What is a Global Culture?

A number of people interviewed in this study believe that there is a 'global' or 'dominant culture' that is based on consumerism, cultural superficiality and bad food and coffee.** And it is often seen as the culture of the great postwar middle suburbs; the dependable 'other' that imbues Fitzroy with its unique but somewhat inverse identity. Most notably there is a strong community resistance to the multinational retail chains that pierce the global-urban landscape.

Accordingly, many of the people interviewed here believe that local cultural production is based on effort, personal sacrifice and the wish to champion local idiosyncrasies whilst dominant cultural forms are inimical to this (as large homogeneous markets and tastes produce larger profits for the few).

The users of milkbar.com.au can view what some of the people in Fitzroy have to say about the changing culture in their area. There are a number of conflicting opinions but the users may recognise some of the reoccurring themes. It is the quirky, the ordinary and the idiosyncratic that are often overlooked in what some people call the study of the global.

** One definition of 'dominant culture' emanates from the fact that in the past couple of decades there has been a demise in the national regulatory frameworks of mass-communication (television, radio, and newspapers). Mass-communication has become highly corporatised and thus rewards its own globally syndicated economic ideologies. Thomas Frank in this provocatively titled book One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy describes this movement as 'market fundamentalism'.(3) He places 'dominant culture' (or populism) in an historical context and asserts that populism was once a movement 'by the people for the people' but now it is driven by media elites who simply want us to consume more.

In an economic populist sphere any culture that exists outside of the market (such as governments, universities, artists, local cultural communities, and even Historians!) could be labeled 'elitist' and out of touch with 'the people'. 'The people' are consumers and the independent agency of the consumers is sometimes even mistaken as democracy. Economic globalisation with it popular cultural forms is the overriding type of globalisation. This is what Richard Falk terms 'globalisation from above' and is this variety of globalisation that spurred the protest movement against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999 and the protest against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne on September 11, 2000.

(3) Frank, Thomas. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy, Double Day, New York, 2000.