This article takes up the idea that technology and mass media is slowly but surely eroding boundaries between nations. The advent of technologies that cross borders is definitely a challenge to national and cultural power, because of the difficulty that nations have controlling what goes on in these mediums. From a western perspective this is a good thing, because it helps eliminate radical ideas and separatist groups which lead to misunderstanding and war. There is a simultaneous desire for the propagation of these ideas, but also for the power to limit them in the interest of national security. At the same time that this posses a threat to the security of nations it also tends to enforce international agreements, making the information more available and easier to enforce. The article goes on the detail some of the issues that India has had with this very phenomenon.
The second article is significantly more dense in language to describe the telling of history and culture. The author talks about the end of history, due a global sense of apathy and goes on to say that it is no longer able to captivate the attention of the masses and transcend mundane cycle of daily life. Perhaps humanity and our history has already reached a "critical mass" so to speak. Another theory states that we are so caught up with finesse and detail that we have lost sight of the bigger picture. It has been lost behind all the attention we pay to detail. I believe what the author is trying to say that the advent of our new technologies and media have led us to a downfall of sorts. However the language making reference to the cosmic order makes it a little hard to penetrate the meaning of the article. The media has changed our language and our way of thinking, and the knowledge that we cannot trust everything we see on tv is pervasive. He suggests that by having the information, or news, so readily available it becomes less real to us and that when these images are gone that they leave no impression.
These two articles seem to take opposing views on technology. But I would agree that both seem to think that the media is changing the way people think, be it about news or history or the national borders we call home. I tend to agreement that international propagational information is a good thing and encourages discussion and the spread of cultural understanding. Although it makes our world increasingly small, and may somewhat densensitize us to reality I think this is the key to understanding between opposing groups of people. Education is the key, and media plays a key role in it.