Popular Culture and Globalization

Popular Culture and Globalization

This paper is based on the topic of popular culture and globalization. For this paper, I have selected a particular question:

Q: What effect does global popular culture have on local cultures in your view?

Ans: The ubiquity of chains such as McDonald's and Starbucks, the worldwide recognition of Mickey Mouse and Pokémon, and the fact that Baywatch has been broadcast in 148 countries in 32 languages all speak to the concept of globalization of popular culture. This worldwide cultural homogenization is often seen as evidence of cultural imperialism and a result of hegemonic control of media and communication technologies by high-income countries of the North.

Increased cultural contact during the past few decades has promoted the conspicuous consumption of fashionable products in the developing world and the fetishism of imported goods in countries of the global North. On the other hand, a counterargument can be made for increasing heterogeneity with the emergence of new hybrid forms of culture that combine elements from the traditions and customs of multiple peoples and, thus, produce new forms of cultural expression.

Cultural Imperialism and Greater Homogeneity

Cultural imperialism occurs when the traditions and way of life of a group of people, whether an ethnic minority or an entire nation, are displaced by those of another. This may be a conscious process in which a dominant group intentionally suppresses another culture by suppressing its language, music, religion, symbols, or other practices. More often, however, it results from global market capitalism's drive to increase profits through rationality, homogeneity, and parsimony.

Whereas many view cultural globalization as a process of obliterating traditional cultures, others question the idea of cultural authenticity altogether. Globalization has been under way for centuries, so all existing cultures are products of appropriation and borrowing from one another. The term glocalization, originally a marketing concept of adapting goods to a local culture, has been used to describe the phenomenon of the selection of some cultural influences and rejection of others when disparate societies encounter one another. New forms of art, music, theater, food, and other cultural products have resulted.

The maturation of popular culture as a proper field of sociological enquiry has seen a massive growth in its range of topics, from an analysis of the greeting card (Papson 1986) to music crowds and museum attendance (Bennett 1995), from gender advertising (Goffman 1972) to radio broadcasting and teen magazines (Johnson 1979; McRobbie 1991). As well as providing fascinating case studies of popular practices, this type of scholarship also alerts us to an underlying political agenda, and from sociological readings of such popular practices, we can identify systematic instances of social injustice, exclusion, and prejudice. Popular forms such as top 40 dance music, street fashions, skateboarding, Internet chat rooms, and “blogging” reveal complex social relationships and group identifications. Chris Jenks's (2005) sociology of culture brings the rigors of theory to illuminate how the contemporary urban experience can be understood as a shifting ground where the institutions of power and social order have ...