Globalization and Culture

Technology has now created the possibility and even the likelihood of a global culture. The Internet, fax machines, satellites, and cable TV are sweeping away cultural boundaries. Global entertainment companies shape the perceptions and dreams of ordinary citizens, wherever they live. This spread of values, norms, and culture tends to promote Western ideals of capitalism. Will local cultures inevitably fall victim to this global "consumer" culture? Will English eradicate all other languages? Will consumer values overwhelm peoples' sense of community and social solidarity? Or, on the contrary, will a common culture lead the way to greater shared values and political unity? This section looks at these and other issues of culture and globalization.
Globalization is a complex process because it involves rapid social change that is occurring simultaneously across a number of dimensions – in the world economy, in politics, in communications, in the physical environment and in culture – and each of these transformations interacts with the others. So it’s a complicated process to grasp in its entirety. And there are all sorts of theoretical issues – to do with its causality, its historical and geographical sources, and its relationship to other concepts like modernity and post modernity, its social consequences, and its differential impact – that are difficult and controversial. However, at its core, there is something going on which is quite simple to describe – and I call this a process of accelerating ‘connectivity’. (Tomlinson, 1999). By this I mean that globalization refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern social life. At its most basic, globalization is quite simply a description of these networks and of their implications – for instance in the various ‘flows’ - of capital, commodities, people, knowledge, information and ideas, crime, pollution, diseases, fashions, beliefs, images and so on – across international boundaries.
This increasing connectivity is, in some ways, an obvious aspect of our lives. It is something we can all – at least in developed societies - recognize in everyday routine practices: in our use of communications technologies – mobile phones, computers, email, the internet - in the built environment we inhabit, in the sort of food we eat, in the way we earn our livings, and in the way we entertain ourselves – in cinema, television and so on. It’s pretty obvious that we are living in a much more globally ‘connected’ world today than even thirty of forty years ago. But what does this all mean culturally? Does it mean that, as many people suppose, we are inevitably being drawn together, for good or ill, into a single global culture?
One reason why people believe that globalization will lead to a single global culture is that they see the effects of connectivity in other spheres – particularly in the economic sphere – producing an integrated system .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 , to quote Roland Robertson (1992) , a 'single place'. Obvious examples of this are the way in which the economic affairs of nation-states are locked into a complex global capitalist economic system which restricts the autonomy of individual states, or how the environmental effects of local industrial processes can rapidly become global problems.
However, increasing global connectivity by no means necessarily implies that the world is becoming either economically or politically ‘unified’. Despite its reach, few would dare to claim that the effects of globalization currently extends in any profound way to every single person or place on the planet, and speculation on its spread must surely be tempered by the many countervailing trends towards social, political and indeed cultural division that we see around us. This is a point that is frequently made by theorists of development: what used to be called the ‘Third World’ does not partake of the globalised economy or of globalised communications in the same way as the developed world. So we have to qualify the idea of globalization by saying that it is an uneven process - with areas of concentration and density of flow and other areas of neglect or even perhaps exclusion (Massey, 1994). So globalization in this sense is not quite global.
Poised at the turn of the century, we are living in a world where the 'culture of globalization' pervades all walks of life following simultaneous communication through cinema, television, trade and tourism, compressing the political, economic and socio-cultural space in the process. Whereas the 'hyper-globalist' defines the contemporary world in terms of economic globalization and the end of nation state, the 'skeptics' view the whole debate about culture of globalization in terms of a cliché. Though it is premature to assess the impact of culture of globalization on national cultures and identities, it cannot be denied that these no longer remain robust and unsullied. In fact, the global infrastructures of culture and communication have contributed a great deal in the formation of epistemic transnational elite communities; formation of transnational political lobbies and alliances; development and entrenchment of diasporic culture and communities; increasing openness of information and cultural autonomy. Virtually all countries in the world, if not all parts of their territory, and all segments of their society, have now become part of the larger global system in a way. Interestingly, the culture of globalization has led to the emergence of new patterns of global stratification in which some states, societies and communities are enmeshed in the global order whereas others are marginalized. The 'culture of globalization' and 'globalization of culture' strives towards 'deterritorialization' and 're-territorialization' of political and economic power in the era of borderless world and global village. My paper seeks to examine the challenges of multiculturalism and hybrid culture faced by various countries worldwide. They are finding it difficult to contain the demands for group rights based on 'identity politics' within the 'liberal framework'. It is becoming very difficult for them to sustain the demands for 'group rights' based upon rationality and universality within the framework of their existing capacity, leadership, preferences, and socio-cultural norms, political and economic development. The methodology adopted is analytical, conceptual and comparative.