Reading Assignment 2：culture globalization——LI LINLIN

   Every academic today accepts a broad, universal proposition: globalization is a multi-dimensional process that occurs simultaneously in the fields of economics, politics, technological developments (especially media and communication technologies), environmental change, and culture. A simple way to define globalization is not to assign priority or causality to any one of these dimensions. Accelerate and integrate global connectivity. Understood in this rather abstract and general way, globalization refers to the rapidly developing and increasingly close network of interconnections and interdependence in the physical, social, economic and cultural life of the modern world.

   On multiple levels, whether it's the weather, for example, it's getting warmer; The economy, the financial crisis and so on, we live today in a world that is much more globally connected than it was even 20 years ago, and from a longer historical perspective, the degree of global interdependence is unprecedented. Therefore, understanding globalization as a generalized process with increasing connections helps us to remember the multidimensional complexity of this process. However, for the relative importance of these dimensions, the most important is the economic sphere, the institution of the global capitalist market, which is a crucial factor and a necessary condition for global connectivity. This dimension dominates the imagination and language of corporations, politicians, and anti-globalization activists, and shapes the immediate understanding of globalization by most ordinary people.

   The global dominance of the capitalist system is inevitable, but we must resist the temptation to attribute it to the causality of the globalization process. First, because we are not dealing with direct empirical judgments, but with the question of what constitutes an analytical category. Suppose that the economic sphere is a machine-like system, independent of the wishes, desires, and aspirations of the human subject, and therefore completely immune to cultural influence. Therefore, the boycott economy is also based on an unrealistically narrow economic concept.

   The second reason is that it distorts our understanding of the cultural sphere. It is only natural that the global market process - especially the distribution of iconic products - is central to the interpretation of cultural globalization as "cultural imperialism," "Americanization," or "cultural imperialism.

 The concept of consumer goods is relatively easy to understand because of its potential impact on people's cultural experience. "Culture" seems to be a particularly inert category, something that people experience or absorb that they do not produce or shape themselves. But despite such criticism, the idea of culture as an intrinsic part of globalization, as a dimension that has an impact on other areas, remains relatively vague.

   Cultural meanings and interpretations constantly inspire and guide people, individually and collectively, toward specific choices and actions. We can think of it as a component of our cultural "life world." A useful way to think about the impact of culture on globalization is to grasp how culturally informed "local" actions can produce the consequences of globalization. At the micro level, consumer activity constitutes an entire complex web of global market connections, with implications not only for the employment of workers in far-flung parts of the world, but also for the ecological fate of the planet in terms of the natural resources and industrial processes consumed in their production.

 The effects of globalization currently extend to every person or place on the planet in any profound way, and speculation about the spread of globalization must surely be tempered by the opposite trend of many social, political and even cultural divisions we see around us. This is a point that is often made in the field of development studies: countries that used to be called the "Third World" clearly do not participate in the globalized economy or globalized exchanges in the same way that developed countries do.

    Among some Western commentators, there is still a tendency to think that globalization is pushing us toward an all-encompassing "global culture." The most common way to understand it is that cultural globalization implies a kind of cultural imperialism: the spread of Western capitalism, and especially American culture, across the globe, with the accompanying threat of the loss of unique non-Western cultural traditions. The fear here is that through the unrivalled development of iconic brands, world culture will be completely dominated. Formulaic Hollywood movies, Western pop music genres, and television formats sold on the global market are, in the eyes of many, a "cultural totalitarianism," as filmmaker bernarado Bertolucci once referred to them.

 This problem cannot be solved if we limit our analysis to the rather superficial problem of the global distribution of cultural products. We must be careful not to confuse mere cultural products with cultural practices themselves - this involves the interpretation and appropriation of meanings associated with those products.Indeed, one of the ineluctable effects of the current wave of anti-Western sentiment in much of the Muslim world is precisely the demonstration of the resilience of cultural opposition to these values. Another way to deal with these issues is to look at contemporary globalization in a longer historical context. In this context, societies and cultures imagine the world as a single place, centered around their own culture. This imagination has been a consistent feature of the founding narratives of cultural collectives, especially faith groups.

 The idea of a progressive, cosmopolitan cultural politics deserves to be taken seriously. This does not necessarily mean endorsing grand plans for "global governance," but rather trying to clarify, and ultimately reconcile, cultural differences with the attachments and values of the emerging broader global human "community."

 Human rights can be used to defend cultural differences, just as they can be used to assert universal standards of justice, or to provide equality in health care, education, and so on. There is no contradiction in the fact that "man" is in a rich pluralistic acceptance that preserves cultural differences, while "man" in the universal terms of justice is realized precisely by the institutionalized framework of the typical identities of modernity. The key here is the diversity of identity positions. Amid the proliferation of localism and sharp identity discrimination, globalization has also - formally, flexibly, and without dependence on any particular cultural tradition - produced a flexible category of cosmopolitan belonging.

Interesting point： Clifford Geertz said, "Culture is not a force, something to which social events can be causally attributed." If we were to ask the explicitly functional question, "What is culture for?" The most satisfying answer is that it is to create the meaning of life. The need for "meaning" is deeply central to the human condition, and it is the cognitive existential equivalent of the material needs of housing and livelihood.People are more interested in absorbing culture, and the overall proportion of people who create culture can be said to be only a single digit in a population of hundreds of millions. However, after the selection, modification and display of culture in front of people by the government, there is less. People choose the culture that conforms to their own tonality as the meaning of life and the spice of life. So for culture, they are an end in themselves.

Question: American related culture is sweeping the world. American culture penetrates into People's Daily life and imperceptibly changes some people's ideas about different cultures. American film and television culture such as Netflix is also changing the original style of film and television in some countries. So will Netflix become a new round of cultural hegemony such as Disney or Hollywood?