Please don’t tell Bono or Naomi Klein, but ‘globalisation’ is a misnomer. It is not a single and homogenised global economy that rules our lives. Instead it’s actually a product of the way countries and regions work together and against each other, a manfestation of how companies fight, sometimes to the death. The way they act, impact, react and interact. This new series delves into the substratic plates of the global ICT economy: the new techtonix...

There are lots of lumps and laurdalite humps. There are shocks and aftershocks. There is a tendency toward glacial movements punctuated by sudden, seismic events.

Our age is shot through with technology. We tend to forget forget just how much this is so.

A useful exercise for those so inclined is to spend, say, 20 minutes walking around their homes and identifying what features within them would not have been around perhaps 100 years ago. Or examine their working lives through the same existential prism. Make that 200 years ago and almost everything we take for granted is simply not there. Make that just 25 years and an awesome number of things that we now take for granted must still be filed under ‘E’ foe ‘Eye Twinkles’. Call it ‘Moore’s Law’ – but with an all-too human face.

Around fifteen digits or as many numbers or characters with a few ‘dots’ thrown in will take you in seconds to anywhere in the world by telephone or via the World Wide Web. Personal ‘space’ is a telephone number, a website or an IP address. Maybe it follows on from this that we talk of a ‘global industry’. In spite of the fact that the ICT sector has thrown up fewer truly global brands than the sports footwear industry, for instance, you have a sense of lots of companies the world over seeking to achieve the same goals. And lots of people the world over seeking to benefit from those achievements. And, sadly, lots of people the world over failing to benefit at all.

Over the next two weeks this series of short articles looks at the different ‘techtonic’ plates around the globe.

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What is revealed is not so much a uniform sense of progress but an ever-shifting balance of forces. In geological terms, our ICT world would be described as unstable. Its plates abut and retreat and the danger lies in taking a snapshot at a given instant and extrapolating future trends from there.

The science of techtonix do not work like that.

Over the days ahead, this series will focus on ten key ‘techtonic’ plates. They are North America, Africa, the European Union, the Middle East, China and India, Japan, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe and Asia.

In a series of short reports, each region will be assessed in terms of its inward and outward impact on the world at large. These assessments will cover the short-term, the mid-term and the long-term. Some of the conclusions may surprise you.
Jim Chalmers

Tomorrow: North America’s pivotal, but possibly declining, role in global telecoms...