2.4: Global Culture?

Who Gets to Define Global Culture?

Culture moves, mixes, mutates, and surprises us. But it does not move through a vacuum. Some languages travel farther because they are attached to powerful states, large markets, or global institutions. Some films reach hundreds of millions of viewers because they have massive distribution networks behind them. Some creators can turn a regional style into an international trend almost overnight because a platform, celebrity, record label, fashion house, or entertainment company amplifies it. Other communities produce extraordinary cultural work that remains largely invisible outside a local or diasporic audience.

This is where cultural globalization becomes inseparable from power. The question is no longer only how culture travels. It is also: Who gets the microphone? Who decides what becomes globally visible? Who is treated as sophisticated, modern, aspirational, or universal? Whose culture is labeled traditional, exotic, backward, niche, or ethnic? Who gets paid when cultural practices circulate? Who gets credit? Who gets translated, streamed, promoted, and exported—and who gets reduced to raw material for someone else’s version of it?

These questions sit at the heart of debates over global communication because cultural exchange has always involved a tension between structure and agency: global media systems can privilege some producers over others, but audiences are not passive recipients and continually reinterpret what reaches them (Demont-Heinrich, 2011).

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Culture Has Gatekeepers. Cultural globalization happens through markets as well as communities. Advertising, entertainment firms, media companies, fashion houses, and digital platforms possess very different capacities to make particular images and lifestyles visible across borders. Global visibility is therefore not the same thing as cultural neutrality. (Photo by Julien on Unsplash).

Cultural Imperialism: When Influence Becomes Dominance

One of the classic concepts used to describe unequal cultural power is cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism refers to the dominance of one society’s cultural products, values, symbols, institutions, or media over others, especially when that influence reflects broader economic or political inequalities. Scholars have long used the concept to analyze the way powerful media systems can shape transnational cultural flows, even as more recent scholarship has complicated older models that treated audiences as simply absorbing whatever dominant media industries sent them (Demont-Heinrich, 2011).

The idea became particularly influential in debates about the spread of Western (and especially American) media, consumer culture, advertising, fast food, fashion, film, television, and popular music. At first glance, the argument seems obvious. Hollywood films have circulated globally for decades. American brands became symbols of modern consumer culture in many parts of the world. English dominates important sectors of international business, higher education, science, aviation, and digital communication. This matters because culture does more than entertain. It carries assumptions about what a desirable life looks like. A film can normalize certain family structures, beauty standards, gender roles, forms of consumption, or ideas about freedom. An advertisement can make one lifestyle appear modern while another seems outdated. A language can become associated with professional advancement while a local language is treated as something useful mainly at home.

Cultural imperialism asks us to notice that these processes are not always reciprocal. But the concept has limits. It can imply that audiences are passive. They are not. People interpret media through local histories, languages, social norms, political contexts, and personal experience. They parody, reject, localize, remix, reinterpret, or simply ignore imported cultural products. That tension between structural inequality and audience agency is one reason cultural imperialism remains useful but insufficient as a complete explanation of global culture (Demont-Heinrich, 2011).

Americanization: Still Powerful, No Longer the Whole Story

For much of the twentieth century, discussions of cultural globalization often centered on Americanization, and there were good reasons for that. The United States developed extraordinary global influence through film, television, music, advertising, consumer brands, universities, technology firms, sports, and military and political power. For many people around the world, the visible face of globalization looked distinctly American: blue jeans, Coca-Cola, Hollywood, McDonald’s, MTV, Nike, Disney, the English language, American universities, American internet companies, and American social media platforms.

That influence remains substantial. But if we stop there, we misunderstand the cultural world students actually inhabit. The contemporary global cultural landscape is far more multipolar. South Korean music and television have become globally influential. Japanese anime and gaming have shaped generations of audiences. Nigerian and Ghanaian music circulate through global streaming networks. Indian cinema reaches vast transnational publics. Latin American music repeatedly reshapes global popular culture. Turkish television dramas have developed enormous audiences across multiple regions.

Global cultural power is still unequal. It is just less simple than before.

Soft Power: When Culture Does Political Work

Culture can also function as a form of soft power. Political scientist Joseph Nye developed the concept to describe influence generated through attraction rather than coercion or payment: countries may gain international influence when others find their culture, values, institutions, or public image appealing. Soft power matters because governments understand that cultural influence can have political effects. A country whose music, films, universities, food, sports, language, or public image are widely admired may find it easier to attract tourists and international students, support exports, cultivate diplomatic relationships, or improve its reputation abroad. Yet soft power is not something governments can simply manufacture on command. A cultural product may become popular for reasons entirely unrelated to state policy, and audiences may admire a country’s artists while strongly criticizing its government.

The Hallyu Effect: When Culture Becomes Strategy

South Korea offers one of the most widely studied examples of contemporary cultural soft power. The global spread of Korean music, television, film, beauty, food, and fashion is often described through the term Hallyu, or the Korean Wave. Scholars have examined Hallyu not simply as entertainment but as an important source of South Korean soft power and international image-building (Lee, 2009). Hallyu’s rise cannot be explained as a government project alone. Its global success emerged from interactions among state cultural policy, private entertainment companies, artists, international fans, commercial markets, and digital platforms. Fans translate content, create fan accounts, organize events, learn Korean, remix dances, and form communities across national boundaries. Soft power does not travel only from governments to audiences. Audiences participate in producing it.

Q-Pop: When Global Influence Becomes Local Identity

In Kazakhstan, Q-pop emerged as a localized popular-music movement influenced in part by K-pop aesthetics, production systems, performance styles, and fan cultures while incorporating the Kazakh language and local cultural references. Studies describe Q-pop as a form of cultural glocalization in which international pop styles are adapted to Kazakh linguistic, social, and cultural conditions rather than simply copied (Zholamanova & Oh, 2025). The genre is particularly associated with the group Ninety One, whose rise helped establish Q-pop as a recognizable cultural movement. Scholars have linked Q-pop to debates over youth culture, language, nationalism, identity, and post-Soviet cultural transformation (Danabayev & Park, 2020; Zholamanova & Oh, 2024). It reflects diffusion, glocalization, and hybridity, while also connecting cultural globalization to national identity. A cultural form influenced from abroad can sometimes reinforce local identity rather than weaken it. That is the opposite of what simplistic theories of cultural homogenization would predict.

Global Culture Is Not a One-Way Street

Older models of cultural globalization often looked something like Center → Periphery. Powerful countries produced culture. Everyone else consumed it. There is still truth in that model. Global entertainment markets remain highly concentrated. Large companies control distribution. English-language media enjoys enormous advantages. Wealthy countries possess greater resources for production and promotion. But contemporary global culture increasingly looks more like a network. A Nigerian musical style can shape a British artist. A Korean group can borrow from African American musical traditions. A Colombian artist can collaborate with a Puerto Rican producer and reach listeners around the world. A Japanese visual style can influence European animators. A Kazakh group can borrow Korean pop aesthetics while using those forms to strengthen Kazakh-language youth culture. It does not mean cultural exchange has become equal but it means inequality now operates inside a much more complicated web.

Global Platforms: The New Cultural Gatekeepers

Once upon a time, cultural gatekeeping was easier to identify. Editors decided what books were published. Studios decided what films were distributed. Record labels decided which musicians received contracts. Television networks decided which programs entered homes. Those gatekeepers still matter, but now platforms matter too. Streaming services and social-media platforms do not merely host cultural content. They organize visibility. Recommendation systems decide what appears next. Search rankings determine what gets found. Playlists can dramatically expand a song’s audience. Language settings can widen or limit reach. Content-moderation rules can suppress or amplify particular forms of expression. Research increasingly treats recommender systems not simply as neutral technical tools but as cultural systems whose design assumptions and ranking practices can reproduce social and cultural bias (Gupta et al., 2022; Hamidy, 2024). These are cultural decisions disguised as technical ones.

Algorithmic Culture

Algorithms increasingly influence what people hear, watch, read, buy, and imitate. That means they also influence what people understand as popular. Suppose millions of users are shown the same song. The song becomes more popular. Because it is popular, the platform recommends it more often. Now popularity feeds itself. The algorithm is no longer simply measuring culture. It is helping structure cultural attention. This creates extraordinary opportunities. A musician recording from a bedroom can reach millions. A diaspora creator can speak directly to a global audience. A small-language community can build an international network. But the same systems can create new inequalities. Content in dominant languages may have advantages. Material that fits familiar commercial categories may be easier to recommend. The architecture of a platform can quietly influence the architecture of culture.

The Strange Life of “World Music”

Even our labels reveal power. Consider world music. It sounds inclusive. But music from the United States or Britain is rarely classified simply as “world music.” It is pop, rock, hip-hop, country, or electronic. Meanwhile, music from Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East has often been grouped into one broad category that essentially means music from somewhere else. Some cultural products are treated as universal. Others are marked as culturally specific. Global Studies asks us to notice who gets to occupy the category of normal.

Who Gets Called Modern?

Cultural power also shapes ideas about modernity. For centuries, colonial and Eurocentric narratives treated Western societies as modern and others as traditional. The distinction provided ideological support for empire because, once one society was classified as advanced and another as backward, domination could be reframed as civilization or development. Similar assumptions can persist in subtler forms. A glass skyscraper is treated as modern architecture. An Indigenous building method is treated as heritage. A Western business suit is interpreted as professional. Traditional clothing is interpreted as ceremonial. English is described as globally useful. A local language is described as culturally important. Notice the difference, one category is associated with the future, the other with preservation.

Cultural Resistance

People do not simply accept global cultural hierarchies. They resist them. Communities revive endangered languages. Artists deliberately use Indigenous or minority languages. Movements reclaim clothing once stigmatized under colonial rule. Museums face demands to return cultural objects. Creators refuse categories imposed by global markets. Parents establish heritage-language schools for diaspora children. Preservation does not always mean freezing culture, sometimes survival depends on reinvention.

Cultural Power Is Not Just About Countries

States are not the only actors that wield cultural power. Corporations do. Platforms do. Museums do. Universities do. Fashion houses do. Sports leagues do. Influencers do. Tourism industries do. Diaspora communities do. And sometimes a teenager with a phone unexpectedly does. Formal power and cultural influence do not always align. A smaller country can generate enormous cultural influence. A marginalized community can create a style that becomes globally dominant without gaining proportional economic power from it. A platform headquartered in one country can influence cultural visibility across the entire world.

The Cultural Power Test

When analyzing a cultural form, ask five questions: Who created it? Who amplified it? Who changed it? Who profited from it? Who received credit? Those answers are often different. And the distance between them tells us a great deal about power. That is where cultural exchange begins to blur into cultural extraction.And that brings us to another of globalization’s most difficult questions: When does borrowing become appropriation?

Think About It!

Pick one globally popular cultural product and apply the Cultural Power Test. Are the people who created it, amplified it, profited from it, and received credit the same people? If not, what does the difference tell you about cultural power?

Ideas Travel Too: Religion, Ideology, and the Problem with Civilizational Boxes

Not everything that travels through globalization can be worn, eaten, streamed, or downloaded.

Ideas travel too.

Religions have moved across borders for thousands of years through migration, pilgrimage, trade, conquest, missionary activity, empire, diaspora, education, and now digital communication. Christianity emerged in the eastern Mediterranean before becoming a global religion. Buddhism moved from South Asia through trade and political networks across much of Asia. Islam spread across an enormous geographic space through merchants, migration, political expansion, scholarship, and religious communities. Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Indigenous, and countless other religious traditions have similarly been reshaped as communities move and encounter new social environments.

Globalization therefore does not simply spread religions. It changes the contexts in which religions are practiced. A religious community in diaspora may become more deliberate about preserving traditions precisely because it is surrounded by different ones. Younger generations may blend religious practices with new national identities. Digital platforms now allow sermons, rituals, debates, religious education, and religious communities to circulate across borders almost instantly.

Political ideologies travel in similar ways. Liberalism, nationalism, socialism, communism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-colonialism, human rights, religious nationalism, and democracy have all crossed borders, although never as perfectly packaged exports. Ideas are translated, contested, adapted, resisted, and combined with local histories. Much like music or food, political ideas become glocalized.

This makes one influential argument about culture especially worth examining.

In the 1990s, political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that major post-Cold War conflicts would increasingly occur along the boundaries of large cultural or “civilizational” groupings rather than primarily between competing political ideologies or economic systems (Huntington, 1993, 1996). His framework became enormously influential, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because it seemed to offer a simple map for understanding conflict in a complicated world.

The simplicity is also the problem.

Civilizations are not internally uniform actors. “Islamic,” “Western,” “Hindu,” “Sinic,” or other enormous civilizational categories contain countries, languages, political movements, classes, ethnicities, religious interpretations, and individuals with profoundly different interests. Critics including Edward Said argued that treating civilizations as coherent blocs risks turning extraordinarily diverse populations into opposing camps and can make political conflict appear culturally inevitable when its causes may also involve colonial histories, territory, state power, inequality, economics, or strategic interests (Said, 2001).

Globalization gives us evidence for both cultural friction and cultural mixing. Religious nationalism can harden boundaries, while diaspora communities can create identities that cross them. Political movements can mobilize cultural difference, while artists, migrants, students, businesses, and families create relationships that make supposedly separate civilizations surprisingly difficult to separate.

That tension gives us a better question than whether civilizations are destined to clash:When does cultural difference become a source of conflict, and when do political actors make cultural difference into one?