The Effect of McDonald's and Starbucks

Everywhere we go we always find something in common: McDonald’s and Starbucks. One could definitely argue that it is harder to find an area without them than it is to find an area with them.


I went to Korea and Japan over the summer this year. It has been two years since I have been to Korea, and four since Japan, and when I first stepped into those two countries, I have noticed that there were more fast food restaurants and quick-serviced to-go food chains than before. But what astonished me was that those eateries were not Mcdonald’s or Starbucks as they were just a few years ago. They were ‘like’ them but not ‘them.’


For example, just until a few years ago, I used to always go to Starbucks in Korea and order green tea frappuccino. This year Starbucks was actually hard to find because the places where Starbucks used to be were supplanted with other local cafes. From this some people might say that the “global chain” is trying to “look local to survive globally” and that it is destroying the culture that the country had before (Simon 370). But these local cafes aren’t Starbucks. How could they be if they sell tea and coffee that taste differently? Some cafes like Ogada sell only tea that include ingredients such as ginseng, jujube, yuzu, and etcetera, which mostly only koreans know and enjoy. Also, the coffee that these cafes sell are made to a taste to which all koreans love. In other words, the local cafes may look like replicas of Starbucks, when really, these cafes are just using the idea of Starbucks to further spread the country’s culture. It is basically the same for all fast food restaurants too in Korea. Burger restaurants sell korean barbeque burgers, kimchi burgers, and even rice burgers. Pizza restaurants sell sweet potato pizza and korean barbeque chicken pizza. Fried chicken restaurants sell honey butter (a seasoning that is a hit right now in Korea) chicken and soy sauce chicken. What do they all have in common? They sell food that are engraved with the korean culture, which not only koreans could savor, but also tourists from other countries in the world and even americans living in cities where these restaurants are located.


The same goes for Japan. The cafes there sell tea and sweets that look and taste totally differently from those in Korea and America. Japan also has a lot of to-go places (an idea used from Mcdonald’s) like takoyaki to-go eateries and fried chicken stick to-go eateries where many different types of seasonings enjoyed by japanese are displayed so that the customer could choose and season their own chicken. All this is viewed as McDonaldization, which Ritzer defines in his essay as, “the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurants” are dominating the world (Ritzer 372). Many view McDonaldization as homogenization and homogenization as global sameness which taints the value of diverse cultures. But this homogenization could in fact be a pathway to heterogenization. Uniformity that everyone is familiar with could be slightly altered to familiarize everyone with and preserve the values of diverse cultures. Therefore, the McDonaldization and homogenization that is going on right now should not be frowned upon.

Internet as an Educational Tool

You must all be wondering: what happens if teachers and professors were all supplanted by machines and robots? What would happen if all knowledge and information were transferred automatically from machines to all people? Isn’t that a more faster way to learn? Isn’t that a more cost-efficient (to college students) and time-consuming way of taking in knowledge?

Right and wrong.

Saying that actual professors and teachers could be substituted for a piece of machinery is a total exaggeration. But it should be taken into consideration that learning with the aid of technology is indeed helping to develop a better education environment for students.

Paulo Freire states that our traditional way of learning, ‘banking education’, needs to change, because it is “dehumanizing” for the students in that the teachers basically feed them whatever they want to feed them and whenever they want to (Freie and Behuniak 340). He wants an education system where students learn to reflect, act, and think unceasingly in conjunction with the teacher. According to “Paulo Freire and ICTs: Liberatory Education Theory in a Digital Age” though, advocates of Freire actually deny the fact that technology could help alter this banking education, because the machineries that we use today in classes are actually helping students to fake their participation and connections with other students. But isn’t this the same thing as saying that having paper and pen in class is distracting since students are liable to doodling instead of taking notes? Distractions and “faux-participation” are caused by the amount of will to listen and learn, not the technology itself. Technology doesn’t force students to get sidetracked.

According to some professors using Twitter as a learning tool, Twitter, or other communicating systems through the internet, actually helps students to have “peer to peer communication” and share ideas “beyond the classrooms” (Kassens-Noor 304). This shows that communication via the internet pertains to learning via the internet. Freire states that education should involve “the interaction of reflection” and “acts of cognition” instead of just a transfer of information. Well, in fact, as peers communicate together about a topic and idea through online communication, they are not just stating some facts from a textbook, but actually reflecting upon what is written in it together as a group. They may be separated physically from each other, but their brain and minds are virtually together as one through the internet.

Internet is indeed an educational tool as is a piece of paper, which could be just viewed as a form distraction depending on who is utilizing it.

Internet Is Not The Problem

You guys have probably started writing your blogs or doing your homework, and somehow through searches and searches, have come to reading this blog. Or, you may be searching for your research topics in one tab, and chatting with your facebook friends in another. Whether or not this multitasking is intentional, we could all say in one voice that distractions through the Internet are inevitable.

For example, I know that I have to finish writing this blog within the next few hours, but I have this impulse to watch a new episode of a drama that just came out today. I cannot finish this homework unless I satisfy my urge, and thus start watching my favorite drama. But after about 20 minutes into it, I start to panic a little after realizing how much more I have to write. I then go back to my blog, write three more sentences, and go back to my enjoyment again.  According to Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan’s “Meet Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think,” this continuous partial attention will sooner or later build up stress in our brains and eventually destroy our “ego and sense of self-worth.” This also means that the ability of our hippocampus, which “allows us to learn and remember new information,” subsides (Small and Vorgan 147). It is thought that the Internet and all the other digital devices is the cause for this problem.

But is the digital age that we live in really the problem? Is Internet really doing us wrong than doing us good? If you think about all the benefits that the Internet provides us, like enabling us to digitally connect and communicate with one another and to google map uncertain destinations, the advantages of the Internet outdo the disadvantages of the Internet. As shown in Friedman’s “Come the Revolution,” students are now able to earn a degree through online courses offered by professors from some of the top universities in America for not even one percent of the normal tuition money that we pay while physically attending college. Although we may be using our laptops in class to watch YouTube videos or update our Facebook profiles, there are still many people out there who are actually willing to learn and work. Snyder states in his essay that the Internet might be “distracting America’s future workforce” from making our economy any more prosperous, but this cannot be talking about every single person out there. There are people who work day and night; evidence is provided by the fact that America is still one of the most affluent countries in the world.

Without the Internet there would be no online classes or google searching. We like to blame the Internet for our distractions when, in fact, we are our own distractions. Some people like myself just naturally cannot concentrate on one subject. If we had no Internet, we would still be urged to pass notes to friends in class or go shopping with friends instead of finishing up homework. Living in a digital age therefore gives us more opportunities to prosper than to languish.