The Internet, Global System of Mobile Telecommunication (GSM), and Satellite Communication (cable TV networks) are perhaps the most influential of all information and communication technologies (ICTs) in modern digital society.

Numerous studies have revealed that while these technologies have the potential of eroding local cultures even to the point of threatening their extinction, yet they equally provide a podium for global societies and cultures to meet and interact.

The resultant globalization of world cultures or global culture, of course, is not without inherent problems of hierarchy, domination by the stronger nations and subservience of the weaker ones.

Marshall McLuhan, a media effects scholar correctly prophesied that the world was quickly turning into a global village. The emerging global village orchestrated by ICTs unfortunately is not a village constituted of equals.

The information and communication powerful nations have taken the positions of influential few as the case may be.

So, although there are critical negative pressures exerted by ICTs in the society, and Tanzania included, the effect of these technologies on the people’s lifestyles is both positively and negatively oriented.

In this regard, Tanzania as a nation needs not to be shaken by these noxious dimensions of globalization but should concentrate on its positive potentials.

The ICTs have a double edged impact on people of any society and culture.

On one hand, there is the detrimental effect of the local cultures being overshadowed by the more dominant or overriding cultures of the western society perhaps leading to the disappearance of some traditional values.

On the other hand, these technologies have yielded a platform or stage upon which the nation’s scripts could be acted out or showcased globally as in a theatre room.

The technologies, despite their harmful potentials, thus are tools of empowerment to the nation to encounter and be encountered by other societies and cultures and thus need to be developed and enriched.

Tanzania like other societies of the world, willingly or unwillingly is swiftly engulfed by the strong wind and tide of socio-cultural globalization.

The world has finally collapsed or merged into a single entity which is even smaller than Marshall McLuhan’s global village, the international nuclear family.

Events or occurrences in any part of the world automatically impact strongly on all other parts of the globe. Consequently, the trend towards globalization moves on unabated, totally oblivious of any society’s enthusiasm or otherwise about the global developments.

So like it or leave it, the Tanzanian society like any other society is strongly influenced by information and communication technologies that are principal actors in the globalization script.

All of us (world nations) in different capacities are contributors in the shaping of this new culture.

Admittedly some cultures such as the American culture may be more dominant, yet the resultant value system which is a conglomerate of world beliefs, values, views and customs cannot be claimed as originating from any single society, because the global culture is more of a reflection of a variety of world cultures.

ICTs are therefore human inventions that speak of man’s giftedness and ability to advance or better his world. It can be argued that ICTs have put our world finally in our own hands.

They offer us a great opportunity to make our national appearance in the world scheme of things and have the potentials to repaint our image that may have been previously carved, drawn and painted badly by some biased sculptors or artists prior to the digital age of information communication technologies.

{Author is a visiting scholar at Regent University’s School of Communication and the Arts in Virginia, US.}