Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Abstract
In this paper, we first briefly review the evolution of the inter-cultural communication in the pre-ICT world. By emphasizing on the role of fatalism and free will beliefs in the inter-cultural communication, it has been shown that the system of inter-cultural communication used to be in a multi-polar fashion before the 13th century. The single-polar age started from the 14th century and ended up to the globalization era which was described by Herbert Marcel McLuhan as the era of living in a globalvillage . Although the global village was formed by a historical process by itself, but it made it much easier to run some communicational projects against other cultures. The second part of the paper considers the culturalimperialism and cultural invasion concepts. The cultural imperialism is the product of having a US-based single-polar system and the cultural invasion is due to some specific evolutions during the global village era; however it should be noted that the so called cultural invasion is in a great difference with the military invasion . By explaining some of the important differences, it has been shown that the current situation is actually a transient period which is anticipated to be followed by a different era within a few years. The upcoming stage is called the message bazaar as it has some interesting similarities with the oriental traditional bazaars. The last part of the paper describes some of the predicted features of the inter-cultural communication, especially the effect of hardware and software evolutions to ease the difficulties of having different languages, in the message bazaar. The pathology of entering to the so called bazaar is also studied.
Keywords
)