Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Head Shop >

The Creation of a World Culture and the Democratization of Artistic Expression

02:53 / 27.02.04

I'm not sure exactly what prompted this, its a lot of things really.
I don't pretend that all of the things I want to be happening are actually happening. I sit here in my apartment in the Midwest and use my computer to find almost anything that human beings have ever made.

I can literally download music from anywhere on earth, Google has Babel Fish, I can translate almost any text into English.

Cultural imperialism as a concept, as a theory of human socialization has gained a lot of proponents, and for the most part I agree with it.
Western culture, particularly American culture, especially American mass media is overwriting itself, duplicating itself worldwide.

This is a tragic and nearly irreversible process.

Note this my opinion, not something I can prove, not something based on specific variables but on a general idea of the future.

My thing is, by the time this exportation has created a loose sort of worldwide cultural homogeny the original cultures themselves wil have changed. America is changing, my guess is that American English and Mexican Spanish are going to slowly become one language.

Or a hundred different regional dialects, or will reinforce each others existence.

Who knows, we could all be speaking Mandarin fity years from now.

The point is, that it is impossible to simply overwrite one culture over another. I would guess that culture will mutate on the local level. Small isolated groups of innovation, which will then be absorbed by the rest of the total culture.

Once again I do not like this, but it does and is happening.
My prime example is the behavior of the music industry.

A group creates a new idea, an A+R man realizes its potential, and it is exploited until the idea has run its course. What I find interesting is the capability of some groups to resist this progress.
To perpetually fly under the radar.

As for the second half of that title, I believe that a computer essentially creates a blank slate artisticly.

A computer creates near complete equality, from the production angle.

I hit post and I publish this little meandering thought process
worldwide.

I don't know, what do you think?

05:51 / 27.02.04

I keep thinking about a genetically diverse ecology being more robust than a genetically homogeneous ecology, and wondering how, if at all, this might apply to a monoculture. The problems are that I've been drinking heavily, and that I'm not quite sure what 'stability' means when applied to culture. I mean, what kinds of actions would 'threaten' a culture and what does it mean for a culture to be 'threatened'?

09:06 / 27.02.04

I'm reading Hardt & Negri's Empire at the moment, which is a nice upbeat theory of globalization. Basically they seem to suggest that "the multitude" produce (things, emotions, modes of subjectivity, cultures, artworks, houses, food, roads, computers) and then the forces of "Empire" (which is a particular mode of sovereignty in global capitalism, not quite equated to US culture but not not US imperialism either) glom down on them and turn them into commodities - like the A&R man in your example. So that usually cheers me up, re the creation of a world culture.

I'm not quite sure from your first post what you don't like, eg:

I would guess that culture will mutate on the local level... Once again I do not like this, but it does and is happening.

When was there ever a culture that didn't mutate on the local level? It sounds like you're attached to an idea of self-contained local (ie confined in space and time) cultures that don't interact with other cultures, and that - to me at least - is not cool.

All is flux, as some Greek dude probably said. Cultures are constantly changing through pressures from within and without. Different groups and lines of association are formed, particularly through technologies and structures of globalization. All we need to do is try and resist the forces that attempt to assert, enforce and police a particular (bad) direction to those flows and lines - eg, capital can move from the First to the Third World, and images/information must flow from the First to the Third World - factories make luxury goods in Sri Lanka and sell them in Europe, the TV exports propaganda about Western lifestyles - but labour cannot move from the Third to the First World. Where's the sense in that? Nowhere.

On the arts stuff - are any of our Australian lithers around? I hear the trade agreement with the US has just been passed, but I haven't heard about the rules that's set for artistic/cultural production. I seem to remember it was probably going to be a Bad Thing, in that it meant that US cultural products would still be globally disseminated but it would be financially more and more difficult for Australian cultural products to be produced (even, I think, for "local" consumption, let alone for export).

11:57 / 27.02.04

I WANT a global culture, I want us to cross-pollenate into a glorious mess. You don't have to lose anything of your own identity because you have integrated others.

I don't think there is a finite space to be filled with cultural influence, but I think you can enlarge yourself with different perspectives.

...

Yeah...

20:39 / 27.02.04

'm not quite sure what 'stability' means when applied to culture.

Stability in a culture means its resistence to changes (esp. large changes). This is neither good nor bad. Changes in the essential elements of a culture constitute a destruction of that culture. This can happen internally or externally or by some combination of the two. A global monoculture is likely to be more stable than the culture of some isolationist islanders somewhere. Such people may have been able to maintain their culture for thousands of years, but the influence of a more open society would probably have a monumental effect on the islanders without anyone in the open society even noticing.

20:13 / 28.02.04

One thing that I have noticed is the effect of a strong culture on a individuals social or religious beliefs. In cultures that traditionally have arranged marriages, such as Hmong or some Islamic cultures, the American culture is a massively destructive thing. It is virtually impossible for them to maintain traditions that run counter to the rest of the culture. I've noticed this affect in strongly literalist Christians as well. This is where you get things like private or homeschooling.

That culture clash can be extremely detrimental to the individual.

You have entire generations, which just don't have gaps, but nearly no mutually shared ideology.

20:30 / 28.02.04

Ghost muzak - your post above is a bit confusing. For example, when you say

the effect of a strong culture on a individuals social or religious beliefs

which culture are you calling "strong" in your example? American (by which presumably you mean secular-Christian bourgeois American culture, rather than, for example, Black Muslim American culture) or the cultures with arranged marriages? I want to engage with some of your points there, but I'm not really sure what they are... is homeschooling bad? What culture clash is detrimental to what individual and in what way? Where and in what ways is American culture destructive to arranged marriages? Are you talking about the born-in-the-US children of immigrant parents, or about the exportation of American culture to other countries?

Really not trying to have a go at you and hope it doesn't come across like that, but I just don't know what you're trying to say, which makes it hard to respond.

20:52 / 28.02.04

I'm sorry if I was being a little vague. I was taking three examples from my own life, and not properly explaining them before referring to them.
Okay in this case I am thinking of American mass produced entertainment. Which I am sure you know is not a product of an American white christian culture, but its logical successor. Christian influence on culture in the last fifty years has diminished, and while I know many people that call themselves Christians I only know a couple of families which feel that American culture is so antithetical to their beliefs that feel forced to censor their children environment, and to self censor a large majority of the time. I am talking about growing up in such a environment, and then having it replaced by the rest of the culture after leaving. That leap from Christian values to secular values has left me feeling enormously lost and unsure exactly how to proceed. I have a friend who dated a girl who was a second generation Albanian immigrant and her parents were more strict than mine were. Her parents were literally completely unaware of what turned out ot be something like a year and a half long relationship. Being stuck between two cultures, between two different moralities can be a very difficult thing.