one of my undergraduate lectures in foreign policy once said, globalisation will strengthen cultures not break them down. In a way he was right.
But, in a way he was wrong.
I am being a little unfair to my lecturer. Since the early 1990's, when I was at Uni, a great deal has changed.
The change in technology has meant unprecedented access to information and an ever changing shift in power from corporates to brands to people and, in some cases, back to corporates. It's bloody hard to follow!
Technology has driven globalised change and broken down some traditional cultural boarders but it has also caused the creation or recreation of cultural boarders, just not boarders in the physical sense.
The internet has not so much created a melting pot of cultures but reunited people of the same culture(s) across the global.
Languages have been resurrected. Traditions have been saved from extinction.
When, in the past, one culture would have been assimilated into another, today the same culture only needs one person and an internet connection to reach others around the world. And thrive.
The speed at which culture is moving is increasing and forming in new ways we have never seen before.
Culture to me is not just a nation state and it's traditions and rituals, it is a group of people that see life through a particular lens. If I have the liberty to use this definition then I conclude that the internet is creating new cultures. Not just communities but cultures.
This new cultural phenomenon is creating global opportunities for people interested in ideas and human understanding.
Preempting cultural changes in behaviour and beliefs that occur across the globe could change the way we motivate people to solve some of the world's biggest issues. Issues like water shortage or war based on physical (cultural) boarders. Knowing how ideas and cultures change at a new speed and beyond physical nation state may even give the UN some real power.
