5.4: At Home and Abroad - A Hypothetical Friendship

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Project future possibilities brought by cultural globalization

New Possibilities through Cultural Globalization: A Hypothetical Friendship 

After discussing the concept of cultural globalization, it is useful to discuss how it impacts everyday people. Keeping in line with the theme of this book, it is important to recognize that we are all participants in the process of cultural globalization, simply by virtue of living in a developed region. For Americans in particular, cultural globalization has made much of the world accessible today in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few decades in the past. The following hypothetical example should illustrate this point. At the time this chapter is being written in 2024, it is totally conceivable that a college student in California can have a meaningful friendship with another college student in Japan. Having met through a common online interest forum, the two people can interact in real time, using devices that clearly present their voices and faces. They can share instantaneous correspondence with each other via internet and smart phone technology. If one wants to fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo for a visit before classes start in August for the Fall term, the trip can be achieved for a price of around $900, and can be done in as little as 11 and a half hours. The costs of telecommunications do not pose a major barrier to these students’ friendship, and the travel cost is probably meaningful, but not impossible to overcome.

To further this example, the two friends likely have common interests, which might include anime that diffused to the United States from Japan, and baseball which diffused from the U.S. to Japan. It is likely that both own at least one pair of blue jeans, and that both like sushi. Finally, the two friends probably communicate with one another in English, which happens to account for over half of the total content on the internet and is a commonly taught second language throughout the world. In 2024, nothing about this situation seems implausible because both the United States and Japan are technologically developed and display high levels of connectivity. A college student in California could just as likely have a similar friend from the Netherlands or Hong Kong. However, forming a friendship with someone from Bangui, Central African Republic seems a lot less likely, due to the fact that levels of development, and therefore access, in Central Africa are much lower.  

Now, consider the likelihood that this friendship happened in 1980s. Not only would the two students not have the opportunity to meet in the first place, due to the lack of the internet, but they would not have even been able to talk to each other affordably. They would have had to talk via long distance land line rates, which were around $2.53 plus $0.95 for each additional minute, according to the New York Times (Rates on overseas phone calls, 1982). Doing some quick math, a 30-minute phone call would have cost $31.03. Adjusting for inflation, that 30-minute call would cost $98.11 in 2024 dollars, likely higher than someone’s total telecommunications expenses for an entire month.  

Conclusion 

Cultural globalization is an ongoing process that is highly dependent on economic development, technology, and accessibility, but it also involves a wide array of aesthetic factors and value systems. The concept itself is highly intertwined with global capitalism and consumerism, as the particular artifacts, sociofacts, and even mentificats associated with cultural globalization are those that constitute popular culture and thus diffuse hierarchically. To this end, developed regions, and the cultural elements created there, have had an advantage when it comes to diffusion, particularly those associated with American culture. However, as levels of development continue to increase around the world, new populations will continue to be connected and thus begin participating in the exchanges necessary to further cultural globalization. Local populations also retain some agency in terms of accepting or rejecting cultural elements, according to their own unique value systems. Adaptations to cultural elements, as seen with glocalized artifacts, along with increased participation in the creation and export of popular culture by actors in non-U.S. markets, suggest that a purely American-based global monoculture, as presented in the McWorld model, is unlikely to come to fruition. While acknowledging the outsized influence of U.S.-based cultural elements promoted by the driving actors of cultural globalization is valid, actors from other developed regions certainly have a hand in the process and as levels of development and connectivity increase, new actors will be able to take part in the process. Therefore, it is important to see cultural globalization as a dynamic process, without a specific predetermined outcome.