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“Globalization”—lots of people seem to think it means that the world is turning into some consumer colony of America. Coke, CNN, McDonald’s, Levi’s, Nikes—if they haven’t taken over the world yet, the feeling goes, they will soon. (Odd: Japan is the world’s second largest economy, and yet I’ve never heard of anyone who buys Sony or eats sushi believing that it’s part of some plot to turn the world into Japan.) But regardless of whether you’re buying or selling, in the past 20 years much of the world’s economy has become increasingly integrated and foreign direct investment has grown three times as fast as total domestic investment. From 1980 to 1995 the value of trade worldwide rose dramatically, with the total value of world exports estimated at U.S. $5.1 trillion in 1995, up from U.S. $2 trillion in 1980. Yet the globalization phenomenon is more than the mere transfer of goods, the fact that, for instance, you can buy French mineral water and Danish beer in the Shanghai airport or eat Japanese ramen out of your suburban microwave. It’s the advent of cheap and ubiquitous information technologies that is dissolving our sense of boundaries. More and more television channels and the Internet have contributed to what expert Daniel Yergin calls a “woven world.” When we talk about “globality” (a new buzzword), we’re trying to define a world in which cultures meet and, rather than fight, they blend. As observer Frederick Tipson notes, “More like a thin but sticky coating than a powerful acid, this cosmopolitan culture of communications networks and the information media seems to overlay rather than supplant the cultures it interacts with.” Because when cultures receive outside influences, they ignore some and adopt others, and then almost immediately start to transform them. That’s how you end up listening to something called “bhangra pop” in India, to take an example at random: sounds like Jamaican reggae played on traditional Indian instruments, then amplified. “As things get more global,” commented Norman Klein, a communications professor in Los Angeles, “they’re actually becoming more localized.” Next section: Big Bird in China |