2.4: At Home and Abroad - A Hypothetical Friendship

Learning Objectives

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

• Explain how cultural globalization shapes everyday social relationships.
• Analyze the role of technology, transportation, and communication in expanding cross-cultural connections.
• Evaluate both the opportunities and limitations created by increasing global connectivity.

Introduction

The effects of cultural globalization are often easiest to understand through everyday experiences. Advances in communication, transportation, and digital technology have transformed the ways people form friendships, exchange ideas, and participate in shared cultural practices. What once required months of travel or expensive international phone calls can now happen instantly through online communities and social media.

The following example illustrates how cultural globalization has changed everyday life within a single generation.

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 rather than a fixed outcome. New technologies continue to expand opportunities for cultural exchange while also revealing persistent inequalities in access and influence. Although highly developed economies and global cities remain important producers of popular culture, cultural globalization is increasingly multidirectional. Ideas, media, cuisine, fashion, and artistic traditions now circulate among societies in complex ways, adapting to local contexts through processes such as glocalization.

Rather than producing a single global culture, cultural globalization creates new forms of interaction, negotiation, and exchange. Individuals and communities retain agency in deciding which cultural elements to adopt, adapt, or reject. Understanding this dynamic process helps explain why globalization continues to generate both greater interconnectedness and greater cultural diversity.