Global Culture

Arjun Appadurai does a great job at defining and giving examples of our current global culture economy. We have changed from cultural interactions based solely on warfare and religions of conversation in the past century to colonization and the print capitalism to a media global village. Appadurai explains a concept called “nostalgia for the present” in which a foreign population “looks back to a world they have never lost” (p.3) which resembles American or European cultural history such as music and even fashion styles. He talks about Filipinos and I can recall other Asian and African countries that have turned a blind eye to the facts of their history which involves missionization, democratization, and colonization but dress like American hippies from the 1960s and can mimic country singers from the 1980s. It’s a paradox in that the foreigners rely on American or European culture to reminisce without acknowledging their own history.

VH1's The Mob Wives

To understand the global economy and its disjuncture, Appadurai illustrates five dimensions of global cultural flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. In summary, they are defined as moving people, information and mechanical technologies, money, mediated images, and ideas. With regards to mediascapes, they provide “…large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed” (p.9). Audiences throughout the world are able to experience media as intricate and unified range of print, advertisement billboards, celluloid, and screens. He goes on to say that realistic and fictional landscapes lines are blurred so that audiences without metropolitan experience create whimsical worlds. It’s funny because my Mother is from a farm in the South and she grew up watching “Mod Squad” and “Starsky and Hutch”. She had a very obtuse concept of metropolitan life in California and New York solely based on her media experiences. I can only imagine how some audience’s minds are constructing imagined worlds based on reality TV programs like the “Mob Wives” if they have never been to New York and know nothing about the Italian-American Mob.