William Gibson Quotes

American is deteriorating because it is becoming like other countries

Things are so much global and Americanised.

Throughout history, it took centuries for the habits of one culture to materially affect another. Now, that which becomes popular in one country can sweep through others within months.

Accordingly, globalization is not only something that will concern and threaten us in the future, but something that is taking place in the present and to which we must first open our eyes.

We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

In my mind globalization means returning the industrial revolution back to square one.

The forces of global integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away the established order of things.

Globalization is the central reality of our time.

Globalization is a harsh god.

We should be obliged to admit that Europe is Americanizing herself with disconcerting rapidity.

My personal opinion about the world is that it's homogenized.

Indian cinema is changing not because of outside pressure but because of inside pressure. Society is changing. Obviously, ideas change because of globalization, because of the huge middle class that is mostly first generation.

We live in an ever-changing global pop culture community.

Modernization means Westernization.

I think we are becoming more and more linked, and before long, we'll all be one culture. It's happening in every field, not just fashion. Actually, I think the only hope for peace is if culture is homogenized. Unfortunately, money seems to be the only solution to political disagreements. If we are all linked through culture and trade, it won't be worth fighting each other.

I think globalization actually maintains and fosters various elements of national and cultural identities. I don't think everything is being homogenized. If anything, your food, your culture, and your ethnicity might become part of the globalized world, and thus absorbed by other countries.

There's a real connection between the history of print in Europe and nationalism, and how those two things could be formed. I think they may both now be ending, for good and bad, but I think mainly for good. Either globalism was supposed to make people all realize this is one big business going on and we should know what's going on everywhere, or it makes people say, "I don't want to become part of this thing. I want to be incredibly different from you and I want to uphold my local behavior." Dress a certain way.

You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.

Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.

For Russians in the '90s, there was that sense of not knowing what the future held at all. And coming off a long period of when people actually were robbed of the ability to plan their future - that's very much a part of totalitarian control - that exacerbated it. In this country, we are not coming off a long period like that. But I think that for a lot of Americans, as a result of globalization, as a result of the housing crisis, the future is just too uncertain. And their place in the world is too uncertain.

Culture which smooth the whole world licks, Also unto the devil sticks.

The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.