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The year 2005, are we the people of the world now living in the same culture: a Global Culture? If we are, what are the general features we experience? What benefits, dangers and secrets can it hold for us? What are its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
The Global Culture can be outlined as: Belonging to all and yet to no one; similar to great works of art that are gradually losing their original meaning. In art, the most personal artistic cause and dedication is so often transformed depending on the development of their further contextual existence in different ages into the cult objects, places or entities - the milestones of visual arts, literature, drama and sometimes history of the époque.
The concept pf the Global Culture is spreading fast due to broadcast coverage of global media, internet and political, economic and military power of the creating and radiating sources. The sense of such a central broadcasting is becoming normalized and it can not be weakened, transformed, silenced or destroyed. The effect of speed and coverage has now become heightened and more ore less a need for all. If the central broadcaster is destroyed, everything will be destroyed with it. Sacred inscriptions and books that were hidden in the dawn of humanity or that were stored in the libraries now can be lost instantly when the server is seriously damaged or backup destroyed, or when a whole library of digital content embracing the knowledge of the highest rank can be seriously threatened by a simple program like computer virus. If something like this were to happen it is possible for the knowledge to survive through some form of mouth to mouth.
The ideas of creating and manipulating such knowledge are huge, as it is becoming more and more vulnerable to stand the test of time. After the crash of one empire, regardless of its size, in the middle ages its knowledge and history lasted for centuries. Its history was passed down in the form of epic literature, poetry or oral ways. Later, when it was printed in books the traditional forms of keeping one’s history alive through oral poetry was turned into more of a marginal and rare art that was limited to annual festivals of ethnical and musical character. The technology of creating and maintaining the livelihood of some cultures alone can define either the marginalization of that content or the remittance into the mainstream.
The abstraction and digitalization of material is defining our life in consumer society. Its powerful consumer approach has started to turn us into digital and abstract consumers. Even more, it is turning the digitalized issues of global culture, turning the information into goods again and thus giving the idea of materialism reversed flow in human perceptions. We might wonder about future generations and the fact that very soon they will need to establish borders between “reality and fiction”. Without this distinction further evolution of the human mind will challenge the perceptions of that difference by progressing further towards blurring the edges between the abstract and material.
The term Culture entered languages as early as the 15th century but the term Subculture was only derived in the last decades of the 19th century. In global culture the subcultures spread into myriads of branches creating a pattern. This pattern is known as a network culture where everything can be provisionally regarded as equal; equally connected but also far and close to the core culture covering the “body” of what used to be the mainstream culture. More interdisciplinary and specialized approaches are equally possible and equally appreciated in forming the next communicational nods of the same multilayered network that global culture represents. At the same time, the production of a new cultural asset is as important as its product, sometimes even more. More and more products of the latest culture are focused on the processes rather than entities derived from them.
Cosmogony of Global Culture is fragmentary and simultaneous in its development. Nobody is trying to grasp the whole any longer. Not that one could actually do this or that it would be of any use to any one anymore. There are so many things of the equal or opposing importance that are happening and are self-defining as we speak. Each moment of living in Global Culture is a chance for transformation of new values into new amalgam of values. Each moment is also one of deteriorating the old, traditional values in the context of their further development. Paradoxically enough, while the opposites are so quickly turning into one another, with the same ease that they united, the fundament of ‘new’ which is equally important to stand beside the old values or to replace those ones not so long time ago estimated as everlasting.
That way we live in Culture is, concerning its values and entities, more relative in any way than any other culture we would like to compare it to. In earlier examples of cultural patterns the system of values developed slowly leaving the impression of something consistent and stable because of its long valid presence and slow rate of change over time spanning over lives of many generations. In truth, it was always some system whose slow changes were trying with more or less success to catch up with the innovations, with the changes of human creation of new values or evaluation of the old ones. So, in any earlier time we could doubt individual values but rarely could we doubt the system as a whole. In Global Culture we experience a different pattern, often called “cultural shock”. Culture shock is the mixing and adapting of more than one cultural pattern in close touch. The number of these “shocks” is increasing and omnipresent in the lifetime of just one person that they now represent a normal part of the life learning curve. We no longer doubt individual values, we are bound to doubt the existence of the system of values. We are not able to notice that the system is being developed and changing very fast leaving us this time catch up with it, if we want to spread our understanding from the immediate and individual to more general or universal. In this age we need the active, innovating and creative relation to the culture as in earlier times when people were assumed to have more passive, accepting and obedient attitude.
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Writer Profile
Zorica Vukovic
Zo belongs to a generation of average middle-aged intellectuals who grew up in a unique environment of the country known as the former Yugoslavia, which shrank in the last decade of the 20th century, divided into a few new states through civil war and finally dissolved into a union of states known as Serbia and Montenegro. She writes from her early youth, neither living of it, nor even living for it, just observing and meditating upon various issues of life and humanity. Her totemistic values are: love, creativity, ethics and the daily improvement of communications and actions on a global level.
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Comments
the global culture anshumali | Nov 14th, 2005
in the context of global culture one really need to see the functioning of the multinational corporations, since they are managing large and diverse work force, how much change has taken place in them and in the organisations will simply give an insightful understanding of it all, perhaps zo's revelations are exellant.
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