Let's Talk About Cultural Globalization

The evidence of the globalization can trace back thousands of years in the past, globalizing forces such as trading was essential to the

communication and survival of the people located in different countries. Take the Silk Road for example, its purpose was to enable commercial and cultural exchanges between regions of the ancient world. During the process of the Silk Road, cultural aspects and traditions between the trading nations slowly started to influence one another, merging them into one. After the European modernization, transportation technology has increased by a large margin, providing a more rapid travel time for people and goods.

But is globalization all positive? Do people from other nations experience negative impacts from it? How do people submerge into other cultures? Do they slowly forget their own cultural importance?

Today, the globalization has evolved into a very large scale of act, multinational companies such as Apple, Walmart and McDonald’s spread out their manufacturing facilities in many parts of the world in order to mass produce their products. By trading massively on a daily basis, people constantly live in a stage where they communicate with those who carry influences of others cultures. Thus, there must be an increase of cultural globalization, the transmission of ideas and values of a culture would start impacting other nations, which could be a negative influence. From Manfred B. Steger’s article “Global Culture”, he shares the concerns of people becoming too busy embracing other cultures than to preserve their own traditions, incidents such as Amazonian Indians wearing Nike training shoes and denizens of Southern Sahara purchasing Texaco baseball caps, and Palestinian youths showing off their Chicago Bulls sweatshirts (Steger) would occur in our society. People slowly merge into the cultures that are not originated in their nations, hence they forget the importance of their own cultures.

But how do they slowly forget their own traditions and customs? For example, due to the wide availability of the fast food industry such as KFC or McDonald’s, people from a different culture would resort to eating the fast-food burgers and chips rather than to eat their own cultural food, which would eventually lead to the disinterest of their own cultural food because they have experienced how tasty or convenient these burgers and chicken wings are. Therefore, they start to consume more and more American fast foods, which would lead to what American sociologist George Ritzier would call “McDonaldization”, which describes “the wide-ranging sociocultural process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world” (Steger), the same phrase can be used to describe other products or traditions such as clothing, smartphones, cultural slangs, etc. From Steger’s words, the world would eventually change traditional manifestation of national identity in the direction of a popular culture characterized by sameness, thus achieving the cultural globalization (Steger).

With all these impacts caused by globalizing the planet, people are slowly adapting, and therefore starting to use cultural slangs originated from another culture. For example, raised in a small mountain town in China for over a decade, I observed the cultural change amongst the young people in schools and the ways they’d act and speak to others when offended or disrespected by others, “an eye for an eye” as they’d say, which they think would bring back the respect that they think they deserve. Some others would use aggressive, intimidating behaviors, which would make them look quite “black” as some others say. Some of the words and actions could be traced and found in western cultures, particularly in American black street culture. Elijah Anderson, a well-respected American sociologist who studies the impact of local cultures states that the source of this black culture comes from the profound sense of alienation from mainstream society and its institutions felt by many poor inner-city black people who lack education and social economic status (Anderson) in his article “Code of the Street”, the reason why this culture, or say “code” exists is that the minorities who live ghetto inner city environments are frequently ignored and neglected by the society, and even by the police force. Thus, when people encounter trouble, they need a set of informal rules to govern interpersonal public behaviors such as violence, unfairness, etc. (Anderson).

The “street code” is highly popular amongst city environments, with the help of internet and the unstoppable force of globalization, more and more people start knowing about this culture. As the time goes by, this culture merges into the mainstream society where all social classes interpret and adopt this “code” in many different aspects of life and situations, some see it as an urban survival strategy, some use it to fit in with their friends, and the rest utilize it to have a more moderate lifestyle. Today, even the people who live in a poor small town surrounded by mountains in China know, understand, and use this culture every day to get by and to gain respect, I must say that despite the negative impacts of globalization, it has evolved humanity into a more collective species.