Global popular culture✅

A global popular culture

  • Flew suggests that the evolution of new media technologies, such as satellite TV and the internet, has played an important role in the development of a global popular culture.

  • Kellner argues that the media has the power to globally produce images of lifestyles that increasingly become part of everyday life and through which people form their identities and views of the world. The global culture is primarily American in origin.

Global culture refers to the way cultures in different counties of the world have become more alike, sharing increasingly similar consumer products and ways of life. This has arisen as globalisation has undermined national and local cultures

  • Globalisation has undermined national and local cultures, as the same cultural and consumer products are now sold across the world, inspired and promoted by global media content and advertising. These products become apart of the ways of life of many different countries, spreading a popular culture which makes what were once different cultures more and more alike.

  • This process of a powerful media making the cultures of different countries become more alike, and merged into one uniform culture, is known as cultural homogenisation, and it may now be more appropriate to speak of a homogenised global culture than national or local cultures.

  • Advances in multi-media technology, like satellite TV and the internet, and the digitisation of cultural products like music and visual art, mean that today’s media conglomerates operate in a global marketplace.

  • As well as breaking down the distinction between high culture and popular culture, this new digital world also breaks down the cultural distance between countries, and popular culture is spread beyond the boundaries of particular nation-states, with the same cultural products sold across the globe.

Sklair (2012)

  • Suggests the media, largely American-based, spread news, information, ideas, entertainment and popular culture to a global market.

  • The media blur the differences between information, entertainment and promotion of products, and sell across the world ideas, values and products associated with what is presented as an idealised, happy and satisfying consumerist American/Western lifestyle.

  • This encourages acceptance of the dominant ideology of Western capitalist societies, which Sklair cals the ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’.

  • It is Western companies such as Microsoft and Google that have dominated the growth of the internet, which increasingly spreads this same Western culture-ideology of consumerism.

  • Inspired by the media-generated culture industry and global advertising and marketing, consumers around the world increasingly have a shared popular culture, with people watching the same Western/American TV programmes and films, listening to the same music, eating the same food, following the same sporting events, wearing the same designer clothes and labels and sharing the same fashions, playing the same computer games, carrying the same phones and sharing many aspects of their lifestyles, beliefs and identities.

Ritzer (2008)

  • Companies and brands now operate on a global scale, promoting a global culture among with the consumer lifestyles associated with them, and also weakening local cultures.

  • Companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, HSBC, McDonald’s, Vodafone, Starbucks, Sony and Nike use the transnational media to promote their products on a global stage, and their logos are now global brands that can be recognised across the world.

  • Television and production companies - predominantly from the USA and the UK - sell their programmes and programme formats globally.

  • For example, by 2012, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? had been distributed to 120 countries; The Weakest Link had been seen in 60 countries and Big Brother in 64 countries. 160 million viewers in china were watching subtitles episodes of Downtown Abbey in 2014, and localised versions of Britain’s Got Talent, Big Brother, and The X Factor have been huge successes, with hundreds of millions of viewers.

  • Computer/video games are a global phenomenon - for example, Grant Theft Auto V, produced by the American firm Take-Two Interactive Software, in 2013 became the fastest-earning entertainment product of all time, hitting $1 billion in global sales in just three days.

It is the media that have made some US and British film, music and sports stars known across the world, enabling huge success in marketing their merchandise in global markets; and it is the media that have contributed substantially to English becoming the internationally dominant and preferred second language of most of the world.