In what contains both a brilliant exposition of the recent history (last 100 years) of cultural influence across continents and a terrible use of such history to defend large global corporations, the article “American Culture Goes Global, or Does It?” (2002) written by Professor Richard Pells for The Chronicle of Higher Education states its fundamental position:
globalization has become the main enemy for academics, journalists, and political activists who loathe what they see as a trend toward cultural uniformity.
It then proposes a few reasons why American culture seems to be so ubiquitous:
the ability of American-based media conglomerates to control the production and distribution of their products has been a major stimulus to the worldwide spread of American entertainment.
Unlike, for example, German, Russian, or Chinese, the simple structure and grammar of English, along with its tendency to use shorter, less-abstract words and more-concise sentences, are all advantageous for the composers of song lyrics, ad slogans, cartoon captions, newspaper headlines, and movie and TV dialogue. English is thus a language exceptionally well-suited to the demands and spread of American mass culture.
The American domestic market has, in essence, been a laboratory, a place to develop cultural products that can then be adapted to the world market.
The article is very much worth reading, even if for some strange reason it seems to be politically charged (defending large corporations) when it doesn’t need to. It’s main conclusion is not flawed:
American mass culture has not transformed the world into a replica of the United States. Instead, America’s dependence on foreign cultures has made the United States a replica of the world.
But comparing genuine expressions of pop culture such as American Jazz with MacDonald’s defeats the same arguments stated by the article. One just needs to look one level deeper to realize that culture migration is and has always been a very powerful agent for transformation around the globe. The real evil is money (from large corporations) trying to control the flow of such culture.
Our aim is to identify processes by which cultures (including the American) can be enriched by the afluence of migrants and their cultural baggage.
[...] had already explored the cultural influence that the world exercises on the United States, but given the political strength of the super power, [...]