Borders as the Last Century

¶ … Borders As the last century ended, the world continued at a faster and faster pace with changes occurring rapidly and regularly. It was just an indication of what would be happening in the next decades. Many of the major changes that took place at that time dealt with the new concept of "A World Without Borders," where countries everywhere were being impacted by similar issues and challenge and communication and transportation allowed people to quickly move interact with others on the other side of the globe.

The environment became a global concern at the end of the 20th century. Changes started taking place across the world. For example, it is thought that global dimming, or the gradual reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface, caused the Ethiopian droughts in the 1970s and 80s. Millions died, because the oceans in the northern hemisphere did not become warm enough to allow rain formation. Global warming stared bringing temperature pattern alterations.

Stakeholders and researchers worldwide recognized the need to come together for joint resolutions to face the changes. The first challenges is to agree on a framework. In 1988, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meterological Organization (WMO) created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess the scientific knowledge on global warming. The IPCC concluded that climate change was human-induced.

This report led to an international convention for climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed by over 150 countries at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. As noted, one of the main changes at the turn of the century was the ability to interact with people instantaneously around the world. The global chat groups became a reality. The Internet relay chat (IRC) now makes it possible for people to use online services to converse with each other in real time by typing messages back and forth.

Servers are needed to conduct this form of communication. IRC was born during the summer of 1988 when Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen wrote the first IRC client and server at the University of Oulu, Finland. The number of servers that were being allocated to this started to grow. In the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide. Naturally, the IRC continued to grow with the Internet. Now hundreds of independent IRC networks exist (such as IceNet GammaNet, linuxnet, galaxynet, bestnet, NewNet, RedBrasi, AnotherNet, ChatNet, UpperNet, ZAnet, X-Net, SuperChat, GR-Net, AlphaStar, amiganet SorceryNet).

The IRC allowed thousands of people in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas Australia join together at a moment's notice in a cross-cultural communication. It has enabled a global subculture to be built from artificial but stable identities, quick wit, and the use of words to construct an imagined shared conservational context.

The thousands of people tuned who are on IRC at any one time are divided into hundreds of "channels" that Internet users can join or leave at any time; like Usenet newsgroups, the channels consist of a rich variety of topics, from the academic to the obscene. Some of the things that took place at the end of the century were a mix of good and bad. For example, According to the World Bank, global poverty rate has fallen to 21.1% since 1990.

In 2001 there were 100 million fewer people living in poverty than in 1990 and almost 400 million fewer than in 1981. If this economic growth is sustained, the global poverty rate will fall to 10.2% and 400 million more people will not be impoverished -- some believe this a major success. On the other hand, progress in eliminating hunger are slow. Rates of undernourishment have been falling in most regions, but too slowly to reach the Millennium Development Goal target, and in many regions the number of hungry people continues to grow.

However, there is controversy about the extent or impact of this.