CSS Current Affairs | Role of Social Media in the Preservation of Global Culture
The following question of CSS Current Affairs is solved by Hamda Faisal under the supervision of Howfiv’s Pakistan Affairs and Current Affairs Coaches, Miss Bushra Arooj, Sir Ammar Hashmi, and Miss Iqra Ali. She learnt how to attempt 20 marks question and essay writing from Sir Syed Kazim Ali, Pakistan’s best CSS and PMS English essay and precis teacher with the highest success rate of his students. This solved past paper question is attempted on the pattern taught by Sir to his students, scoring the highest marks in compulsory and optional subjects for years, and uploaded to help aspirants understand how to crack a topic or question, how to write relevantly, what coherence is, and how to include and connect ideas, opinions, and suggestions to score the maximum.
Outline
1- Introduction
2- Understanding the relationship between social media and global culture
3- How social media has contributed to the preservation and promotion of global culture
- ✓Archiving and categorisation of cultural information making it easier to preserve and share
- ✓Providing platforms for introducing local cuisines promoting a mixed global culture
- ✓Increasing the acquisition of different languages due to cultural diffusion
- ✓Spreading progressive social values like freedom of speech and democracy
- ✓Ensuring an equal chance for the rise of local culture
- ✓Mobilising diverse people for humanitarian causes irrespective of identities
4- Critical analysis
5- Conclusion
Answer to the question
Introduction
Social media, a form of two-way communication, has increased to the spread of people-to-people connections. It provides a platform where people arrange themselves in communities on the basis of shared interests, personalities, or political views. According to a 2011 comScore Report, internet users have surpassed one billion in the last ten years, out of which 82% are social media users. Moreover, it has led to the appearance of a global culture—more diverse and participatory than the West-influenced global culture brought to popularity in the twentieth century. The new and evolving global culture is spearheaded by social media, as social media applications have contributed to the preservation and promotion of global culture. This answer narrates the different factors to prove as such.
Understanding the relationship between social media and global culture
Over the past fifty years, communications technology has rapidly evolved and expanded from radio broadcasting to social media applications. Even before the advent of social media in the mid-2000s, popular forms of media, like radio and television, have helped in the spread and preservation of different cultures across the globe. This phenomenon has led to a cultural diffusion where a dispersed and fragmented global culture has arisen. Many scholars in the twentieth century have acknowledged the global culture as an effect of globalization. However, Encyclopaedia Britannica states that cultural globalization is “a phenomenon by which the experience of daily life, as influenced by the diffusion of commodities and ideas, reflects a standardisation of cultural expressions around the world”. The popular examples of global culture are reflected in the circulation of music, sports, and news all over the world. Regardless of the point of origin of these images, they are shared and talked about across social media by all admirers and propagators in dispersed communities.
Social media contributing to the preservation and promotion of global culture
Every sociologist agrees that it is evasive to define culture. It is as breathing and evolving as human beings it binds in a shared ideology and belief. The same can be said for global culture as well. The following factors expound on how social media has contributed to the preservation and promotion of global culture.
- ✓Archiving and categorisation of cultural information making it easier to preserve and share
First, social media provides a space for the archival and categorisation of diverse cultural information. It is later retrieved by people identifying with the culture or to know more about a certain culture. For instance, Wikipedia has 3.8 million articles by 48,000 active editors in more than 100 languages. People participating in this collaborative effort in a global cultural space come from various countries and nations. The chief characteristics of global culture, like shared memes and popular movies, are also meticulously archived. The site Know Your Meme, launched in 2011, also uses wiki software and document popular memes and other internet phenomena. Therefore, social media leads to the preservation of global culture, where crowdsourcing is employed to categorise and archive different information.
- ✓Providing platforms for introducing local cuisines promoting a mixed global culture
Moreover, social media provides a platform for different individuals who share their local cuisines, which are tried by various people across the globe. Likewise, they simultaneously preserve and promote an aspect of global culture through participating in a community convened at the joy of making and eating food. For example, the top ten cooking channels on YouTube have more than 200M subscribers, six times more than the average population of a country. Moreover, the Social Capital Theory states that there is a natural tendency in people to connect and interact with other people and form societies. This shows that the size of communities on social media far exceeds the traditional understanding of shared culture and shared space. Thus, social media is playing an active role in preserving and promoting global culture by providing it platforms for people to convene around specific topics.
- ✓Increasing the acquisition of different languages due to cultural diffusion
In addition, there is an upward trend in the acquisition of different languages with the advent of social media. Global culture develops a consciousness in people about connections and the different ways they can employ them. Cultural diffusion takes place when people interact with foreign cultures again and again and develop enough interest to pursue another language to better understand others. According to Duolingo, over 45 million users a month are actively learning one of the 40 languages being offered. The application’s profiles have almost 16 million followers across popular social media like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. That, people not only immerse themselves in another culture but also broaden the horizons of what global culture can be. Therefore, the increasing trend in the acquisition of different languages leads to the promotion of global culture.
- ✓Spreading progressive social values like freedom of speech and democracy
Furthermore, social media help in spreading progressing social values like freedom and democracy. As John Baylis says, “People think globally and act locally,” because of the advancement of globalization, social media also intensifies the propagation of ideas like freedom of speech and democracy. According to Hatem Ali’s report in Harvard Human Rights Journal, 85,000 Egyptians used Facebook to engage in the “Revolutionary Day” as part of the Arab Spring movement. People interact with new people and become socially and politically aware of their own circumstances. Then, they struggle to change to conform to the global norm—as is the case in most cultures. Therefore, social media helps in promoting the chief characteristics of global culture: progressive social and political values.
- ✓Ensuring an equal chance for the rise of local culture
Adding to it, social media provides an equal chance for all local cultures to gain global popularity. The twentieth-century global culture was marked by Americanisation, with jeans and fast-food culture spreading all over the world. However, the transforming global culture promotes local culture, preferring authenticity above all. For instance, the rise in the popularity of Korean popular music, Korean dramas, and Korean movies is a testament to that. According to a report by the Korean Foundation, there were 89 million hallyu fans in 113 countries in 2019. The popular global culture is an intermix of different local cultures, equally accepted by all people participating in it. Thus, social media provides an equal chance for the promotion of local culture and its diffusion into global culture.
- ✓Mobilising diverse people for humanitarian causes irrespective of identities
Likewise, social media helps in mobilising people from a diverse set of backgrounds to rally under humanitarian causes irrespective of their identities. With the intensification and expansion of cultural flow across the world, people are identifying with each other on the basis of their shared humanity. For example, the Palestinian cause is supported by many beyond Muslims and Arabs. According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, in the first three weeks following the Israeli siege against Gaza, Palestine, around 4200 demonstrations in almost 100 countries. This means that people bypass traditional identity and erase differences. Therefore, social media allows people to mobilise for humanitarian causes, promoting and preserving different ethical values of shared global culture.
Critical analysis
Although some critics claim that global culture is another name for homogenization or Americanization, the above-discussed instances prove it otherwise. Like all cultures, global culture is a living and changing entity, and it is shaped by the interests of people inhabiting it. Moreover, social media has provided a two-way communication that has intensified the networks created by predecessor communications technology. Despite some of its side effects, social media provides a kind of physical space akin to geography where people of global culture disperse into smaller communities and come together to preserve and promote their identities, whether it may be in the digital space or the physical space.
Conclusion
In brief, social media is a proponent of global culture and plays a vital role in preserving and promoting it. It covers the digital landscape of it and unites people in a way never imagined before. As such, global culture shares the same characteristics as traditional culture: humour, food, social values, shared interests and ideologies. It has even imparted its practitioners, every citizen of the globalized world, enough pride in it to convene and stand up for their ideals and beliefs. The instances of global culture also translate into the physical landscape. For instance, world sports, tourism, student exchanges, business expansions, movies and animations, music, clothes and much more are shared at a global level now. People participate in global ideals by bringing in their local and indigenous knowledge to rich its ideals, and then, in turn, they apply those ideas to better their personal life and local environment as well.
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