Cultural Homogenization Quotes

While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic angst or social alienation.

There is something romantic about the world being a diverse place, where every place has a Starbucks and Denny's.

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.

That's just the way the world's going - everything has to be so instantly commercial that it kills anything that's a little bit underground instantly.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

Pop Art is industrial painting. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won't be American; it will be universal.

Assimilation, not success, is the American end game.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.

I think we are slowly killing liberty, creativity, intelligent thinking; it's as if we are being led into a world that is like a huge shopping centre, with a sort of anaesthesia about everything except the choice of goods in front of us.

To me, America is just another market.

Every time the industry gets powerful, and corporate thinking dominates what the music is, then the music really pales.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

the Americanizing tasks of the public schools have passed into other hands, in part because the overwhelming majority of Americans are native-born and do not need to be 'Americanized.' As well, recent multicultural understandings of what is 'American' no longer enables the possibility of the homogenized Americanization of the past. The rise of the mass media (TV, radio, movies) has provided a set of far more powerful socialization and acculturation tools which 'Americanize' in their own way in a manner that has far greater influence than the public school and which is not only accessible to everyone but sought by everyone.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology. … Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.

Even fairly serious moviegoers can't shake this shadow of the corporate world.

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.