forum barcelona 2004

If you google “cultura global” (global culture in spanish), you’ll get a summary of a session help during the Forum Barcelona 2004. Although the linked page is in Spanish, there is an English version available. The name of the session was “Is There a Global Culture? The Globalization of Media and the Culture of Societies”. Take a look at the quality of the discussion:

Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan explained some of the findings from his project the the World Values Survey, in which he managed to describe at a very high level the cultural aspects that are shifting in societies going through an industrialization process:

Inglehart explained traditional values in terms of the emphasis on religion, obedience, patriotism, the desire to make one’s parents proud, non-justification of divorce, rejection of abortion and economic protectionism, and defined rational-secular values as the opposite.

For those societies in a postindustrial phase the cultural values are shifting from “values centering on survival” to “values linked to self-expression”:

Values of survival would be characterized by an emphasis on economic security, male chauvinism, homophobia, rejection of foreigners, existential discontent, low political participation and few environmental concerns. Self-expression and individualist values would be characterized by an emphasis on the opposite.

The concept of “long-distance national communities” also seems quite relevant to some of the previous posts we’ve discussed here:

According to this concept, emigrant communities perceive themselves as national, but operate globally, thus calling into question, according to Volkmer, many traditional notions about the aforementioned relationship between public opinion and the Nation-State. Globally broadcast television stations such as Al Yazira do not, in principle, follow the political nor opinion criteria of any one Arabic country, but rather claim to represent the public opinion “of the common people”—in this case of Arabic people. The same can be said of the numerous internet portals, from those that offer information and news in different languages to the members of that and other communities. Among these communities there is, therefore, an abstract national identification, but which does not arise from living in a specific national territory and which, in addition, becomes real through global communication flows.

The conclusions of this session are stated as:

Although we cannot yet speak of a global culture, certain conditions of global existence can be observed, such as the possibility of global cultural and media divulgation, which constitute a threat to traditional social and political formations (Nation-States) but an opportunity for minority social and cultural formations (or local cultures). Once more, and by way of synthesis, it seems possible to assert the reality of glocalizing trends in the world today and therefore, the survival and even strengthening of cultural diversity in a global environment.

There is a lot more at the Forum’s web site. In preparation for next year’s forum at Monterrey, Mexico I’ll try to cover as many of the 2004 sessions related to Global Culture and provide an update whenever possible. One thing seems to be true: the existence of a Global Culture can’t be doubted anymore as it was in 2004.