Will globalization extinct cultural diversity?
Posted on October 25, 2012 | posted by:
Three weeks ago, I was in a small city called Kuching in Malaysia. A local friend that I just met took me to a well-known dessert place in the city. It’s a small desert shop with a long history; my Malaysian friends and their parents have grown up eating desserts from this place.
Because of the hot humid weather in Malaysia, the dessert place is an open hut constructed with only roof, several columns and a few straw mats in-between. A grandpa-like master was the only staff working at the dessert place. He put down the straw mat by our table to shade us from the sun when we were seated.
While I was enjoying my powdered-ice with toppings like red bean, assorts of jelly and cream, I noticed a small blackboard hanging on the wall outside the kitchen. It’s the menu board with priced dessert items like “Justin Bieber”, “Lady GAGA”, “Taylor Swift” and “Transformer” on it. “What are those?” I asked the master. “Our special menu,” answered with a big smile, “We also have a popular YouTube channel and a Facebook Group. Go check them out, and follow us online.”
It was at that moment that I suddenly realized how much social media and web 2.0 have changed the world. Four month ago, I didn’t even know that there’s a small city called Kuching in the world. I’m surprised that this small, even a little shabby Malaysian dessert place utilized social media actively (a dessert named Justin Bieber, really?). It is truly amazing how we get to know more about the world by using the technology today. It provides us opportunities in all aspects that have never happened before anywhere in the world.
However on the other hand, I was a little concerned about how much impact social media and globalization are making on societies. Will they extinct the diversity of our cultures? In some cases, it is isolation that keeps the diversity of nature. For example kangaroos in Australia are unique because the continent is far away from others. As internet pop culture spreading around the world, people in every corner of the world listen to the same music, appreciate the same art, watch the same movie and eat in the same fast food chain restaurant. You can hear Katy Perry everywhere in China. The “I heart NY” logo is applied again and again in gift stores in European cities. Children in Africa watch Disney cartoons just like children in the States. And the big yellow M of McDonald’s can be found even in a tiny town in most countries. Just like the mass production and industrial revolution in the past centuries have made our lives easier by providing standard products, the “factory-made” culture is well polished, organized and invariable from one to another in this century.
Sometimes even we designers are following the same “universal design rules” like typography and layout forms for projects. Are we loosing the ability to be creative in distinctive ways? It is one of the responsibilities of all designers to keep cultural diversity as much as possible. Design is playing a more important role than ever. It exists in every discipline and all systems. We are at one of the moments when people have no idea where the future is going to be, not sure if this is the end of a change or the beginning of it. But if in the future every country is going to have the same characteristics, if everyone is speaking the same language, and if every corner of the world has similar skyscrapers, life will be boring.