ABSTRACT
Although we are rapidly moving towards a conflation of global time and space through which the world is increasingly becoming one place, there are very few analysts of globalization who would argue that there is a global culture. There are so many languages, religious beliefs and practices, inherited traditions, forms of family and community life, types of music, dance and sport and, generally, ways of being in the world, that it is ludicrous to suggest that there could ever be a common disposition or orientation to life that produces similar practices and forms of everyday life. And yet there seems to be an increasing similarity to the pattern of life for most people living in the world capitalist system. The swiftness, intensity and penetration of global flows seem to lead to more people working the same way, consuming the same products, obeying comparable laws, rules and regulations, living in similar spaces, engaging in the same forms of entertainment and so forth. The question then is whether the similarity in everyday life has become so strong that there is effectively little difference not just between cosmopolitans living in global cities but between locals living in rural Idaho and rural Ireland. Would someone living in rural Ireland today have more in common with someone living thousands of miles away in rural America than they would, for example, have with someone who lived in Ireland 100 years ago? Does this suggest that what is happening around the world is that
the material base of everyday life is becoming similar and that while there are cultural differences in language, habits and customs, these are increasingly becoming superstructural and insignificant? Despite all the differences described in the previous chapter, has social and cultural life in Ireland become the same as in the rest of Western society? More importantly, because of the similarity in outlook and lifestyle practices, have Irish people developed the same sense of self?
