Globalization & Insecurity

Globalization not only creates cultural homogenization, but also induces a tremendous feeling of insecurity. This insecurity is caused due to the slow rupture of roots from one's own culture, one's own way of living and working. It is a process in which one tries to adapt some new kind of order that is imposed or set by another faculty. Globalization automatically creates minor hierarchies though destroying many others. For example, culturally, most of the developing nations accept the western ways over their natives. The idea of 'imported', or the favour to white skin, the adoption of English - all are indicators of accepting the west as superior, thereby setting an order of aspiration. The sense of not possessing many such (foreign) values creates a lot of insecurity. It challenges one's confidence in one's own culture. 

Image production capitalizes upon and nurtures itself through this insecurity. Today, the entire world is presented to us as an image - through television, internet, mobiles, photographs, etc. What we once lived as memories of distant lands are now virtually available to as as visuals. The fact that we can see and virtually experience a simulated distant reality hybridizes existing cultures thereby creating doubts in everyday living. Doubts begin through comparison and end in homogenization or flattening of cultural practices.

In universalizing English as the communication language, hasn't globalization quietened a lot of people who haven't able to cope up with change? Hasn't it paralysed people who can not use the internet? Hasn't it generated a lot of gap between the immediate generations of fathers and sons? Although people are putting in a lot of efforts to make a tool like the internet as accessible to all people, the language base it uses is still English. I am thinking of the most interesting and subtle folk traditions, cultural practices, of songs, theatre, craft - what would happen to them? We can record and keep everything, but could a Jaipur Music festival at Mehrangarh fort be experienced by images - where the fort walls are equal participants as the performers? Or can the Siddhivinayak be really worshipped on a website - where the smell of the incense or the place makes one feel transported to a new place? I am not being romantic here, what I am trying to say is images flatten our real experience, and they win over us through our insecurity. 

But why am I writing all this? Because I actually wondered why I felt so vulnerable as a college kid and almost felt lost in a whole new world that opened up after my school...It was a time which forced me to rethink my value systems, upbringing, culture - everything - it was a very difficult period. An in this insecurity, I took time to be quiet and rejected most images. I could never rationalize for myself the reasons for homogenizing....And I still haven't been able to rationalize...