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.
It is the borderless, border blurring, redefining or even border erasing in many ways that are referring to the layers of meaning represented in terms – urban, ethno and world. Not that geographical, social, religious borders are erased, they are just defined in another way in the culture that is taking as its primary and maybe ultimate aim to be and become Global. That aim being both understandable and obscure enough is giving the equal and almost borderless chances to prosperity as for the significant deterioration that goes out of control in a seemingly spontaneous way. Both the compliance and resistance are equally considered to be the constituting parts of Global Culture. Both arising from on one hand the broadening of understanding, empathy and constructive identification and on the other hand it also boosts narrow-mindedness, fanaticism and destruction for some local cause often incommunicable to the closest “cultural neighbors”.
It is decentralized and diversifying and yet self defining in so many details that in its fragmentation and equality of all of them it lacks to be self defined globally as its name, Global Culture, imposes. Similarly to pre-historic times or at least to how we see them now, today, names and definitions are given so easily. Simplification is nesting in the core of complexity and vice versa. Both Polock and Neolithic tribes lived under their respective cults and tribal ways of direct and immediate associations abstracting from the reality of life and symbolizing it their way, not knowing how they are going to be named after they left their track in creation. Since the Renaissance European culture has been intent on defining, giving names and titles, inventing them or deriving them one from the other. The only term we have gained is Postmodernism. This term is associated to the end of our local, be it even leading, culture and like our civilization has already ended before our eyes while we have survived it as its witnesses and/or byproducts scattered in short time and planet wide place. Mostly because the Millennium Edge that we have passed over we took that “Post-” prefix denomination as granted and accepted to live our post-lives in our own post-world as if not needing further definitions or as if not finding or being able to create new ones, or if not taking care any more of that. We self define details leaving the universe to develop and control us in its own way without having an articulated pledge that we could create it and have control over it. Instead, we articulate many separate pledges over individual sets of issues and values. No matter how local that may seem it is happening at the same time on global level forming more or less successful coexistence of many diversifying, decentralized trends.
It is young, erratic. Even if it is not considered to be the culture of the youth itself it is giving to the youth the same chance as to anyone else to lead along the way their way. Maybe it is just a more natural chance to get in and out of any task with the winning attitude. The main point of communication is more like CommuniAction: the embodiment of more involving and more of two-way active communications reflecting in the true changes in the sphere of private life, art, cooperation and businesses but also in the sphere of conflicts, clash and erratic rather than strategic fights that are shaping our reality.
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