All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization - Hardcover

Anderson, Walter Truett

3.67

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780813339375: All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813339375 ISBN 13: 9780813339375

Publisher: Westview Press, 2001

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Going beyond the narrow economic focus common to most books about globalization, All Together Now describes four kinds of global change - economic, political, cultural, biological - all of which are now accelerating, driven by the increasing mobility of symbols, goods, people, and non-human life forms. Anderson describes how we are entering an "age of open systems" as systems of all kinds - organizations, nations, ecosystems - change in similar ways. Boundaries around systems are penetrated, challenged, renegotiated, relocated. Systems that were once relatively isolated develop new connections and linkages to other systems. Anderson argues that this globalizing world is radically "uncentralized" even though people and societies are richly interconnected. All Together Now shows how globalization is advanced even by anti-globalization movements, while global-scale problems such as climate change draw us together into the first global civilization.

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Review:

The trouble with books about globalization is that so many of them seem to focus on economics to the exclusion of everything else. In All Connected Now, author Walter Truett Anderson treats economics as no less important to globalization than culture, politics, and even biology. ("Far less frequently cited than Moore's Law, but likely to be at least as significant for all the world's economics and ecosystems in the years ahead, is the doubling time of genetic information.") The result is a helpful primer on what globalization may have in store for us, written by a two-cheers advocate. Anderson says we now live in a world of open systems: "There are no longer any closed cultural systems in the world, nor are there any closed biological systems; every culture develops new points of articulation with other cultures, every ecosystem is visited by exotic foreigners and affected by global events." "The emergent global civilization" will face many challenges, but it also holds out the promise of "individual human lives richer in meaning and experience than we have ever before imagined possible." --John Miller

About the Author:

Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist, social psychologist, syndicated journalist and author of wide-ranging interests whose previous books include Evolution Isn't What It Used To Beand The Future of the Self. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he works with a number of different organizations and currently serves as president of the World Academy of Art and Science.

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