Op-Ed: The Rise of the global monoculture, or just history at work?

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

The Sun Herald:

The term "Australian culture" -- labelled an oxymoron only by the terminally cynical -- was thrown around a lot last week. Some aesthetically advanced people wrote to the prime minister suggesting that the international image of AC would be damaged by recent police action against photos of semi-naked children. It's the right time to ask "What IS Australian culture?" and fortuitously, the Bureau of Statistics has just come up with an answer.

A report entitled Arts and Culture in Australia: A statistical overview, 2008 includes a survey which showed how much time Australians spend on various activities. The bureau found, for example, that 87 per cent of Australians over the age of 14 watch TV for an average of 179 minutes a day, which leads to the calculation that the nation spends a total of 42 million hours each day getting culturally enriched by the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Anna Coren and Dannii Minogue. Applying this process to other entertainments, we can create this chart ...

The chart is a huge page of stats, and interesting reading if you know the subjects. I can sympathize with the columnist, because this information comes in huge slabs from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and learning to read it takes a while. I actually did part of a course on the Bureau’s information database last week.

The article depicts with a sort of ruthless rustic charm a middle class Western nation with pretty predictable cultural pursuits.

Cultural activities were slightly reassuring, to an Australian horticulturalist, writer, artist and musician:

Our most attended cultural activities

1. Cinema (65 per cent of Australians go at least once a year)
2 Zoos and aquariums (35.6 per cent)
3 Libraries (34.1)
4 Botanic gardens (33.7)
5 Popular music concerts (25.2)
6 Art galleries (22.7)
7 Museums (22.6)
8 Theatre performances (17.0)
9 "Other performing arts" (16.6)
10 Musicals and operas (16.3)

It’s nice to know that 22.7% of Australians know how to find an art gallery, let alone actually visit one deliberately.

There’s a lot of data, and a lot of reasonable inferences.

There’s also the lack of statistical means of analyzing global culture.

You could try gluing together sets of regional stats, but that’s still well short of the fact. There’s no reliable yardstick for measuring global culture, or the movement of culture.

The global machine is generating a lot of trans-cultural things which don’t quite fit in a specific analysis.

Internationalism is now unavoidable. American media remains powerful largely because it’s unavoidable. Fashion, music, media, and the rest of the fermentation vat of culture are working at full throttle.

The internet is one huge demand for culture, in whatever form, and nobody really cares where it comes from.

Trade has had to come along for the ride. This is where the business is, this is where the money is, come and set up shop.

A lingua franca works on common interests, and so does shared culture. It may start as business, but it winds up as a way of life, a culture in its own right.

The English language, which is the most genuinely and completely hybridized language on Earth, is a good example. Celtic, Saxon, Norse, Anglish, Latin, French, and a lot of imports from other nations.

The Anglo culture, of which America is the prime example, has brought with it everything it could find or steal from other cultures. Most of these were absorbed into it by the rise of technologies and trade that allowed cultural expansion. That then cross-pollinated the other cultures, producing local versions and developments.

We now seem to have another version of that, on a much larger scale. Younger generations aren’t raised in an insulated environment. They can’t really be insulated like previous generations. The world is there, ready to click.

Cultures come in various forms. There are national, regional, ethnic, religious, trade, and artistic cultures. There are male and female cultures, and the related gay cultures.

Internet culture is superimposed on all of these. The net has provided a massive new source of inputs from all cultures, and an even bigger audience.

Some of the obvious manifestations of global culture are cosmetic more than actual culture, like fashion, popular arts, advertising, media, cell phones, iPods, and the other consumer non-durables. You couldn’t call it “culture” in the classic sense, but it has covered the world in 15 years, very effectively.

However- Even if this is a pretty shallow layer of materials, it’s like watching a layer of sediment form. Soon enough comes another. It entombs what’s under it, then fossilizes it. Then new layers form, and the previous material too fossilizes in time.

The “monoculture” effect is more expedient than cultural at this point. But it’s laying the basis for a culture which will have nothing to do with anyone’s previous ideas of culture.

The big social sites are a case in point. The groups are from across the entire spectrum of human activity. They’re local, regional and international, with equal ease. There’s no part of human culture out of reach.

Then there’s the reaction to culture on this scale. Most people resent intrusive culture, if it becomes a pest, like celebrity culture and tabloid news. It doesn’t really matter where it come from.

The reaction can be extremely effective. “Insularity” could now mean the survival of endangered cultural species.

People object to the loss of culture, even other peoples’ cultures, and they try to preserve it. One of the few good effects of traditionalists and cultural conservationists is that they do preserve and protect their cultures effectively, even if they seem rather purist about doing it.

The global effect has been good to a lot of cultures, providing more outlets and inputs. Cultures must live, and people are the machinery for them to do that.

Now the threat: The global culture does have monocultural methods. It’s market driven. Those methods are sourced from market culture.

The very high turnover of cultural materials may be great for people marketing art, music, books, whatever, and a lot of cultures have received a new life from the exposure.

Opening new markets also means bringing in new materials from those markets, which is usually good for cultures, because they can develop again as trade makes them viable commercially.

But the volume is gigantic. An ocean may be made of drops of water, but try finding one of the drops. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t come across some cultural thing I didn’t even know existed.

The human attention span is now on a roster, trying to fit in an infinite amount of data, innuendo, gossip and disinformation into the time it has to process the what it can find. It’s inefficient, and the demand has been strong for years to manage the information, rather than it managing us.

The current form of the internet doesn’t help. Too much information, horrendously organized, working on the basis of “more is better”, when it quite definitely isn’t. It’s only comparatively recently we’ve been able to exclude things from searches.

Since the internet is the primary driver of global culture, the rise of the global culture will spread at viral speeds. Like anything viral, it will mutate into something, disease or cure.

Global culture, as a thing in which human beings are supposed to participate, is looking very like a puppy trying to find its way out of a box. It’s on all fours, hyperactive, not too well coordinated, and anything can happen when it starts moving.

It will either grow out of the box or crash around until it gets out.

I’d say we have a very large puppy on our hands which will do the puppy thing, trashing furniture, knocking over priceless antiques, and have to be washed and cleaned after collisions with everything standing. It will also need some housetraining, and to learn to dig up the garden constructively.

The Himalayas are a sea bed which was raised to the height of Mount Everest. You can find old sea shells on the slopes.

About a million years from now, cyber-archaeologists will be digging around in the mountains of data we produce, trying to find an ancient human culture.