Via an article by Alexander Rai entitled “Neoliberalism Globalization and The Commodification of Global Culture”, I’m finding strong support to some of the ideas mentioned in earlier posts.
While the article is a position about the advancement of Neoliberalism and its mechanisms to dominate culture, I found a lot more interesting some of the quotes used by the article itself. In particular those from Jeremy Rifkin in his book The Age Of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience. A few quotes from it:
When all forms of communication become commodities, then culture, the stuff of communications, inevitably becomes a commodity as well. And that is what’s happening. Culture-the shared experiences that give meaning to human life- is being pulled inexorably into the media marketplace, where it is being revamped along commercial lines
Marketing is the means by which the whole of the cultural commons is mined for valuable potential culture meanings that can be transformed by the arts into commodifiable experiences, purchasable in the economy
If the capitalist system continues to absorb large parts of the cultural realm into its sphere in the form of commodified cultural products, productions, and experiences, the risk is very real that the culture will atrophy to the point where it can no longer produce enough social capital and thus support an economy
The article uses Rifkin and other authors to present the case of Cultural Capitalism, which:
Using shells of old cultures and vestiges of marginally extant tradition as familiar icons and anti-icons, creating a set of customized ‘diverse’ and ‘international’ homogenously inspired products aimed to generate maximum profit and address a fundamental consumption based solidarity sugarcoated and sold as ‘Equality’, ‘Diversity’ and of course, ‘Globalization’
The tactics are only accessible to the most powerful brands and corporations:
the gatekeeping function of the new Culture Capitalists creates a widespread commercialization of a few brand genres keeping out a larger output of local innovation and originality through high barriers to entry, making these virtually imperceptible and financially bankrupt in the deluge of cultural systemization, hyper-marketing, and iconization of a few select artists.
So our mission becomes more clear every day:
- collect and document global culture, before it is diluted by the big brands
- provide a mechanism for real culture to compete against hyper-marketing and other techniques of cultural systemization
2 responses so far ↓
1 Manuel Berlanga V // Jun 13, 2006 at 10:13 am
Globalization is barely a new phenomenon. For centuries, people around the world have traveled and move good and services around, modifying local customs and uses. Think in Italian food and you are actually thinking in Chinese and Mexican ingredients that are now so deep into their culture that you are more likely to identify a tomato with Sicily than from Oaxaca. Think in the Native American horse riders, a truly native tradition? hardly, the horse didn’t exist previous to the European arriving to America. People moved around freely and unrestricted, passports didn’t exist previous to 1921!!!!
Globalization was stopped in Berlin with the building of The Wall. Goods and services traffic was severely restricted as well as the flow of ideas. That time was used for the huge corporation to strength in their sphere of influence. That is the time where McDonalds and Coke built their western empire and became a synonymous of Western Civilization (yikes!). That is the time when Latin America got hooked on USA and their huge cultural influence.
Globalization restarted also in Berlin, the flow was restored, but only in a one way traffic. Ideas, goods and services start pouring in the eastern economies, but almost nothing came back. Globalization is now not the spread of different cultures around the world, but the spread of Western (American) culture around the world. That is why it is dangerous, that is why efforts have to be made not for stopping it –that is impossible- but for restoring the natural bidirectional flow.
Tools like this one must be used to restore the balance. Bring America to your town, bring Starbucks to your plaza, but also have a statue of Benito Juarez in Chicago and a Venezuelan, pop and mom owned café in Manhattan. That is the way when the world enriches itself, that is the way of keeping traditions and that is the way people can deal with the fact that the world is smaller than yesterday but bigger than tomorrow’s. Bring your village to my village. Globalization may depend on it.
2 Global Culture » the cultural commons // Jul 9, 2006 at 12:24 am
[...] As I’ve mentioned in the “commodification of global culture”, global corporations are mining our local cultures, systematically taking shortcuts in their creative processes and repacking, rebranding, redistributing globally its by-products at a profit. These cultural “enterpreneurs”, not content with their share, are also creating all kinds of mechanisms to ensure that only their rebranded products are reaching the consumers, eroding any possibility for the original performers to have a fair chance to compete. [...]
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