[ Reading Assignment 2 ] What is the relation between globalization and culture?

 1. Summary

 According to the writer, globalization is a complicated, combining process of global connection. This connectivity that characterizes the urban environments is increased in various aspect of our lives. It is true that our society is more globally connected than the past. Therefore, perception of globalization as a process of developing connection is helpful to know the various dimensions of process. 

 It is so hard to escape from the global dominance of the capitalist system. However, John Tomlinson says that we should oppose the enticement to attribute it causal primacy in the globalization process. There are two reasons for this. 

 First, people can’t handle positive judgments about what particular practices drive each thing, but can raise some questions of the structure of analytical categories: Is it economic practices also, cultural? As it is assumption that the economy is worked outside of the impact of culture, the first reason is regarding conception of the economic narrowly.  

 Second, the temptation perverts our understanding of the territory of culture. This temptation like using ‘the impact of globalization on culture’ or ‘the cultural consequences of globalization’ contains theimplicit assumption that globalization is working outside the culture. And it implies cultural imperialism, Americanization, Westernization, etc. 

 Then, we should examine concept of culture more detailedly. For the present, the culture is for generating meaning that is the point of human life. The meanings doesn’t end in themselves for culture, but inform, inspire and direct individual and social activity. Thus, simultaneously, culture is a context to bening interpret and the primitive context in which human capacity begins. Understanding how ‘local’ actions have an effect on globalization is one of the beneficial methods to consider the consequentiality of culture for globalization. Cultural globalization systemically integrates small individual actions into social dimension which control our lives.

 There is ordinary assumption that globalization will result in single global culture. In fact, the globalization makes the single place in many different aspects. However, increasing global connectivity doesn’t mean that the world will be unification economically or politically. For example, ‘Third World’ doesn’t participate in globalized activity through developed world’s way. Another example is the existing wave of anti-Western feeling in large parts of the Muslim world. This situation show the resilience of cultural opposition to the Western cultural values. Therefore, we can know that globalization doesn’t install Western culture as global culture.

Another way of accessing these issues is to see modern globalization with longer historical context in which people imagined societies and cultures as a single place, regarding their own culture as centre of it. We can learn something advisable to the modern situation from two historical examples.

 The first is a map. The Ebstorf Mappa Mundi, made in c.1284, implies domination of the representation by elements of Christian theology. We can find context of globalism in which society is imagined theologically. However, this pre-modern discourse has not disappeared.

According to Slavoj Zizek, Christians tendentially excludes the other people who celebrate other gods. But the writer, John Tomlinson say that though Zizek may be correct, it is foolish to say that all Christians is exclusive. Plus, he emphasizes that unwarranted universalizing is not limited either to religious point of view or to ‘pre-modern’ cultures, but can be found at the centre of European Enlightenment rationality.

 The second is Karl Marx. He present a vision of a future world without the divisionsof nations, all other local action. However he link this vision with Eurocentric attitude of other cultures deeply. In other hands, Marx universalize modernism in a way to unsee cultural difference like the mapmaker. We can still take a lesson that rational progressive humanistic visions can coexist with tendency to universalize projections of a global culture.

 Deterritorialization means that not only the significance geographical of location of a culture, but ethnic boundaries and limits of practices that have accrued around this is eroding. Long before, culture has been bound by idea of a fixed locality. Deterritorialization is cutting this relationship between cultural experience and geographical territory. The phenomenon of deterritorialization is found in complex set of various dimensions and can’t be restricted by one. However, dependence on media and commication technologies contributes to deterritorialization.

 John Tomlinson suggest that we would go ways by resolving formation of ‘cultural identity’.Cultural identities are ways to regulate and organize the cultural activity by grasping our existential condition, our personal relations and our attachment to a place or a community. This process of institutionalization of identity is related with the issue of cosmopolitanism. We need to understand the sympathy with a globally encompassing humanism and with rights and obligations belonging to this as cosmopolitan characteristic 

2. What was interesting/ what did you learn

 I was worried about the single place that globalization makes because I thought that Western countries is absorbing other societies like global companies when I read reading assignment 1. However, in this text, I learn that my existing way of thinking implies a form of cultural imperialism. 

 Also, the part of telemediatization with deterritorialization was interesting, as I’m majored in Journalism & Mass Media. According to the writer, telemediatization is grasped as a peculiar form of mobility that does not involve actual physical movement. In this context, the theory of Marshall McLuhan can be linked with here: ‘The media is the extension of the body.’ 

3. Discussion

Deterritorialization makes new issues. Most of all, refugee problem emerged as major issue. What do you think about it?

source: UNHCR blog 

https://www.unhcr.org/blogs/statistics-refugee-numbers-highest-ever/