Cultural Integration & Globalisation

Global migration

Cultural integration?

Is it true that major western cities and societies are looking more and more like the sort of cities that middle-class, white, plastic Americans want to live in?

There is a pervading sense that major western cities are becoming very much the same.

Invisible Cities.

Italo Calvino described a fictional city called Trude in his novel Invisible Cities . Calvino's character Marco Polo referred to how there increasingly seemed to be many Trude-like cities in the world.

This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels. Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. "You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail ..." (Calvino, Invisible Cities , 1972:128).

Do we have a world composed of Trudes? Is the culture of western cities homogeneous, uniform? Or increasingly homogeneous?

Are culture and economy becoming increasingly uniform across the globe?

Cities increasingly seem to share compatible systems of commerce, identical leisure pursuits and cuisine, similar social relations, and uniform built environments. There is plenty of evidence of Trude-like convergence across the planet.

Uniform ways of life: language; architectural styles; leisure; fashions; sports; etc

Take for example the spread across the globe of US cultural products, such as Hollywood films, McDonald's cuisine and Coca-cola. The spread of such products helps explain why the beverages and entertainment in Trude-like cities had become so monotonously familiar to the traveller.

The process of cultural integration has come about and accelerated in recent years due to a number of factors:

Technological change (ease of long distance travel and recent developments in communications)

There are a variety of ways in which culture can be spread and be adopted or adapted around the globe.

Kabul, Afghanistan

Diffusion

Adoption

Adaptation

Factors affecting cultural integration

The rapid development of communications technologies, the aims and strategies of transnational corporations in the entertainment industries, and the international regulatory environment, have all contributed to cultural integration.

yourtv.com.au

In recent years, due to sponsorships by large companies, especially globalised companies, and the role of media in particular new cable and satellite channels, the process has accelerated.

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