The Globalisation of Culture
Trade agreements have removed all obstacles and
resistance to corporate invasion and control of the Third World. With
the liberalisation of telecommunications under GATS, corporate culture
is set to rule the world. Today the whole world is wired and plugged
into the TV programmes, movies, news, music, lifestyles and
entertainment of the North. Satellite cables, phones, walkmans, VCDs,
DVDs and retail giants and other marvels and wonders of entertainment
technology are creating the mass marketing of culture. Through these
channels and networks corporations homogenise the consumer culture of
the North.
All over the world people of all ages are exposed to
the same music, the same sporting events, the same news, sitcoms, soap
operas and the same glamorous lifestyle. US corporate culture is
available everywhere. Satellite TV has made available viewing anytime of
the night and day. More than 75 percent of the world’s population have
access to daily TV reception. In South America and Asia, US films and TV
programmes dominate the screens. Every week viewers in Malaysia, click
with ‘Ally McBeal’, her angst in her quest for true happiness and
love. Young people the world over aspire for the kind of adult
relationships found in ‘Friends’.
Young people in Third World countries are the largest
consumers of the global culture and global corporations are racing to
get a piece of the market, even children are not spared. Sony has
developed its range of toy-like radios, kids music label and videos for
this age group. With MTV, global entertainment reached its apex; today
it beams daily to over 200 million households in over seventy countries.
The biggest growth potential for pop music is in South America and Asia.
Foreign pop brands and local versions and renditions of the same
synthesised beat is imitated every where. Local artistes belt out songs
popularised by the ‘Spice Girls’, and ‘West Life’ with the same
stage sets, manoeuvres and costumes.
The penetration of global music has resulted in the
marginalisation of traditional music among cultures the world over.
Today, pop music and its local variations can be heard in all social
settings from weddings to religious festivals and birthday celebrations.
Young people have lost touch with traditional harmonies and traditional
tunes; songs and dances which are specific to regions or villages in
Third World countries, are no longer heard. Transnational sound has
destroyed cultural diversity every where. Ironically, as Third World
artistes consciously imitate their western counterparts, indigenous
music and genres have been hijacked by western musicians and pop bands
as free global commodities. Global entertainment is addictive to the
young because it is selling an experience and an image. It gives the
illusion that we are all connected in this global world. That is why the
World Cup fever is such a seismic global event sweeping everyone into
its megapresence. In Malaysia, giant screens are installed outdoors and
hundreds of fans rave, rant and weep (and get drunk) on the fortunes of
their favourite teams. Deaths have also been reported as a result of
heart attacks brought on by watching the matches.
TV offers not only entertainment, it embodies the
sheer power and influence of global corporate culture. It has become the
most powerful and insidious tool of mass education in the Third World;
like an immovable juggernaut it shapes lifestyles and values and fills
the vacuum emptied by the pervasive collapse of traditional
institutions, communities, clans, family, life, and authority. Through
Hollywood movies, programmes and global advertising we learn, cultivate
and internalise values and lifestyles.
TV not only creates artificial needs, it undermines
the meaning of community, wealth and the notion of self. The effects
have been particularly devastating among indigenous communities. When TV
was introduced among the Dene Indians and Inuit peoples in the Arctic,
children lost interest in the native language, they wanted to learn
Canadian English; they refuse to learn how to fish on the ice or go
hunting. It has ended the tradition of story telling through which the
old handed their experience, Indian culture, traditions, oral history
and way of life to the young who had a sense of place and their roots.
TV makes the young important and the old redundant. ‘Young people did
not want to be Indians, in fact they hate being Indians - they want to
be Canadians and Americans’. The old were silently witnessing the
death of their culture (Mander 1996c: 352). American values as
encapsulated in ‘Dallas’ are eloquently captured in the words of an Dene
Indian: ‘People are sitting in their log houses, alongside their
frozen lakes with dog teams tied up outside, watching a bunch of white
people in Dallas, standing around their swimming pools, drinking
martinis, and plotting to destroy each other or steal from each other or
get their partners’ wives into bed. Then after that comes a show about
a man turning into a machine… The effect has been to glamorise
behaviours and values that are poisonous to life up here. Our traditions
have a lot to do with survival. Community co-operation, sharing, and non
materialism are the only ways that people can live here. But TV always
presents values opposite to those.’ (Ibid: 351-52). It is life
and soul destroying and obliterates the richness and diversity of life.
In the Third World TV serves to heighten the stark
contrasts between the poor majority and the rich few. An Indian social
scientist has tried to explain the recent suicide epidemic sweeping the
sub-continent as a result of social breakdown and culture induced
stress. According to him, ‘economic liberalisation has further widened
the gulf between the rich and the poor’. The opening up of the economy
has benefited the elite further; while ‘traditional bonds of extended
families have snapped, leading to the disintegration of old family
support structures. Increasing westernisation of the Indian elite, the
rat race for personal wealth and glory has contributed to the loss of
equilibrium. The stress on material values rather than moral or
spiritual values, increasing consumerism, fuelled by myriad satellite TV
channels’ so that the rich now ‘drive around in foreign cars, wear
branded clothes and patronise expensive discos and five star hotels have
contributed to the suicide frenzy in the economically deprived
communities. Dazzled by the riches of the Indian elite, the poor take
increasingly to crime. When this short cut to riches fails, as in most
cases it must, the poor commit suicide’. (Coomi Kapoor, 10 July,
2000). Seventy percent of Indians do not have access to sanitation; 53
percent of children under five are underweight; almost 16 percent of the
total population cannot hope to survive beyond the age of 40. Some 44
percent of the population is under the international poverty line of US$
1 per day (Ibid). In the midst of this, corporate food chains vie
to capture a dedicated following among the rich and the young, for the
new tastes and lifestyles that Pepsi, Coke, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried
Chicken offer.
In this theatre of life, corporations dominate and
shape our perceptions of how life should be lived. In the US, some 75
percent of commercial network TV time is paid for by the hundred largest
corporations meaning these entitles determine what goes on TV, hence
deciding what viewers should watch. The average viewer watches 22,000
commercials every year. Thus ‘twenty two thousand times, corporations
place images in our brains to suggest that there is something great
about buying commodities. Some advertise cars, others drugs … but all
commercials agree that you should buy something and that human life is
most satisfying when inundated with commodities. Between commercials
there are programs, also created by corporations, that espouse values
consistent with the ads… It is the pathbreaker for cars, paved roads,
western franchise foods, frantic and stressful lifestyles, loss of
traditional skills, immersion in computers, walkmans, CD ROMs’ (Mander
1996a: 3,11).
TV has become the agent for the new global corporate
vision. In this manner, a whole new generation has been schooled and
future generations will be taught. It packages vicarious experience and
synthesised canned consciousness severing people from human connections
and the real world around them. In like manner, the computer age is
inflicting the same subtle damages. Adults and kids alike spend hours
surfing or chatting on-line. Like video and film and global
entertainment, the computer becomes the substitute for human
interactions, community and civic life. Little by little the machine
conditions our lives, our consciousness and we lose the sense of
inter-connectedness, human sensitivity and understanding that is vital
for survival in the web of life on this planet.
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