ABSTRACT

Global culture is the culture that is ubiquitous throughout the world and more or less the same, with but small variations, wherever it is found. Global culture is largely the culture of global capitalism. It is a commercial culture produced for profit and it mainly deals with consumer commodities. In any locality, the balance between global and local culture varies with its level of socio-economic development or modernization, for short, the more modernized it is, the more global culture displaces local culture. The efflorescence of popular culture in Europe dates from around the middle of the nineteenth century, and in America from the post-Civil War period, a time when industrial capitalism was growing at a rapid rate, when cities were booming, and the working-class was greatly enlarged. Popular culture could not survive once mass culture began around the turn of the century and peaked half a century later after the Second World War.