How could mashups serve international governance? Would mashups serve to make government more effective

According to Wikipedia, Mashup is a platform (web page or application) combines two or more sources to make a new program or function. In this case, people could integrate the existing functions or data to create the new one. Thus, people could have their own web program or software; it is a way that democratizes the internet users. In the level of state, based on the ideology of Mashup, government can gather the information from internet and monitor them. Therefore, the government can easily restrict the information which they do not want people to see. For example, from this week’s reading, the Chinese government set several rules and regulations to manage the information on-line. The regulations involve in many perspectives such as politics, social order, and criminal information. The authority even asked some foreign website to block the information according to the roles if they want to do business in China and usually resulted in some conflicts between government and the foreign website. For instance, Google announced to withdraw from China since they are not able to restrict the information which they are excepted to. There are some arguments based on these roles. Some believed that the regulations violate the freedom of public. Some argued that it is effective for government to manage the ill-natured information due to provide a better internet environment.

Links：http://www.programmableweb.com/, http://mashupawards.com/

The Global Civil Society

According to this week’s reading, the global civil society has three social and political implications. Firstly, there is influence shift from state-based institutions to social relations. The relationships between different NGOs become significant in political and social perspectives. Then, the NGOs played important rules and become essential actors in the international society. Thirdly, the global civil society is moving toward more democratic based politics. The NGOs and even the state based institutions will become more “people centered” (Warkentin & Mingst 2000, p238). The individual rights will be highlighted and the state sovereignty may be limited.

On the other hand, the market is also a fundamental component. In global society, the transnational cooperation and interaction become more actively. Some international trading agreements like the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) is designed to carry out some regulations in due to ensure the transnational investment is standardized into same way. It is seem to be a good method to minimize the transaction cost and encourage foreign investment. However, there is a series of oppositions have been lead by some NGOs to against the MAI. These NGOs criticized the agreement would violate labor and environmental conditions. They argued that MAI would lead the countries to competitively minimize their labor cost due to attract foreign investment. This is a typical negative aspect of global civil society. When many countries are integrated together in market, the country with better economic development and leading technologies would constrain and take advantage from the weaker countries. For example, they may benefit from hiring cheap labor and getting permission to pollute the environment.

In brief, the global civil society has both positive and negative perspective.

Source: Craig Warkentin and Karen Mingst, “International Institutions, the State and Global Civil Society in the Age of the World Wide Web,” Global Governance 6 (April-June 2000): 237-257.

Does Internet Democratize the Consumer? Is privacy a concern?

In Arun Sharma and Jagdish N Sheths’ article, the transition from traditional marketing to reverse marketing is initially highlighted. The traditional marketing theory mainly focuses on the products and services which the companies and firms can produce. The marketing target is to promote demand for the product (Sharma & Sheth 2004, P697). The reverse marketing focuses on customer side of the market. As the increasing influence of Internet Business, the manufactures began to stop sustaining producing and to seek the orders from customers. Therefore, as the author stated, the marketing has changed to “customer- centric” perspective (Sharma & Sheth 2004, P697). Based on the internet, the manufactures and companies could easily gather opinions from many customers and the individual order is also possible to be made. The customers now have opportunities to choose the products which mostly fit their needs. In some case, instead of comparing different existing products, the customers could design their own production style. For example, on some shoe makers’ website like Nike and Adidas, people can freely fill different colors on several types of shoes and order it through the website. As a result, the development trend of product and service will become more personalize.

In my opinion, privacy is a significant concern. People will disclose their personal information when they shopping on-line. The firms, on the other hand, obtain many people’s financial, medical, and social information. How they would use these information is a big question. Some firms trade their customers’ information as profitable product. Until there is universal agreement or regulation has been reached on the privacy of customer information by all companies, otherwise, privacy is always a concern.

Source：Arun Sharma and Jagdish Sheth (2004) Web-based markeing: The coming revolution in marketing thought and strategy, Journal of Business Research 57 696-702