MyGlobalCity

Welcome to My Global City March 17, 2006

For a few decades now, the media has used the term global village. It means different things to different people. But to me it refers to the fact that it’s relatively easy for people in two different parts of the world to do business with each other and generally communicate as if they were next door. With the introduction of the Internet to the general public around 1995, the world was changed forever, arguably for good.

Now, with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Skype and GoogleTalk and all those other VoIP clients and VoIP phones, you can communicate practically for free with someone on the other side of the world. Believe me when I tell how much of a technological advance that really is.

In the mid-1990s, I was publishing a monthly print magazine. Because my editors and contributors were students, at any given time of the year, they might be 100 miles or more away from me. My monthly phone bill was often $300-600. For a poor grad student that made a pittance on part-time work, paid for his tuition and all the costs of running a magazine, that was a fortune - fully 20-30% of operating costs.

Now, if I were to start up a digital magazine and use Skype or GoogleTalk, I could run the magazine for next to nothing, aside from hosting. What’s more, I wouldn’t have to pound the pavement begging people to advertise. Just as bad, I don’t have to be chased out of small stores by owners who don’t want to give me a few square inches of space to carry my magazine and can’t be polite enough about it.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know all of this. The Internet has changed man lives forever. It’s my estimation that it will continue to be the backbone of a worldwide communications system - supported by various technologies - that let’s us all live in the same global city. I say city not village, because the world’s grown up.

Welcome to my global city.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, publisher + editor