Processes of Globalization and Shared Global Culture

Paper Summary:

The paper states that it is not complicated to find some globalized places such as airline terminals, international hotels or CNN business news revealing the effects of globalization and its repercussions on our understanding of culture in the modern world. The paper relates that through the growing of global interconnections and the processes of ideas and global goods crossing national borders, cultures fuse across the globe. The paper also discusses the presence of English as an international language, and a homogenization of culture. The paper confirms that, culture is a set of values and practices characterized by its particularity, which nevertheless needs universal criteria as a reference to justify this particularity. It is also crucial to define culture as an "encompassing" concept and to keep in mind that it is difficult to know what is cultural.

From the Paper:

"In addition, a shared global culture is also relevant as a global dissemination of an American or Western culture. Indeed the processes of globalization are providing fuel for a cultural imperialism, that is to say a global culture liable to be a hegemonic culture. Thus the assertion of a shared global culture seems to be linked to what Friedman describes as "the increasing hegemony of particular central cultures, the diffusion of American values, consumers goods and lifestyles" (Friedman, 1994: 195). The diffusion of dominant standard icons and references such as MacDonald's, Coca-Cola leads to think about an obvious Americanization. In a word, cultures are both confronted by a global dominance of the western culture and by the practices of global capitalism. The result is probably a decrease of cultural differences: a process which undeniably worked to the advantage of the USA and others Western nations. A striking example of this tendency of cultural imperialism is the United Nations Educations Scientific and Cultural Organization's call for a "new world information and communication order" and its politics on global culture."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Featherstone, M. (Ed) (1990) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London, Thousands Oaks, New-Delhi: Sage publications.
• Held, D. (Ed) (2000) A globalizing world? Culture, economics, politics, New York: Routledge.
• King, A. D. (Ed), (1991) Culture globalization and the World-system: contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, London: Macmillan.
• Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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