Cultural Globalization

1) Summarize in your own words of materials you read

Globalization process has cultural analysts from understating its huge significance. However, we have to resist the temptation to attribute it with causal primacy in the globalization process.

Firstly, because we are not dealing with straightforward empirical judgments about what specific practices drive everything else, but also with questions of the constitution of analytical categories. The second reason is that it distorts our understanding of the sphere of culture. One major reason why it seems natural to speak of globalization’s ‘impact’ on culture is that global market processes are relatively easy to understand as having a potential influence on people’s cultural experience. Cultural signification and interpretation constantly motivate and orient people, individually and collectively, towards particular choices and actions. However, increasing global connectivity necessarily implies that the world is becoming, either economically or politically ‘unified’. 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..

But Marx combines this vision with a deeply Eurocentric attitude to other cultures. He welcomes the way in which the bourgeois era is sweeping away premodern ‘civilizations’, preparing the way for the coming socialist revolution and the communist era which, he insists, ‘can only have a “world-historical” existence’ But still we can take a lesson from Marx’s example, and it is that the ethnocentric tendency towards universalizing projections of a global culture can coexist with otherwise rational progressive humanistic visions.

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 is eroding. This is not only the physical, environmental and climatic location, but all the self-definitions, ethnic boundaries and delimiting practices that have accrued around this. No longer is culture so ‘tied’ to the constraints of local circumstances.

2) Mention of any new, interesting, or unusual items learned 

 We can take an example from the Marx and this means that I can learn from previous historical culture. To take one’s own culture as the ‘obvious’ model for the one, true, enlightened, rational and good is as common as it is understandable. Also, relativizing these require much more difficult acts of hermeneutic distancing and of intellectual and affective imagination.

Deterritorialization is very interesting thing for me. No more our culture is tied in one space. I agree that what we can call the ‘telemediatization’ of culture is a key distinction in twenty first century life. Our use of media and communications technologies helps to define what it is to exist as a social being in the modern world. The phenomenon of deterritorialization arises from a complex set of economic, political and technological factors. It is not as though localities, and the particularities, nuances and differences they generate, suddenly and entirely disappear. But, having said this, there is one factor which is worth singling out for closer scrutiny, since it opens out on to areas of connectivity that are historically unprecedented and which may justifiably be said to define the tenor of our times. Deterritorialization is not simply the loss of the experience of a local culture.

3) Identify at least one question, concern, or discussion angle 

I agree that these situation need to make ‘global governance’ but, rather it means trying to clarify, and ultimately to reconcile, the attachments and the values of cultural difference with those of an emergent wider global-human ‘community’. This is a dilemma.  Universal human rights or cultural difference? We don’t really know which one to stand beside because it is most side has understandable reason and it can be reasonable.