[sarah32]

"Civilization" can sometimes refer to human society as a whole, as in "A nuclear war would wipe out Civilization" (see End of civilization) or "I'm glad to be safely back in Civilization after being lost in the wilderness for weeks." Additionally, it is used in this sense to refer to the global civilization. Such a usage is often found in the context of discussions about so-called "globalisation," again often used in a normative sense. Critics of "globalisation" reject such a coupling of the terms, saying that what is called "globalisation" is in fact a form of "global corporatisation" and that other forms of globalisation are possible, (for example, in respect for International Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions against torture of political and prisoners of war). Violations of such international principles today are widely considered "barbaric." The descriptive sense of "global civilization" would consider, with William McNeill's thesis of "the Rise of the West," that at least since the age of the great voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, that the world comprises a single socio-economic and political system (see "World Systems Theory"). Recently it has been suggested that there are in fact three waves of the globalisation of civilization.The First Wave: was associated with technologies of "Wind and Water" energies. Leadership of this phase passed from Spain and Portugal to the Netherlands, and then Britain, in what Lewis Mumford calls the Eotechnic phase.
The Second Wave: was associated with technologies of coal, iron and steel, and steam power. (See "Industrial Revolution." Lewis Mumford refers to this as a "Paleotechnic" phase. Leadership was contested between England and France in the first half of this period in the Napoleonic and Revolutionary Wars, linked in part to the contest between old and new technological and social systems.
The Third Wave(of which we are approaching the end), is based upon the technologies of oil, electricity, plastics, chemicals, and the automobile. Mumford refers to this as the age of "Neotechnic" civilization. Like earlier phases, world leadership of this phase was contested, initially by Germany and Britain, then by Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
In each case, the transition between one technology and the next has required an often revolutionary reorganization of society, and these revolutions have had social, economic and political dimensions as well as technological ones.
It is argued that contemporary global civilization is beginning to undergo another transition, beyond the dependence on oil (See "Peak oil") once again towards sustainable or renewable technologies not dependent upon parasiticdependence upon fossil fuels. The current War on Terrorism in this context has been claimed by a number of writers to be a part of such a transitional pattern, where existing great powers first try to monopolise the declining stock of depleting strategic resources.

This is in general what civilization means .. every day , a user will pick a civilization , a culture and we'll discuss it ...