Grisham INFO 285-15 Globalization and Information

One topic that really interested me during Unit 9 was the discussion around disaster relief and the organization of knowledge and information in those situations. Joyce Monsee's presentation on her work with the Standby Task Force was fascinating to hear and when she talked about how she applied what she learned during her MLIS classes to her job that's not in a library, it really got me thinking about how I apply some of the topics in this Unit to my job that's also not in a library. Currently I work in a bank, where we are also tasked with collecting, storing, organizing, archiving, and filing vast amounts of customer and transactional data. The main lecture from this Unit discussed high-tech solutions, such as the internet, that are involved in information management programs. The bank I work for is a small, local bank that, within the last year, switched from storing all of their physical files on-site to digitizing the records for storage on a cloud. This was a huge

Global Divide on Local Level - Seattle Of the topics covered in the last few units, what really caught my attention was looking at the digital divide within the United States. While the issue of the digital divide is indeed a global issue, it was interesting to consider how it might affect the population closer to home, as discussed in the accompanying lecture (Hagar, 2019), so I took a look at how it affects my local community of Seattle, WA. A study done by the city in 2018 study found that 95% of homes in Seattle are connected to the internet. However, looking closer at the numbers as they related to income found that 99% of households with an income over $50,000 per year had internet but that number dropped to 79% when household income dropped below $25,000 (City of Seattle, 2018). While the overall number of households with internet access was up from their 2014 study, in which 85% of households had internet access, the study still brought to light stark differences in intern

After listening to the lecture on the theories of globalization, I was intrigued by what was discussed about Manuel Castells' contribution to the field of globalization. As discussed, he was writing more than two decades ago (Hagar, 2019) so I was interested in reading again about his work in Robinson's chapter, "Theories of Globalization" to see if I could see if a foundation of his theory was applicable to society as I know it two decades later. Robinson referred to Castells' theory of globalization as "representing a new 'age of information'" (Robinson, 2007) which struck a chord with me because I have frequently heard my generation described as living in the "information age." Castells' theory described the current economy as "informational, knowledge-based...global, in that production is organized on a global scale; and... networked, in that productivity is generated through global networks of interaction" (Robinson