PETRAJ
Socio-cultural homogenization
Socio-cultural aspects
Globalization
Human societies across the globe have established closer contacts over many centuries, but recently the pace has dramatically increased. Globalization in an overwhelming world trend. Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and raw materials move ever more swiftly across national borders. Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely. As a result, laws, economies and social movements are forming at the International level.
Homogenization
Consumer goods are becoming homogenous all over the world. People use the same kind of things: from planes and cars to pins. With this goes a consumeristic way of life and system of values that concentrate on the material world and on physical comfort (Featherstone, Lash & Robertson, 1995). Homogenization is basically something imposed on people by market forces. It treats people as objects. However, it should be noticed that even while they use those goods, people can and do assert themselves as subjects, integrating them in their own way of life. People are not passively accepting, as they have great freedom to select the way of their lives. In this sense, people could choose their own favorites, regardless of the external factors. The global tendency could not eliminate culture diversity, because we have the right to stick to our cultures.
Does homogenization at the consumeristic and rational-scientific levels result in cultural homogenization?
A culture is the way of life of a people through which they humanize and socialize nature. It implies a world-view, a value system, and a network of social relationships (Featherstone, 1996). Culture is not static; it grows out of reverence for selected customs and habits. Indeed, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines culture as the “total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in speech, action, and artifacts and dependent upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.”
Culture can be analyzed in terms of three dimensions (Appadurai, 1996). At the first level, the humans relate to nature and to life. They produce and use goods, and eventually exchange them. The second level relates to symbols and rituals which help the humans to structure social relationships, build community and celebrate it. The third level is the quest for ultimate meaning that offers goals and motivations. Religions and ideologies provide answers to this quest. These three levels provide an identity to a social group and distinguish it from other groups.
Culture is changing. People make culture, culture makes people (Tomlinson, 1999). Culture does change in dialogue with changing economic and socio-political circumstances. A culture changes with other cultures with which it is brought into contact through commercial or political relations. However, cultures are constructed by people.
Creative persons can contribute to the change and development of a culture. People are not mere objects of cultural influences, but subjects who can sift various influences and reject or integrate them.
Homogenization’s Influence on Culture
Global homogenization has an impact on culture at all the three levels mentioned above. It affects directly the production and use of consumer goods. People use the same kind of goods everywhere. But even such use is set in differing social contexts.
Homogenization brought about by globalization is superficial and is limited to the material level of the consumer goods used by people and a certain consumer culture that is artificially promoted by the media. It does not affect how people relate to each other and how they find meaning and purpose in life. It leaves largely untouched the freedom and agency of the subjects in the creating and changing culture, both as individual and as groups (Friedman, 1994).
Globalization Enhances Cultural Identity
In the new era of globalization, people become much more concerned about the uniqueness and particularity of their own culture. Cultural identity provides the global significance of local knowledge and the sense of self, community and nation.
Since people construct their identities through their cultures, they will defend them.
It's true, globalization may lead to hegemonic control and hopefully also to a sense of “togetherness”. The planet is our lifeboat and we are all in this boat together. Globalization can also lead to a sense of “deeply-rooted-in-one’s-culture,” and the global significance of local knowledge. These two dimensions can form a very fruitful interaction. Globalization and localization are so much integrated that we have to coin a new word “glocal”, both global and local. Therefore, togetherness is not at all in conflict with diversity.
The world becomes more diverse and more “together”.
The Impact of Globalization on Design, and Design’s Impact on Globalization
The world is shrinking, markets are expanding and manufacturing industries have decentralized. New industrialized nations have risen, global economies are changing the playing field and technology continues to speed forward at a breathtaking pace.
The impact of this has turned design and the designer, from a beneficial luxury within the process of getting new products to market to an absolute necessity.
The goal is to identify the common denominators; the function and form, the desired emotional attachment to an object that link consuming humanity, despite cultural differences, around the planet.
Global consumers’ desires, needs and taste have been challenged only to evolve until finally they converge in the form of a holistic design for everyone resulting in a “slick,” “slim,” “fit in the pocket,” “multi-mono functional,” “eco-friendly dreaming,” “iPod looking,” “this symbolizes me,” “this is who I aspire to be” design.
Whether we are designing cosmetic containers, soda bottles or cell phones in one country or another, at the end of the day, these products produced with the efficiency of low-cost, high-volume manufacturing, are becoming dangerously ubiquitous and will ultimately be marketed to all of us, right here, right now, right across the planet.
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