Many people ask me what is it that I do.. impossible to explain, as the area of expertise is way too wide to cover in few words. So I thought, it is best if I give a definition of each, culture and globalization, and then compare both. The latest book by
Helmut Anheier and Yughishthir Raj Isar "Conflicts and Tensions" provides us with some in-depth research in this area, and this entry is mostly based around their words.
SO.. what is culture? CULTURE is the lived and creative experience for individuals and a body of artifacts, symbols, texts and objects (all closely related to graphic design and other kinds of communication, such as textual, audio and visual). Culture involves enactment and representation. It embraces art and art discourse, the symbolic world of meanings, the commodified output of the cultural industries as well as the spontaneous or enacted, organized or unorganized cultural expressions of everyday life, including social relations. It is constitutive of both collective and individual identity. Closely related to culture is the concept of COMMUNICATION, which refers to the ways in which meanings, artifacts, beliefs, symbols and messages are transmitted through time and space, as well as processed, recorded, stored, and reproduced. Communication requires media of storage and transmission, institutions that make storage and transmission possible, and media of reception.
GLOBALIZATION involves the movement of objects (goods, services, finance and other resources, etc), meanings (language, symbols, knowledge, identities, etc.) and people across regions and intercontinental space. The notion of CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION involves three movements: flows of investments and knowledge, flows of cultural goods, and flows of people. Cultures or aspects of cultures are globalized to the extent to which they involve the movement of specified objects, systems of meanings and people across national/regional borders and continents. Yet these processes, so closely related to the globalization of communication, the media and the cultural industries, are for one thing inaccessible to the majority of the world's population and actually appear to generate countless counter-affirmations at the level of local reception.
The relationship between cultures and globalization is not only multifaceted from a systematic perspective, in each case, it also involves different units of analysis such as individuals, organizations, professions, institutional patterns, communities, societies, as well as nation-states. The different units, in turn, may be interrelated and affect each other over time. In making observations, and in reaching conclusions about this relationship, it is important to specify the units of analysis involved.
To summarize, culture, globalization and communication are all interconnected, and in order to achieve great results in one industry, it is impossible to escape other industries, that are all interconnected. Global economy, politics.. it is a never ending circle. And my challenge is to explore these dimensions. The greatest challenge will be not to get lost within them - wish me luck!
