John Tomlinson, in his book ”Globalization and Culture”
The way the modern world is interconnected is a result of people diversifying their interests to create a more elastic society. John Tomlinson, in his book ”Globalization and Culture” also explores other intricacies of what drives the current world. The author has a formidable command on matters of cultural sociology and the don for cultural analysis in Nottingham, England. He has published a range of disciplines, including urban studies, developmental studies, media studies, geography, and anthropology. He also possesses lecturing experience across universities in Europe. Owing to his vast experience mostly in the matters relating to the formation of cultures and the nature of urban centers, the author’s profile can be a testimony to the legitimacy of his concerns when compiling Globalization and Culture. The components of the modern world, as we experience today, reflect radical transformations compared to the way people did things from the past centuries. Personal, spiritual, and cultural outfits of a person have always been closely tied to the geography of the individual’s origin. However, the current set up of the way people do things has been adjusted, and people are more open to trying out other styles of doing things as exemplified in cultures that are different from theirs. The book delves into micro factors that influence how people carry out daily activities and pinpoint how they perceive the world. Such factors involve particulars that might not have been impactful in the past. Still, the new era of the interconnected world dictated more of the economy and social classes than family or cultural values.
The book depicts the nature of the civilized world, where people are more accustomed to occupying urban centers. The adjustment towards exploring personal growth has also tramped the ancient way of living where a person’s identity was tied to their culture and family values. As such, it is common for people to focus on developing their personal lives through education or by partaking in a craft. The book has done a proper job of relating the approach towards life by specializing in a craft or building a business as to being the nature of the human tendency to work for a living. According to Darwinism, human beings and animals in large depend on having to hunt or earn a living, initially from farming, and now to a broad spectrum of activities that are useful in today’s domain. The complexity of the approach man takes to care for his progeny, and other dependents have also increased, and various methods are more common than others. For instance, many people rely on formal employment for their upkeep and enabling one to spare time for other activities, never having to work every day of their lives. One significant distinguishable difference between how people secured their households in their past is the ability of the modern human to store value that can keep the family safe for many months or even years. The contemporary person can achieve this feat through obtaining of real estate property and reserving money for future usage. The transition between the hunting and gathering human to the current models that prompt people to earn a living has been gradual. However, levels in the amount of social security enjoyed by an individual in the present world vary as some people are unemployed, meaning they cannot provide for themselves and usually have to rely on family for upkeep. Minimum wage workers are those who have a daily job, although the warnings are mostly meager that they have to report to work every day. Other individuals can comfortably go for a few months without going to work and without having to adjust their lifestyle to save on spending. Another more stable group can go for a few months, while another group that represents the wealthy can go for a few months to several years and tens of years without having to work. Such a stratification based on economic impacts has massive influence regarding the social privilege one can access, such as visiting exclusive places.
The manner the book ‘globalization and culture’ represent how human activities have evolved with time has revealed myriad common grounds between the old ways of doing things and the new order. Radical distinctions can be identified in how social groups have to be created in a particular geography. In the past, a village could grow to a big village and eventually an organ like an empire that can govern an extensive area comprised of many small communities. A person in such a setting grows from a child to adulthood, where much of his life is spent engaging in household chores for a lady and the engagement of activities that involved strength for the men. Occasional festivals would take place, and that was one of the ways these people could socialize. The identity of these people was entirely tied to their villages, and the chances of moving to another village were only frequent when lovers from different villages decided to marry one another.
In the modern world, such social groups can also be spotted everywhere due to the need for people to create meaning around people, circumstances, and the environment. The highly interconnected nature of the modern world profoundly influences the culture at a fundamental level due to the fluctuations in the importance of the various factors that play huge roles in the day-to-day activities of people. Stuff like having permanent formal employment currently overrides the need to stay at your family home, which was unheard of in the past.
This book has provided in-depth insights to the most of the social disciplines and subjects like economics and stock markets. John Tomlinson explains that the dynamics of modern culture reveal essential tenets of the economic machine that runs the world as it is today. Such kind of a study by a renowned author is a high-end type of material that would directly benefit any casual reader, student, or expert in the fields of literature, sociology, economics, and history. Topics that would be especially beneficial to the evolution of music and literature.
The homogenous nature of our modern cultural identity encompasses various cultures assembling in a vast area of an urbanized region. The constant interaction between people living in cities and towns due to the large population density of the areas leads to people of different heritages borrowing bits of cultural practices and beliefs. When such a process is carried out over a period of few years to some generations later, the cultural identity of the occupants of the city is likely to have transformed into unidentifiable practice. However, tenets of the primary cultures can be traced from the current methods. The author invests massive effort to cover that thesis inside out, decoding the derivatives such as the factors that influence cultural changes to extensive lengths. Politics have, for instance, been impactful to the outcome of the current radically interconnected globe. This can be mainly due to the power that some countries have exerted over other countries. In such cases, the lesser powerful nation is likely to be forced into partaking the cultural practices of the imperialist state. Colonization and wars between territories have mired the human history, and groundbreaking reforms and decisions have emanated from such occurrences.
‘Globalization and Culture’ manages to exemplify the nature of the astoundingly capitalistic world and also accurately extrapolates the kind of the near future. The author explains the radical changes in commerce, from holding value in decentralized goods to the establishment of fiat currency, and the recent inception of cryptocurrencies. Such ideas are presented in a systematic manner that honors styling requirements for modern written literature. The book is voluminous enough to be a reference manual for researchers and students of the multiple disciplines highlighted. For an author who is also a professor, John Tomlinson manages to accommodate different levels of readers, including casual ones. Moreover, the chapters are loosely dependent on one another for concepts. Therefore a student or another kind of reader can directly jump to the section in the specific chapter they wanted to study if they did not intend to read through from first to the last chapter.