Blog 2: Cultural globalization - ChoiHwiseong

1. What I Understood from the Reading and Class

Before reading Tomlinson, I thought of culture as something that just gets affected by globalization. The economy moves first, and culture follows. Tomlinson says this is not really right. He argues that economic activity is also cultural, because when people buy things like jeans or a phone, they are choosing based on how they want to see themselves. And when a lot of people make those kinds of choices, it actually changes the global market. So culture is not only influenced by globalization, it also pushes globalization.

He also disagrees with the idea that globalization will turn the whole world into one Western or American culture. His point is that selling a product everywhere is different from people actually living the culture behind it. People take the same product and use it in their own way. He also says that many old ideas of a "global culture" were actually one culture thinking it was the whole world. One example was the medieval Ebstorf map, which drew the Christian world as if it was the entire globe. Another was Marx, who thought European experience would be the future for everyone.

Instead, Tomlinson talks about deterritorialization. I understood this as culture becoming less connected to the place where we live. Our local area still matters, but things from far away, like products, media and people, come into our daily life all the time, so the local place is not the only thing that shapes us anymore. At the end, he explains identity as something modern societies use to categorize people, not something we simply inherit. If we see it this way, globalization doesn't just erase identities, and one person can have several identities at once, for example being Korean and also seeing themselves as a citizen of the world.

2. What I Found Interesting

What made this reading easier for me to understand was two assignments I did for this class.

The first one was the Hofstede project. Before looking at the data, I guessed Korea's Individualism score would be about 20, since I always heard Korea is a collectivist country. But the actual score was 58, which was almost the same as the US (60) and Japan (62). I was confused, so I looked into it. It turns out the scores were updated in 2023 using a newer survey from 2015 and 2016. The old scores came from IBM surveys in 1967 to 1973, and back then Korea was 18 and the US was 91. So what I thought was common sense about Korean culture was actually based on data from around fifty years ago. The reason the US score dropped was also interesting. According to The Culture Factor website, the original sample was mostly white, but the new one followed the census and included other ethnic groups. When I read this, I thought of the Ebstorf map again. The old "American" score was kind of showing one group's values as if they were the whole country's.

The second one was my Wikipedia project. I am expanding the Korean article on The Guardian by translating the English version. When I started, the Korean article was only about 140 words, while the English one was around 13,000 words. While translating, I had to add about 40 interlanguage links, because a lot of the people, organizations and events in the article didn't have a Korean Wikipedia page. I think this is what Tomlinson means by globalization being uneven. Information doesn't move the same way in every direction, and it doesn't just move by itself either.

Some of the content I translated also fit the reading well. The Guardian started in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian. It was founded by a cotton merchant with support from local businessmen. During the American Civil War, the Union blockade cut off a lot of the cotton supply, and the mill workers around Manchester had a really hard time. But in 1862, cotton workers still gathered in Manchester to speak against slavery and sent a letter to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln replied to thank them, and there is now a statue of him in Manchester with parts of the letters on it. I was surprised that even without the internet, a war in America affected people's daily lives and political opinions in an English city this much. Also, in 1959 the paper took "Manchester" out of its name because national and international news had become a bigger part of the paper. I thought this was a pretty clear example of deterritorialization, since a newspaper that started in one city was no longer tied to that city.

3. A Question and Discussion Angle

After these two experiences, I started wondering if the ways we describe culture still work. Hofstede gives one score to each country, and Wikipedia is divided by language. Both of them kind of assume that culture matches a country or a language. But from the Hofstede project, I learned that one country score can hide differences between groups inside that country, and it can become outdated without people noticing.

I also have a question about our Wikipedia assignment. When I looked at my classmates' projects, it seemed like most translations go from English to other languages. I think this is helpful, because there are real gaps, like what I saw with The Guardian article. But if information mostly goes from English to other languages, could Wikipedia become something like the Ebstorf map, where the English view of the world becomes the standard? Maybe translating more from Korean into English could help with this. I'm curious what others think. Does translation make globalization more balanced, or does it make the English-speaking side even stronger?