Cultural Reverse Ⅱ by Xiaohong Zhou

Author:Xiaohong Zhou [Zhou, Xiaohong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429825408
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

In today’s information society, almost all service industries, especially those high-end services where technology is king, are, after all, professions dealing with information. Aviation scheduling, for example, uses flight, airport, and weather data to determine aircraft movements and landings; investment bankers make decisions on corporate financing, mergers and acquisitions, sales and trading of financial products such as stocks and bonds, as well as asset management and venture capital business based on trading information in the financial markets; insurance companies use risk information to evaluate policies; doctors use physical information (e.g., electrocardiograms, imaging data, blood biochemical indicators) to develop treatment plans; teachers choose the appropriate content from the vast amount of relevant information to instruct students of different ages; even supermarket clerks deal with customers’ transaction information every day; and bus drivers have to use traffic information to choose a smooth route.

Thanks to the development of computers, the Internet, and all kinds of software, we are now able to gather information at a speed we have never seen before. For developed countries with high computer penetration rates, as mentioned above, collecting information and processing data through electronic computers is of great convenience. In developing countries including China, mobile phones, which are increasingly developed to personal handheld computers and mobile terminals through 3G or 4G technology, provide ordinary white-collar workers and even grassroots people with convenient access to daily information. For example, the use of mobile phones enables: Tanzanian fishermen to easily collect weather information, enhance cooperation in fishing, deal with emergencies, and negotiate prices for seafood (Myhr & Nordstrom, 2006); migrant workers in India, Mozambique, and Tanzania to respond to emergencies, maintain family relationships, and save on living expenses (Souter et al., 2005); small businessmen in Rwanda to better broaden their business vision, adjust their working place and procedures (Donner, 2005: 39); and migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta in China to obtain employment information sent by friends, former workers, and employers, thus improving their employability (Ngan & Ma, 2008). The mobile phone survey we mentioned in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book also found that for low and middle income groups, mobile phones are not communication tools in the general sense, but more of a means of livelihood. For example, even those “bangbangs” who live at the bottom of society in Chongqing and work as porters for others are also now using mobile phones for business. For a bangbang without a mobile phone, he can only rely on another bangbang who does have a mobile phone to get daily job opportunities (Zhu, 2011).

While everyone, from airline dispatchers and venture capital managers to Tanzanian fishermen and Chongqing bangbangs, has benefited from the information revolution, the undisputed reality is that the millions of people caught up in the maelstrom of the information revolution differ greatly in how they get information and the quantity and quality of that information. If we call this huge difference in access to information the “digital divide”, we can find that in the popularization

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