03 Section A, Key question 2 - Global culture, conflict and glocalisation (part 4)

Different routes of cultural change

Culture consists of learned meanings, values and practices, so cultural change involves more than buying the same device or opening the same app. Globalisation connects social life across countries; digital communication can accelerate those connections by making messages and cultural products easier to circulate across distance. However, connection is a process, while greater cultural similarity is one possible outcome. The first does not guarantee the second.

Homogenisation need not mean that every difference disappears. People in different countries might follow similar celebrity fashions while retaining different languages, religious practices and ideas about family obligations. A claim about increasing similarity in entertainment is narrower than a claim that whole societies have become identical.

Three other concepts identify different responses to global connections:

These concepts can overlap. A hybrid music video can be glocal because it adapts a global form, and it can contribute to cultural defence if its creators intend to sustain a threatened language. But translating a standard video into another language is not, by itself, evidence of extensive cultural mixing. Nor is every local adaptation a deliberate act of resistance: a commercial company might localise content to sell more subscriptions.

Worked distinction: imagine, in an original scenario, that young people in several countries watch a shared dance trend. Its spread suggests homogenisation in one aspect of popular culture. If some groups change the moves to fit a local celebration, that is glocalisation. If they combine movement traditions into a new dance, that is hybridity. The evidence can support more than one process; the useful question is what has become similar and what people have transformed.

Power and cultural visibility

Digital communication can increase cultural similarity by repeatedly exposing audiences to the same highly visible content. A platform is a service through which people access, share or distribute content. A recommendation algorithm is a set of procedures that selects or ranks material for a user. These arrangements affect which cultural products people encounter; uploading a video does not guarantee that anyone will discover it.

A Marxist approach begins with unequal control of economic resources. Companies with money, distribution systems and promotional capacity can make their products more visible than those of less powerful creators. Platforms seeking revenue may favour material likely to keep users watching or attract advertisers. Repeated exposure can encourage imitation of successful formats and consumer lifestyles, giving some cultural forms an advantage across national boundaries. This is a possible mechanism of homogenisation, not evidence that every recommendation produces the same response.

Cultural imperialism describes cultural domination through which a more powerful society or group promotes its meanings and ways of life at the expense of others. Applied to digital communication, the argument is that unequal ownership and distribution can privilege dominant cultures and languages. It requires evidence about power and displacement; the existence of a foreign film alone does not establish domination. Nor should global influence automatically be equated with influence from one Western country: the origin, ownership and circulation of the particular content must be investigated.

UNESCO's Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity overview for its 2026 report identifies concentration among streaming platforms and opaque selection systems as obstacles facing less visible creators. This supports concern about unequal cultural visibility. It is an institutional overview of cultural industries, rather than an experiment establishing that audiences acquire identical values. UNESCO, 2026 report overview.

Worked mechanism: in an original scenario, a small-language filmmaker can upload a film, but a large distributor can buy promotion and secure prominent placement for another release. More people encounter the promoted film; other creators may copy its profitable style. This could narrow the range of visible cultural forms even while the catalogue grows. To test displacement, a researcher would need evidence of changes in viewing and local production over time, rather than simply counting all available titles.

This process can have benefits as well as costs. Wider distribution can make unfamiliar music or film accessible and provide income for creators. Yet an increased choice of products can coexist with unequal chances of being heard. Availability, visibility and cultural influence are different things. The distribution system matters, but audiences may still interpret content through existing beliefs or actively seek alternatives.

Local meanings and cultural exchange

People use global communication systems within particular social relationships, so a common platform need not produce a common way of life. Agency means people's capacity to act and make choices within social constraints. Creators and audiences can select, reinterpret and adapt material instead of absorbing it unchanged.

Roland Robertson's work on glocalisation challenges the assumption that the global simply erases the local. In his 2020 reflection on the concept, he explains his objection to that assumption and stresses the relationship between local contexts and global processes. This is a theoretical argument about how to understand global change, rather than a survey demonstrating the extent of a particular digital effect. Robertson, Glocalization: Self-Referential Remembrances.

Digital communication can support cultural exchange by letting people encounter and respond to material from elsewhere. An original example is two musicians exchanging recordings across countries, discussing their different traditions and producing a shared composition. The two-way response distinguishes exchange from the simple transmission of a finished product. The resulting composition may be hybrid, but the relationship can still be unequal if one participant controls its distribution or receives most of the revenue. Mixing is not proof of equality.

UCL's Why We Post project, whose comparative findings appeared in 2016, provides evidence that local context matters. Nine anthropologists each spent 15 months living in one of nine communities across eight countries, studying everyday social media use. This long-term ethnographic approach examines practices and meanings in their social setting. The project used ethnographic and survey methods rather than treating posts alone as a complete account of people's lives. UCL project, UCL teacher pack, 2019.