The Cultural Impact Of Americanization: The Globalization Of Culture

The Globalization of Culture Globalization is a phenomenon that arose from the industrial revolution in the 19th century, and has been progressively expanding since. According to Joan Ferrante (2015), globalization is the “ever increasing flow of goods, services, people…and other cultural items across political boundaries.” There is much speculation associated with globalization in terms of social and economic growth, but the cultural aspects of globalization are often overlooked and misconstrued with global Americanization (Legrain 2003). Globalization has had resulted in a major downplay on cultural individualism, and also on the way that different cultures view each other. In this paper I will explore globalization’s cultural impact on …show more content…

According to cultural anthropologist Joana Breidenbach (1999), globalization takes precedence over the importance of locality, which causes “a number of traditional practices, whole ways of life and worldviews disappear.” To illustrate this, she explains “special fishing techniques of the Inuit are forgotten and it is estimated that just 10% of over 6,500 languages spoken today will survive.” This indication presents a direct correlation between globalization and cultural homogeneity, due to the fact that without segregation of cultural norms and mores, diversity—while it seems to be increasing with globalization—is at risk of becoming nonexistent. Political scientist Philip Legrain provides an unbiased research analysis illuminating this position, explaining the pros and cons of globalization. In his scholarly article, “Cultural Globalization is not Global Americanization” (2003), he contrasts the proponent belief: globalization is “globalizing American culture and American cultural icons” with the anti-globalizer argument that the “buzzword in global marketing isn’t selling America to the world, but bringing a kind of market masala to everyone in the world. …globalization doesn’t want diversity; quite the opposite”—though, both arguments illuminate essentially the same idea of cultural homogeneity. Whether globalization is selling American culture to the world or allowing interconnection between different cultures, the line that distinguishes one culture from the next is becoming increasingly