3.1.4

Global Culture

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Global Culture

Globalisation has led to the emergence of a global culture, where cultural products, norms, values and ways of life in different countries are becoming increasingly similar.

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Globalisation

  • Theorists such as Ritzer, Flew, Klein and Sklair have suggested that globalisation has led to the emergence of a global culture, where national and local cultures are undermined, and cultural products, norms, values and ways of life in different countries are becoming increasingly similar.
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Media technologies

  • The globalisation of culture is fuelled, in part, by new media technologies such as the Internet and satellite TV, which enable instant communication and exploration of world cultures.
  • The culture industries, such as global media corporations, sell the same cultural products around the world which weaken the cultural differences between countries and spreads a similar culture well beyond the borders of individual nation-states.
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Marketisation

  • The advertising and marketisation of global brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks promote global images that influence the daily lives of people from around the world, becoming cultural symbols around which people can form identities and views of the world.
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Tourism

  • International tourism and global travel mean that people can absorb cultures from across the world and adapt them to suit their own consumer lifestyle.
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Cultural homogenisation

  • All these processes have led to what is called cultural homogenisation, or the growing similarity to culture.
  • For example the same TV shows and films, music and designer clothes.
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Marxists

  • Marxists argue that global culture isn’t, in reality, global but imposed Western (predominantly American) culture; a form of Americanisation or ‘American imperialism’.
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Postmodernists

  • Postmodernists claim that there is no single global culture but a diversity of cultures from which people can pick and choose.
  • Hybridisation is a term that suggesting a mixing or blending of cultures, where global products are adapted to be more in keeping with the local culture, for example, McDonald's in India doesn’t use pork or beef in their burgers.

Jump to other topics

1Theory & Methods

2Education with Methods in Context

3Option 1: Culture & Identity

4Option 1: Families & Households

5Option 1: Health

6Option 1: Work, Poverty & Welfare

7Option 2: Beliefs in Society

8Option 2: Global Development

9Option 2: The Media

10Crime & Deviance

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