Cultural Globalization

Summary

It's generally accepted that globalization is a multidimensional process. Globalization can simply defined as a complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity. In our lives, we can see increasing connectivity in many ways. We communicate with people all over the world by mobile phones, computers, e-mail, and internet. It influence our style of living: fashion, food, music, cinema, manner, etc.
Understanding globalization's multidimensional characteristic is very important. The economic sphere is the crucial element. The capitalist system conquer global system. There is two reasons why we have to resist the temptation to economic reductionism. First, it operates on an unrealistically narrow conception of the economic. Second, it distorts our understanding of the sphere of culture.
It's hard to answer the question 'what is culture for?'. But answering this is very important in studying globalization. Culture have causality and it can inspire and direct individual and collective actions. Cultural globalization increase reflexivity in modern life.

It's common speculation that globalization have general unifying character. Globalization makes the world a 'single place'(Roland Robertson, 1992).  For example, today almost every nation-states are locked into a complex global capitalistic system.
Cultural globalization is connected with cultural imperialism. So many western companys are in our life:Disney, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Google, McDonald's, Starbucks, etc. They dominate world cultures.
The first appearance of globalizing was in thirteenth-century Europe. It was represented by a map that made by Ebstorf Mappa Mundi. The map shows the world round and with some recognizable features of the known physical Europe('the world' in that time) but withour familiar pattern of continents divided by oceans. Instead the land is divided into three parts by rivers. It was religous map. So we can see europeans view of globalism: world of christendom.
Later, European Enlightenment rationality make Western culture preserves the imagined projection of 'our world' into 'the world'. There was cosmopolitan thinkers like Kant.
Karl Marx’s depiction of a future communist society provides what is perhaps the most vivid imagination of a global culture
to be found in either nineteenth- or twentieth-century social thought.

There is another way of explain cultural globalization. It is by understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities. The idea of deterritorialization implies the collapse of relation of culture to geographical and social territories. Deterritorialization, then, means that the importance of the geographical location of a culture – not only the physical, environmental and climatic location, but ethnic boundaries and unlimiting activities that have accrued around this.
The idea of 'Deterritorialization' has radically theoretically effected on traditional ways of understanding culture. Culture has long held connotations that to tying it to the idea of a fixed locality. The idea of ‘a culture’ connects meaning construction with particularity and location with ‘territory’.
Today, the development of communication technologies make local culture to be more global.

Cosmopolitanism means trying to clarify, and ultimately to reconcile, the attachments and the values of cultural difference with those of an emergence of global human community. It has dilemma, 'the attractions of what we might think of as a 'benign' form of universalism' vs 'the equally attractive principles of respect for the integrity of local context and practices, cultural autonomy, cultural identity and 'sovereignty'.
The globalization will make new global identity. And the most thing is will be human. However, the crucial mistake of those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity is confusing this Western-modern form of cultural imagination with a universal of human experience. All cultures construct meaning via practices of collective symbolization. But not all historical cultures have ‘constructed’ identity in the regulated institutional forms that are now dominant in the modern West.

New, interesting, or unusual items I learned

I didn't know 'Deterritorialization' and 'Cosmopolitanism' before. Because there are few data about them, which in Korean, in internet. But after carry out this blog assignment, I can understand those concepts.

Question, concern, or discussion angle

If people have highly level of communication technology in the feature, cultures of the world can be intergrated?


2014048695 Hashin Choi