2. What is the relation between culture and globalization?

2. What is the relation between culture and globalization?

1) Let’s begin with defining globalization. It is a multidimensional process of the economy, of politics, of technological developments. It also refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize material, social, economic and cultural life in the modern world. Due to our use of communication technologies, we can easily think of why connectivity has been increased, and that increased connectivity helps us to understand the multidimensional complexity of the process. Although it’s pretty dominant for people to think globalizations in economic ways, actually it’s not ideal to think that way, because it operates on an unrealistically narrow concept of the economic and it distorts our understanding of the sphere of culture.

Then, what is culture for? It is to generate meaning in life, and the primordial context in which human agency arises and takes place. Thus, when we think about globalization and culture, it is useful to think how culturally informed ‘local’ actions can have globalizing consequences. When we look around our lives, we can find that cultural globalization has reflexivity on modern life. In other words, we can say that culture is a dimension in which globalization both has its effects and simultaneously is generated and shaped.

One of the most common speculations about how globalization has shaped culture is that a single global culture has been led as we can see the unifying effects of connectivity. It’s easy to find multinational companies and their brands everywhere. Some people think it is an uneven process and cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism for this reason. However, we also need to know that there are some waves of anti-Western movements. The reason we have a picture of the world as a core feature of Western cultural modernity is that it originated the world from bible long time ago. Even when communists, like Karl Marx, anticipated a future world in which the divisions of nations have disappeared using a universal language, he combined this vision with a deeply Eurocentric attitude to other cultures.

Another, more promising view of cultural globalization is understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities, and it’s called ‘deterritorialization’ which means the loss of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories. It is not simply the loss of the experience of a local culture, it’s more like localities thrive in globalization. We actually live with this concept by watching American TV shows at home, eating food from different countries, and searching Google instead of visiting public library. As we can see, one biggest factor of this phenomenon is our increasing routine dependence on electronic media and communications technologies and systems. This ‘telemediatization’ helps us to feel what it is to exist as a social being in the modern world. The speed of electronic communication takes our social relation and cultural values way, however, we can’t deny that it promotes a new sensibility of cultural openness, human mutuality and global ethnical responsibility.

Cosmopolitan cultural politics should be taken more seriously because it has a dilemma of universal human rights or cultural difference. Identities are aspects of the differentiating, institutionalizing and socially regulating nature of modern life and globalization has been perhaps the most significant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity.

2) It’s very interesting to know about pre-modern example of imagined biblical ‘globalism’. It shows me that people, even back in the long time ago, were interested in the world and outside of their country, and the way that they imagined the world was based on what they knew and what they believed. In addition, I imagined briefly the world where Karl Marx imagined, which as a universal language and integrated cosmopolitan cultural tastes. If that happens so, why would I travel for? That world wouldn’t be as exciting as it is now, so I hope each country keeps its own culture like now, although I am not against cultural globalization. I believe it surely is our mission to be unified not losing each color.

3) I want to know more whether deterritorializaion is different from glocalization, and if so, what would be different.