Cultural globalization is the unification of diverse customs belonging to different communities. The term refers to the changes experienced by different ways of life of different peoples.
Due to cultural globalization, customs, traditions and artistic expressions from different parts of the world are adapting to the resulting changes. The basis of this phenomenon is associated with the media, through which the cultures and customs of various countries merge.
In this sense, thanks to globalization and the mass media, different societies are interconnected, generating links and giving rise to a unity between them, or underlining their diversity.
Cultural globalization implies the unification of diverse cultural identities, tending to achieve homogeneity and its main underlying content being its own cultural identity.
This internalization includes the connection between territories, nations and continents and fuses the elements of the past and the present. From this, the values of the universal culture are socialized through the insertion of the global in the local.
What should I know about cultural globalization?
To understand cultural globalization, it is necessary to understand the relationship between globalization and culture.
On the one hand, globalization is a dynamic process, in which the economy, technology, politics, culture, social characteristics and ideological thoughts corresponding to each region are interrelated at the universal level.
Historically, from the expansion of capitalism, globalization produces important transformations all over the world.
Having modernity and the notion of progress as central axes, globalization is interpreted as a totalizing vision of reality, where there are trends for the global development of society.
In this sense, the relationship between the social and the cultural, inherent to this dynamic process, is closely linked to the capitalist relations of production.
From this capitalist perspective of globalization, these social relations of production are interconnected throughout the world; linking regional diversities in a heterogeneous world.
In this way, globalization can be understood as a commercial dependency between countries. Who are in a close relationship for the convenience of integrating their savings.
At the same time, it must be borne in mind that globalization not only encompasses the economy, but also produces a strong change in all everyday aspects of a nation’s life. In addition to environmental, political, social, etc. That’s why globalization has its own culture and global politics.
The culture
It is the result of a combination of forms and expressions characteristic of a given society.
Beliefs, codes, rules, rituals and common practices prevalent in people belonging to a society are embedded in it.
In this way, culture is the form of expression that individuals have of their own traditions.
In this way, culture encompasses the distinctive, affective, spiritual, material and intellectual characteristics that identify and characterize a society.
It also includes the ways of life, value systems, beliefs, rights and traditions of a specific population at a given period.
Through culture, the subject becomes aware of himself and the world around him, allowing man to find a means of expression to create works that transcend.
Cultural globalization is therefore a tendency towards homogeneity. A phenomenon that reflects a normalization of cultural expressions around the world. Being implicit in it, the socialization of the values of the universal culture.
Influence of globalization on culture
When new customs and new ideas come from different parts of the world, the characteristic culture of a region is influenced. In this way, regional cultures begin to adopt cultural and consumption practices corresponding to other nations and generally of a capitalist nature.
The consumption of brands, media, symbols taken as representative icons of a society appears in regional customs. Emerging in this way, a global culture.
Resulting in the combination of different elements from different cultures, the expansion of cultural models corresponding to capitalist societies.
Thanks to the mass media, countries are increasingly connected, economically, technologically and culturally; more and more like each other.
In this way, the gap that differentiates the diverse cultures inherent in each society becomes increasingly narrow. However, there is a predominance of cultures from economically more powerful countries. As a consequence, cultural diversity is decreasing as a result of cultural globalization.
At the same time and as a consequence, certain social groups that have been excluded from the globalized world are unified to react against globalization. In order to resurface the values inherent in local cultures, with the aim of reassessing their own.
Media influence on globalization
Cultural globalization arises as a consequence of the process of communication between different parts of the world and, thanks to the different media currently available, different countries can communicate.
As a result, different regions are able to connect through various global exchange networks. Thus producing the contact and relationship between different societies, with their peculiar cultural characteristics.
In this way, the media begins to play an important role in the development of cultural globalization.
Audiovisual media, for example, begins to be an important source of creation and transformation, becoming increasingly omnipresent in people’s daily lives in general.
Thus, popular culture was born, which expanded throughout the planet, becoming the dominant culture. From this, social groups identify with all the products present in the world, enriching a collective imagination.
In this sense, the media is a tool for the homogenization of global culture.
Cultural globalization today
Currently, world society seems immersed in a new cultural context, where globalization as a dynamic and continuous process has influenced culture in most of its aspects.
Cultural globalization has been and is a phenomenon that inevitably influences different areas of the daily lives of a nation’s inhabitants, having both favorable and unfavorable effects.
Detractors of the process believe that there is an important difference between the rapid growth of some countries, compared to the little or almost zero of others, implying a certain loss of sovereignty for the latter.
Cultural globalization a priori appears as a phenomenon that no society can escape, as the means of communication are present everywhere, as well as the stereotypes they can enrich, the fashion styles they spread, among others.
Currently, all countries in the world are immersed in all these global processes. But, from an optimistic view, the world can be augmented by exchanges of all kinds, capitals, goods and services, technologies, information and cultural patterns.
However, one can raise the question about the concentration of wealth and social marginalization or the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries and how this affects the process of cultural globalization in the environment.
