed of information knowledge that the Internet provides.

However, although in theory, the sharing of knowledge is supposedly to be beneficial towards the development of humanity, the Internet also provides a pathway to homogenizing culture and creating an unequal playing field for developing nations. This argument can be clearly seen in case studies of Asian nations, especially in Thailand. Hence, the use of Internet and the growth of businesses on the Internet have increased, the question raised is that although technology has advanced communication and knowledge, has this benefit affected people living in developing countries, or has the gap between the rich and the poor widened?

The Internet is a unique form of media. It has the power to reach many but this is affected by factors such as financial status, technological skill, knowledge, and the desire for the medium. The Internet is not necessarily appropriate or possible for everyone to have, and in a country like Thailand, it can be clearly seen that the less fortunate have been marginalized, especially the uneducated and those from rural areas. For example, seventy percent of Thailand’s Internet users are concentrated in The Bangkok Metropolitan Area (Hongladaron, 2003) and only four to five percent of Rural Thailand has access to the Internet.

In a few of his articles the scholar Hongladaron has also discussed the marginalization of rural Thai citizens. Hongladaron states the benefits of the Internet, but then confirms from his research that because these benefits are only accessible by the wealthy, hence, due to the poor being marginalized, the Internet can be considered to be a discriminatory form of medium. However, Hongladaron also argues that the Internet does not homogenize cultures. He states that “the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, not by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another.” (Hongladaron, 1998).

Hongladaron came to a conclusion about the Internet homogenizing culture, but only to a limited extent. With limited information being available on the ways that Thai people interact on the Internet, or view the Internet as a medium, it’s hard to conclude whether the overall effect of the Internet is homogenizing. However, it can be clearly stated that the Internet does marginalize those who are unable to use this medium.

As usage of the Internet becomes more popular, the debate of homogenizing culture is fiercely debated. Some academics argue that because the Internet benefits the rich and the educated, those who are able to use the Internet usually have a level of mental capability, thus, the homogenizing of culture is only applicable to a limited extent. For example, the Bengali tribes in Bangladesh practice sustainable living and do not value the knowledge that is presented on the Internet. They view the Internet as a very negative form of communication, as personal contact is not made. Members of the Bengali tribe live by the Hindu religion and everyone in the tribe has a certain role.

Thus, the tribe as a whole is self-sufficient and members do not feel the need to adopt the values and the ‘teachings’ of the Internet. Furthermore, indigenous Tibetans are another example where the knowledge of the Internet does not reach the people. Due to their belief of the Buddhist teaching of the Livelihood, they believe in living in harmony with their surrounding land. Members of these indigenous communities do not believe in the Internet as they would argue that the computer is a want and not a need. Hence, in considering the issue of whether the Internet is a tool for the homogenization of culture, although some would say ‘yes’ due to developing Asian nations becoming westernized due to propaganda on the Internet, others would argue that only Asian communities that have already been westernized use the Internet. These academics would argue that some Asian communities, especially those in indigenous tribal communities, would not use the Internet because of their cultural paradigm, hence the Internet community is already focused on just one group of culture with one group of people sharing a common belief: ‘that the Internet is a useful tool’.

Finally, it is not disputed that the Internet is a place of ‘information sharing’ and this sharing of knowledge could lead to certain ideologies being more prominent and change the thoughts and practices of other cultures. However, many would argue that although this is inevitable on the Internet, the Internet cannot control the lifestyle of a person’s life and beliefs, thus the Internet can only present another person’s discourse, but cannot force a person’s ideology to change.

Internet Marketing for Lawyers - Advice That Counts

By Michael Merten

Lawyers face the same challenges any business does. In order to get new business they must market their services, i.e., advertise. And lawyers deal with the same marketing and advertising challenge every business does - how to beat the competition. Plus lawyers have to assume that any Internet or non-Internet marketing or advertising they do may well produce little or no results for the amount of time and money they spend -- regardless of what an outside marketing or advertising advisor may say to the contrary.

Prior to the Internet the main non-Internet marketing option or advertising choice for any lawyer was to advertise in the yellow pages. To this day the print yellow pages contain plenty of colorful, one page display ads that feature lawyers offering their services, and lawyers pay a lot for these ads. How effective these ads are is anyone's guess -- it's hard for your colored, one page display ad to stand out when you have 20 other lawyers doing the exact same thing! The yellow pages companies, however, continue to promote their marketing and advertising philosophy that "bigger is always better" and "everything we sell is an opportunity," so they often present a lawyer with a non-Internet marketing and advertising solution that costs plenty but often produces little.

This line of thinking, along with the use of print yellow pages in general, has gone the way of the dinosaur at a very accelerated pace. The yellow pages in print form had their heyday for many decades, but the population now goes to the Internet for the information they seek, so most print directories are collecting dust. A lawyer who advertises in the print yellow pages may well get calls, but they'll most likely be from vendors using the yellow pages as a cheap source of leads.

The major paid search providers (pay per click search engines) tend to offer lawyers Internet marketing and advertising solutions in a manner similar to the way the yellow pages do with their print directories. "Bigger is always better," so rather than realistically discuss with a lawyer a pay per click Internet marketing and advertising campaign that makes financial sense and produces a decent ROI, the pay per click providers will tell the lawyer to go for as many top listing keywords (the most expensive) as their budget will permit and bid as high as they can. The lawyer may go broke in the process, but at least they'll get exposure! Many lawyers get into pay per click as a quick way to get leads but quickly exit a month later after spending lots of money for Internet marketing and advertising results that produce nothing but expense.

While pay per click Internet marketing and advertising is the running favorite of Internet marketing advertisers worldwide, pay per click advertising for a lawyer is usually an extremely expensive proposition for what they get. How much a lawyer is willing to "pay for a lead" takes on a whole new meaning with pay per click. The cost per click for many lawyer related keywords, e.g., "personal injury lawyer," "criminal defense lawyer," can range from $5.00 to $70.00 per click depending on the market, and when the typical lawyer's conversion rate (the number of clicks it takes to generate a lead) of one to two percent is factored in, the lawyer can find themselves paying upwards of $500.00 to $7,000.00 per lead, and a lead is not a client.

Part of the problem lawyers face when they work with pay per click (and this translates directly into poor conversion rates) is that (1) they spend little time creating their pay per click ads and (2) the ads direct traffic to the lawyer's website. Any Internet marketing professional who knows something about pay per click knows you never send pay per click traffic to a website. Instead you create special pages, i.e., "landing pages" for pay per click traffic to be directed to. The landing pages perform the job of convincing traffic to do what the lawyer requires, which is normally to contact the lawyer via e-mail or by phone.

Legal Internet directories and portals offer the lawyer a potential Internet marketing and advertising option because of their popularity and enhanced Internet visibility. How effective a listing in a legal Internet directory or portal can be for a lawyer in terms of marketing, advertising and Internet exposure will depend upon the particular attributes of the legal Internet directory or portal in question. All things being equal, legal Internet directories or portals that charge a fee to be listed in them make more sense as an Internet marketing and advertising choice than similar sites that offer listings for free. The lawyer has to be particularly careful, however, when they consider advertising in legal Internet directories and portals that "look" like they offer a lot -- and a price to go with it -- but for whatever reasons simply do not produce enough leads for the amount of Internet marketing and advertising money the lawyer must spend.

Many legal Internet directories and portals exist that have a very strong Internet presence, and they are excellent resource centers for lawyers, but this does not automatically make them good places to advertise. With Internet legal portals especially it's not how many lawyers the portal attracts but how many people the Internet legal portal attracts who are searching for legal services. People have paid thousands of dollars for advertising in Internet legal portals that have produced nothing in the way of Internet marketing and advertising results. A very wise idea for any lawyer who considers advertising in an Internet legal portal is to get some very accurate user demographics on what kind of specific traffic the Internet legal portal is actually attracting.

What is a lawyer supposed to do? Everywhere the lawyer looks, whether the marketing and advertising media is Internet or non-Internet, considerable financial risk is involved, and a guarantee that the lawyer will get good, solid results for the amount of money they spend is often hard to achieve.

Ultimately the best way for a lawyer to go with Internet marketing and advertising - the way that will ultimately get them the best long term results for the money they spend -- is to focus on getting their website to rank high in organic search results. When all things are considered, people on the Internet who search for goods and services mainly search for websites to find their answers. They may look to legal Internet directories and portals, and if they don't find what they want they may turn to pay per click listings as a last resort (only about 30% to 40% of users bother with pay per click) but ultimately people who search the Internet are looking for websites that provide them with the answers they seek.

If a lawyer is looking for an Internet marketing and advertising solution that doesn't require being part of the pay per click crowd, the lawyer may want to look into pay per phone call programs. Pay per phone call is like pay per click, but the lawyer does not pay for a call unless they receive one. And the costs for pay per phone call are normally substantially less that what the lawyer will pay for a click in many cases. A smart lawyer may even want to consider getting involved with several pay per phone call providers with the idea that between the providers the lawyer will receive enough leads in the aggregate to make involvement with these programs worth it.

Many of the Internet marketing and advertising solutions that a lawyer chooses to look into must be tried on a case by case basis. Absolutely nothing can be assumed. A pay per click advertising campaign that works extremely well for the lawyer with one search provider might fail miserably with another.

History of the Internet

By Michael Cooper

In this paper I will cover the internet’s experimental beginnings, the commercialization of this technology in the present, and what the project that is taking place that will probably be the future of the internet.

Before I begin talking about the internet, allow me to define what is the internet, who governs it, and what is the financial impact of this technology. The internet is made up of all computer networks that use IP protocol, which operate to form a seamless network for their collective users.[3 Krol] This means that federal, commercial, and institutional networks all compose parts of the internet. This network is connected to each other by either telephone wires, cable lines, or satellite signals. These wires, lines, or signals are then pipelined from server computer to server computer until your host server transmits the electronic information into your computer. The governing body of the internet is the Internet Society (ISOC).[4 Krol] The Internet Society purpose, according to Ed Krol, is to “promote global information exchange through Internet technology”. Another governing body is the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).[5 Krol]

This IAB board governs the protocol standards whereby how computers and software applications talk to each other.[6 ibid] They also make the rules on how to keep track of each 32-bit address number used by each computer on the internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the governing body who takes care of operational and near-tearm technical problems of the internet.[7 ibid]

Along with all conveniences, there is a price to pay. Though information could be obtained from the internet for free, everyone has to pay for their own access to it. Just like NSF pays for NSFNET and NASA pays for NASA Science Internet, individuals pay their Internet Service Provider and their telephone company for access to the internet.[8 ibid] As Ed Krol in said in The Whole Internet User’s Guide, ”everyone pays for their part.”

The internet, just like the light bulb and the airplane, started out as an idea. In August 1962, a researcher at MIT by the name of J.C.R. Licklider wrote a series of memos that outlined a “Galactic Network” of interconnected computers whereby everyone could quickly access information and programs from any site.[9 Leiner] Another researcher at MIT, Leonard Kleinrock, published a paper in July 1961 that would make communication on the internet more feasible.[10 ibid] Kleinrock’s paper on the packet switching theory convinced MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts to set up an experiment that involved connecting a TX-2 computer at MIT to a AN/FSQ-32 computer at System Development Corp. at Santa Monica, California.[11 ibid] This experiment resulted in the first computer network ever built.[12 ibid] In 1966 Roberts took his computer network expertise to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and quickly put together a plan for an “ARPANET”. During the implementation of this plan, Leonard Kleinrock’s theory of packet switching was put into practice by the development of key components called Interface Message Processors (IMPs).[13 ibid]

The impact of this development led to the assembly of the ARPANET. The first site chosen to implement the ARPANET is the Network Measurement Center at UCLA.[14 ibid] This was made possible by the installation of the first IMP and the first host computer at UCLA in September 1969.[15 ibid] Then later, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah were added to the beginning of the ARPANET.[16 Zakon] In October 1972, the ARPANET was successfully demonstrated at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC).[17 Leiner] It is this ARPANET that grew into what we know as the Internet.[18 Leiner]

Two different developments came from the ARPANET: the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and electronic mail.[19 ibid] These developments laid the groundwork for the commercialization of internet technology. In the early 1980’s, commercial developers of internet technology were incorporating TCP/IP into their products in order to network computers.[20 ibid] These commercial developers were shown in a 1985 workshop organized by Dan Lynch and IAB how TCP/IP worked and how it didn’t work. By September 1988, a trade show called Interop was organized to show how well each developer’s internet product worked with other developers products.[21 ibid] This trade show was important because demonstrated web browsers, webpages, and other network interactive material developed by different companies have the ability to interact with each other.

In 1990, “The World” was the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access.[22 Zakon] Other companies such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online and others soon followed. These services allowed anybody with a computer and a modem to have access to the internet. According to Vint Cerf, an internet researcher now at MCI WorldCom, the internet has grown to include some 5,000 networks in over three dozen countries, serving over 700,000 host computers used by 4 million people by the end of 1991.

This explosive grow in the number of internet led to an emerging presence of an electronic economy. In July 1997, President Clinton presented a report called “The Emerging Digital Economy” to analyze “...the importance of electronic commerce and information technologies to the economy as a whole and to individual sectors of the economy."[23 [http://www.ecommerce.gov]] In this report, President Clinton presented some case studies such as: Internet traffic doubling every 100 days, Cisco Systems increasing their revenue from $100 million to $3.2 billion in just one calendar year, and Amazon.com, the first Internet bookstore, recording sales of only $16 million in 1996 skyrocketing to $148 million in 1997