Culture and Civilization

Öz

The term globalization, which has been frequently heard in the agenda recently, has a quite sophisticated structure within its’ economic, political, social, cultural aspects. In parallel especially with technological developments, globalization has found an area to spread quickly and exists in virtue of a lot of factors such as commercial activities, Western itinerants’ journeys in pursuit of founding new and different continents. There has been a widespread opinion as “the world is shrunk and standardized” due to the effect of globalization in the process from past to present. One of the areas that have gone through a great change and transformation with the effect of globalization is, undoubtedly, culture. Culture, which consists of material and nonmaterial elements and tools for carrying them to the future, plays a crucial role in this process. According to some perspectives, in the context of globalization, culture has become homogenized, commodified, and transformed into a market product. In this process, American culture has become the dominant culture; new terms such as Americanization, McDonaldization, and Starbucksization have been carried to the agenda. Another argument is that globalization produces heterogeneity and via the process called “glocalization”, localities are presented to the world. Local identities’ gaining recognition, being informed about the culture from the most remote part of the world via technology could be a positive effect of globalization on culture. Cultural assimilation in the context of the colonialist movements in world history and cultural imperialism spreading via media could be count against the negative effects of this relation. In this paper, by way of these examples and theoretical discussions, the effects of globalization on culture are handled, the back story of the relation between culture and globalization is questioned.