Social globalization — the integration of societies of the world through sharing of ideas and information between and among countries — is important and inevitable in the present world. Social globalization definitely enables people in remote areas of the world to communicate with each other, contributes to world views in which people are more tolerant of one another, changes lifestyles and consumption patterns worldwide, creates vibrant cultural diversity, improves the quality of life and brings many other positive outcomes. Different mediums including television, the internet and social media play important roles in social globalization across the world. While it is crucial for its positive outcomes in the world, there are many negative outcomes that lead to concerns in many countries.
It is notable that before globalization, people were highly ethnicity driven and regionalistic and were unwilling to tolerate people from other ethnicities, communities or cultures. They had limited social and cultural opportunities and found it difficult to fight harmful taboos. The effects of good social and cultural aspects were limited to societal boundaries. But these are no more the case in the globalized world, which has become more diversified thanks to social globalization that involves the cross-border movement of cultures and the openness of media. It helps to improve traditional cultures that are detrimental to development, make friends through social media, build diverse human resource pools and improves the capacity to fight social and other obstacles. Consequently, it leads to many positive outcomes.
But there are many social, cultural, health related and other negative impacts of social globalization — also rendered social and cultural globalization— that brings societies and citizens closer together, across the world. Definitely, social globalization leads to the development of harmful behaviors and the occurrence of harmful acts such as crimes. Among crimes, terrorism, corruption and cyber crimes are notable impacts of it. Notably, social globalization has resulted in increased terrorism and cybercrimes in many developed, developing and less developed countries. Moreover, one of the important negative aspects is that cultural flow tends to flow from the center to the periphery across the world. Among other negative outcomes, social globalization erodes cultural identity.
Definitely, social globalization threatens local traditions, customs and languages in many countries by making the world more uniform to fit its core model, even though it is also increasingly occurring from the periphery to the center because of several causes including the availability of communication media across countries including television. Consequently, many local cultures across the world are facing growing challenges from social and cultural globalization. Among others, increased diseases driven by harmful lifestyles, family disruption and decayed social norms are important negative impacts. Many of the negative outcomes more commonly resulted from social globalization in the last several decades. Among groups, youths are more affected by the globalization of harmful social acts across the world.
Definitely, many institutional, policy driven and other causes lead to the undesired outcomes of social globalization in many countries. A lack of education, along with the lack of capacity to identify positive and negative aspects of social globalization, is — in this respect —crucial. A lack of institutional capacity, inadequate policy support, a lack of economic and other resources and other causes also foster the globalization of undesired social and cultural components across countries. Many countries have not developed capable and effective institutions to protect from harmful sites and promote good local cultures. Many countries also lack adequate policy support needed to deal with the globalization of harmful social aspects through the internet.
Since social globalization has many positive outcomes and is inevitable in the world, securing its beneficial outcomes is important. But to ensure the beneficial outcomes of social globalization, its positive aspects need to be promoted across the world. Also, the negative outcomes need to be reduced. In this respect, planned efforts are imperative. But countries should invest in better education and training to identify the desirable and undesirable social and cultural aspects of globalization and adapt to social globalization in such a way that does not harm good local cultures. Also, countries need to develop institutional capacity to promote good social aspects to successfully prevent harmful social aspects.
