The globalisation of culture

“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions.  Life is plurality, death is uniformity.  By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favours death.  The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technology, impoverishes and mutilates us.  Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.” [Octavio Paz, Mexican author]

The globalisation of culture, of lifestyles, is proceeding apace. 

It manifests itself in a myriad of ways, some highly visible but superficial, others much more subtle and pernicious.  McDonalds, Heinz, Coke, Pizza Hut, everywhere, homogenising our diets and eating patterns, our expectations of service, our need for instant gratification.  American sitcoms on TV, dubbed or sub-titled, but still everywhere: the homogenisation of humour. 

In the late 1960s Dutch comedian Toon Hermans took the biggest gamble of his long career.  A consistent success in the Netherlands over many years, he sought to spread his wings, expand his horizons, broaden his market.  Toon decided to head for the big time in the USA.  His one-man show in English, extensively tested on tour in Holland, was unleashed on the American public. 

It was an unmitigated flop; a disaster, but a delicious disaster: a testimony to human diversity.  Dutch adult humour was not exportable. 

The particular humour of the American sitcom has since permeated Dutch society, and many other societies around the globe.  Since the mid 1960s television has been a primary conditioner of culture.  Its advertisements promoting consumerism; its constant diet of violence and orchestrated reality; its particular interpretation of the world. 

What is most notable about the fare available on screens, whether in Santiago, Dubai, Los Angeles, Wellington, or Amsterdam, is not its diversity but its uniformity.  The same programmes, the same advertising pitches, the same cheap and shallow sensationalism. 

The same is true of radio or social media music content.  There appears to be relatively little home-grown material - most of the music that excites the teenage community is an internationally marketed commodity produced to a standard recipe, often in English. 

The traditional media, and now our social media channels, are constantly shaping and homogenising our minds, our attitudes, our emotions.  The in-your-face delivery and graphic prurience of contemporary infotainment bulletins would have left a 1965 audience incredulous, and ill.  To us it is nothing, it is trivial.  We have been inured to its hyperbole and crassness over several decades of successive and imperceptibly stronger doses. 

The views of the world we are given through our screens are probably much more filtered and limited than we realise^[1].  There are always many perspectives on the truth; there are many truths even.  To some, what was most disturbing about the international coverage of the Gulf Wars, was that it presented only one truth, a truth that allowed the high-tech bombing of Iraqi targets to be portrayed as video games. 

One “video game” was that of a US missile laterally entering the air-conditioning duct of a substantial Iraqi installation in which several hundred people were reputedly at work.  The installation was largely immune from direct strikes, apart that is, from the highly unlikely instance of a missile laterally entering one of the air-conditioning ducts.  The last scene in the sequence was that of the installation being totally obliterated. 

It was a horrifying sequence of events but was not presented as such.  There was no thought given to what had happened to the several hundred people inside, to what would have been left of their bodies, bodies not of malevolent trolls, but of people doing their jobs and living their truths as they knew them.  Instead, it was delivered as a breathtaking technological marvel^[2]. 

No dissenting perspective was explored at any length by the global media coverage of either Gulf War.  Had the intention of the media been to present a US propagandist's view of the Gulf Wars, it could not have done a better job.  It remains unclear that all other options besides war^[3] were fully explored, and that either war was justified.

International news media feeds are dominated by a handful of Western news agencies.  Even if the professional ethics of the employees of these agencies are beyond reproach, the group dynamics of any organisation, combined with the imperative to make a profit, will operate to homogenise the world view^[4] presented by these agencies. 

Control of the world's media, including social media, has concentrated in a handful of large trans-national corporations that, with the advent of satellite technology and the internet, are virtually immune from any local attempts at content management or censorship^[5].  These corporations will argue that this is a step forward, a step towards a fully informed citizenry no longer hoodwinked by despotic regimes.  There is some validity in that, and if the truth as portrayed by the employees of the world's media moguls was even a little heterogeneous there could be no quarrel with such "progress". 

The ever-fewer owners of our local and global media will argue persuasively that their channels and e-publications have full editorial independence.  And, yes, on a day-to-day business-as-usual basis that is almost always the case.  But the bosses' world view is not imparted via direct editorial interference, and neither does it come through overnight.  It seeps slowly into the organisation.  When the editor retires in due course, they are replaced with a person who, subtly, is more in the mould of the owner.  When the owner demands a particular rate of return on investment, staff find that this can only be achieved by adopting a particular editorial line and tone. 

In Wellington, New Zealand, a very small capital city by world standards, there had for some decades been two daily newspapers, with, at one time, radically different editorial lines.  Then they fell under common ownership.  Editors were replaced, though not immediately.  Editorial independence from the owners was strictly and formally maintained.  Yet, in the space of just a few years, the editorial lines of the two papers became not merely indistinguishable, but also New-Right and pro-Establishment.  Finally, there was the predictable rationalisation and one of the newspapers closed. 

The globalisation of culture is a direct consequence of technological advance combined with the lowering of barriers to the international movement of ownership rights, finance, resources (including selected people), and technology itself.

In the current millennium we have seen a radical change in how people receive "news".  Not only is this accelerating globalisation; it is also polarising us globally. 

"Broadcasting" by a few nationwide TV channels is a thing of the past.  National and local newspapers, whether in print or digital, are a thing of the past.  The experience of leafing through a thick Sunday paper with a cup of coffee will be foreign to any millennial.  Now, a majority, if we receive any "news" at all, receives it online through social media or news services that filter what we read according to what we have searched and read previously.  In the thick Sunday newspaper there was a good chance that you would encounter articles that would not have aligned with your then current preferences and predispositions.  You might have read it, if something piqued your interest.  You might have learnt something; you might have changed your position.  Today, you no longer receive that option.

Receiving "news" and "information" that validates what we already believe or "know", entrenches, narrows and polarises us and all others into global camps or "tribes", that will inevitably clash.  

Globalisation is inimical not only of cultural diversity but also of ecological, political and economic diversity.  Yet diversity^[6] is central to the long-term survival^[7] of the biosphere and humanity.  Globalisation is a run-away train pulled by rampant profit maximising consumerism.  The train must be driven to our collective and enduring benefit.  But how^[8]?

To resist the globalisation of culture each of us^[9] needs to be aware^[10], appreciative and nurturing of our own culture and language.  We also need to realise that the information we are constantly bombarded with^[11], even when it is presented as objective news, is never culturally or politically neutral.

But we need to do more than this.  We need to be proactive^[12].