Cultural Globalization

1. Summarize
 

 Virtually every serious scholar today would accept the broad general proposition that globalization is a multidimensionalprocess, taking place simultaneously within the spheres of the economy, of politics, of technological developments – particularly media and communications technologies – of environmental change and of culture. One simple way of defining globalization, without giving precedence or causal primacy to any one of these dimensions, is to say that it is a complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity.

In all such readings ‘culture’ seems to be a peculiarly inert category: something that people experience or imbibe but do not themselves produce or shape. Much has been written from the semiotic-hermeneutic perspective of cultural analysis in response to this deep misconception, demonstrating the active, transformative nature of the appropriation of cultural goods (Morley 1992;Thompson 1995; Lull 2000). But despite this critique, the idea of culture as being intrinsically constitutive of globalization – as being a dimension which has consequences for other domains – remains relatively obscure.

E ven the most basic instrumental actions of satisfying bodily needs are not in this sense outside of culture: in certain circumstances – slimming, eating ‘disorders’ such as anorexia nervosa, religious fasting, political hunger strikes – the decision to eat or to starve is a cultural decision. One useful way to think about the consequentiality of culture for globalization, then, is to grasp how culturally informed ‘local’ actions can have globalizing consequences.

 One common speculation about the globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. This is only a speculation, but the reason it seems possible is that we can see the ‘unifying’ effects of connectivity in other spheres – particularly in the economic sphere where the tightly integrated system of the global market provides the model. And indeed, globalization in some of its aspects does have this general unifying character. Whereas it was in the past possible to understand social and economic processes and practices as a set of local, relatively ‘independent’ phenomena, globalization makes the world in many respects, to quote Roland Robertson (1992), a ‘single place. However, increasing global connectivity by no means necessarily implies that the world is becoming, in the widest sense, either economically or politically‘unified’.

 Third World clearly does not partake of the globalized economy or of globalized communications in the same way as the developed world. An overarching global economic system, it is true to say, is deeply influential in determining the fate of countries in Africa. But this is a far cry from saying that Africa is part of a single, unified world of economic prosperity and social and technological development. So we have to qualify the idea of globalization by saying that it is an uneven process – with areas of concentration and density of fl ow and other areas of neglect or even perhaps exclusion (Massey 1994).

 To this Despite all this, there persists, at least amongst some Western critics, a tendency to imagine globalization pushing us towards an all-encompassing ‘global culture’. The most common way in which this is conceived is in the assumption that I mentioned earlier, that cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism: the spread of Western capitalist – particularly American – culture to every part of the globe, and the consequent threat of a loss of distinct non-Western cultural traditions. What is feared here is the total domination of world cultures through the unopposed advance of iconic brands such as Disney, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Microsoft, Google, McDonald’s, CNN, Nike and Starbucks. Globally marketed formulaic Hollywood movies, Western popular music genres and television formats appear to many as what the filmmaker Bernado Bertolucci once referred to as ’a kind of totalitarianism of culture’. extent, globalization, it seems, is not quite global! Without being drawn too deeply into these perplexing issues, we can at least see that the vision of Western liberal-capitalist consumer culture sweeping all before it is severely chastened by this cultural opposition.

A different way of approaching these issues is to view contemporary globalization in the context of a much longer historical context in which societies and cultures have imagined the world as a single place, with their own culture at the centre of it. This sort of imagination has been a consistent feature of the founding narratives of cultural collectivities

Familiar pattern of continents divided by oceans. Instead the land mass is roughly divided into three parts by rivers, and set within an encircling sea. But what is most striking is the complete domination of the representation by elements of Christian theology. Jerusalem – the Holy City – is placed at the centre, whilst the orientation of the map places the east at the top where is also depicted the Garden of Eden – scene of the Christian God’s creation of mankind.

Karl Marx’s depiction of a future communist society provides what is perhaps the most vivid imagination of a global culture to be found in either nineteenth- or twentieth-century social thought. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels present a bold vision of a future world in which the divisions of nations have disappeared, along with all other ’local’ attachments, Including those of religious belief. Communist society is a world with a universal language, a world literature and integrated cosmopolitan cultural tastes.

But this is precisely what we need to do if we are to avoid the sort of violent contestation of worldviews that looks so threatening in our present world. Making cosmopolitanism – in the rather simple, literal sense of ‘world citizenship’ – work in a way that does not impose any one particular, culturally inflected model is perhaps the most immediate cultural challenge that globalization faces us with. One clear implication of the discussion in the previous section is that both utopian and dystopian speculations about a single integrated global culture are not only generally ethnocentric in their origins, they are – in part because of this – rather poor predictions of actual cultural development. But there is another, more promising, way of approaching cultural globalization. This is not via the macro analysis of ‘globality’, but precisely in the opposite way, by understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities.

The vast majority of us live local lives, but globalization is rapidly changing our experience of this ‘locality’ and one way of grasping this change is in the idea of ‘deterritorialization’. Deterritorialization, then, means that the significance of the geographical location of a culture – not only the physical, environmental and climatic location, but all the self-definitions, ethnic boundaries and delimiting practices that have accrued around this – is eroding. No longer is culture so ‘tied’ to the constraints of local circumstances.

This ‘deterritorializing’ aspect of globalization is felt in very ordinary everyday practices: as we push our trolleys around the aisles of ‘global foods’ in local supermarkets; as we choose between eating in Italian, Mexican, Thai, Indian or Japanese restaurants; as we settle down in our living rooms to watch an American soap opera or the news coverage of a distant political event; as we casually phone friends on other continents, aware of their ‘distance’ only in terms of a time difference; as we routinely log on to Google for information rather than walking down to the local public library. These activities are now so taken-for-granted in the affluent, developed parts of the world, that they seem almost too trivial to consider as signaling deep cultural transformations. Yet they do. It is through such changes that globalization reaches deep into our individual cultural ‘worlds’, the implicit sense we all have of our relevant environment, our understanding of what counts as home and abroad, our horizon of cultural and moral relevance, even our sense of cultural and national identity (Tomlinson1999: 113f; 2003).

What we can call the ‘telemediatization’ of culture is a key distinction in twenty first century life. Human beings: as, indeed, a distinctive mode of deterritorialization. Telemediatized practices – watching television or typing, scrolling, clicking and browsing at the computer screen or talking, texting or sending and receiving pictures on a mobile phone – should be regarded as unique modes of cultural activity and perception. It seems to me, then, that one of the main challenges of global cultural analysis is to come to terms with the way in which telemediatization is shaping our lives – and, indeed, our values.

But the larger cultural question – as yet scarcely addressed – is what all this speed and ‘instant access’ means in the longer term for our emotions. Through increased travel and mobility, the use of new communications technologies and the experience of a globalized media – people effortlessly integrate local and ‘global’ cultural data in their consciousness. Thus, what happens in distant parts of the world, though still perhaps not so vivid as events in our neighbourhood, nonetheless has an increasing significance in our lives.

This essentially modern, ‘regulatory’ category of cultural identity, then, consists in self and communal definitions based around specific, usually politically inflected, differentiations: gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity, nationality. However, the crucial mistake of those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity is to confuse this Westernmodern form of cultural imagination with a universal of human experience. All cultures construct meaning via practices of collective symbolization: this is probably as close to a cultural universal as we can get. But by no means all historical cultures have ‘constructed’ identity in the regulated institutional forms that are now dominant in the modern West (Morley,2000).

 

2. Opinion&Question

Is modernization to be Western? Since I was young, I have learned the course of history development at school. I learned the process from primitive to modern. All normal countries have developed through this process, and those that do not are not normal. And at the peak of the normal countries were always the West. The West was the truth, the bible and the only good. But I noticed that evey county doesn’t have to develop according to the rules. Not every country has to wear a suit, eat hamburgers and pizza, and enjoy the Avengers movies.

 The author says that globalization is not a cultural imperialism. In fact, capitalism has been transformed into different forms in all countries and "hybridization" is occurring. But still, the power of the West, U.S. and English, is enormous. More than half of the letters circling the globe are written in English, while more than 80 percent of the information in the world's electronic recovery system is also composed of English. Most of the academic papers are also written in English. If you can't speak English well, the cost of the chance to lose is very huge. This means that we should not underestimate Western influence in "globalization."

 When it comes to "globalization," it is easy to imagine a scene where various cultures blend together. In reality, however, reality would not look so colorful. The world has become quite similar because of colonization, war, and capitalism. The boundaries of the world are blurring more and more. Telecommunication is making the world more 'disregionalization'. Globalization may make the boundaries of the world just symbolic. But the world is still difficult to equalize. Because the hegemony of Western still operates on the world’s systems and products.

 I would like to ask the question, 'Is globalization equal to everyone?'