Globalization and the rapid growth of global culture
Globalization has made the world a more interconnected and interdependent place of culture, population, and economies. Economic globalization has rapidly spread over the past years. With the rapid spread of globalization, culture has been changed and global culture has developed. Due to increasing globalization and the emergence of a global culture a lot of contrasting ideas and perspectives on what this means for us have developed. Globalization is not easy to define as some view it as a positive process while others view it as negative. While some people predict that that global culture over time will create a more peaceful world and connect people others worry that there will be a higher price to pay for having a global culture. In my opinion, though global culture will create peace in terms of reduced conflict caused by contrasting ideas and beliefs and an overall decrease in war and conflict, the price we pay for global culture will outweigh the benefits in terms of the loss of home culture, traditions, and beliefs, and diversity.
Global culture has negative as well as positive aspects and I believe that changes caused by the development of global culture will cause negative repercussions around the globe. Global culture leads to the loss of home culture, traditions, beliefs, values, and diversity, all the aspects which embody and represent the idea of culture. If every person shares one common culture and values there will be no diversity and no uniqueness as this negates an individual’s expression of their identity. If Global culture spreads further, the younger generation will be the first to be impacted and integrate other cultures, leading to losing their traditions, values, and beliefs. This can be seen by teenagers adapting to Western culture and traditions as a result of the media content they consume.
Another impact of global culture is each person will follow the same culture, traditions, beliefs, and values and this will lead to a loss of identity and an identity crisis as culture impacts identity. Global culture will create more conflicts on preserving a certain culture, leading to the loss of human life. Furthermore, culture creates diversity and relationships if there is one common global culture, we will lose the diversity and what makes us unique.
Language a key expression of culture will start diminishing and eventually die as groups of people will adapt to the dominant language. The younger generation is now starting to adapt to different slangs and languages and their way of talking is now like the Americans. and Globalization has also led to an increasing inequality gap as those who can only invest in learning the global language have more and better opportunities in terms of business, education, and livelihood.
It is very evident that Western culture is dominating the minority of cultures throughout the globe, while this could be a good thing some aspect such as the commercialization of culture has increased. MacDonaldization or fast-food culture has rapidly increased and local and cultural food is now being replaced by unhealthy fast food at an alarming rate and this further leads to a host of health problems in children and adults such as obesity and heart problems. Furthermore, more children are now dressing in more Western clothes, and traditional clothing such as sarees, bowler hats, kilts, kimonos, etc are worn less and less by children. Festivals such as Halloween are being celebrated more and more around the globe as a result of globalization and increasing global culture. Even though Halloween is an important and unique festival celebrated in America, the concept of Halloween is not very meaningful in other cultures and does not align with other culture’s traditions and beliefs the celebration of Halloween and other such festivals is gaining popularity and is now celebrated all over the globe.
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