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Youth
and the culture chaos The fusion of the MTV phenomenon with the shopping mall culture created a whole new way of life for the youth with a new system of values and beliefs, which entwined with the lifestyle in the urban centres of Sri Lanka. As effects of global culture fuelled by the economics of globalisation, transnational corporations and international media giants were having a huge impact on lifestyles of people worldwide. According to sociologists and anthropologists, this situation created new windows of opportunity for people to develop; but it also paved the way for local cultural destruction. In states where there were sections of youth, restricted by cultural implications, the circulation of the ‘free values’ of the global culture created a huge gap between their bond to the local cultural establishment and rationalised lifestyle, creating an implosion of their restricted ideologies. Especially for some elements of the urban youth, irrespective of their class difference there existed a vacuum for locating their identities, as in Sri Lanka, where the modernisation process in the country was similar to some mutation in a nuclear disaster aftermath. Thus, the introduction of the global culture provides them with a temporary refuge from the above problem and consequently dislocated them from their Sri Lankan cultural roots. This disorientation can manifest itself in one or two extreme forms. For one, there could be an exaggerated attachment to an often reinvented past in the name of tradition and culture, or the reverse manifesting in attempts at wholesale adoption of anything and everything foreign. Thus this can be understood with the concept of “cultural implication” by which I mean their relationship to the basic presuppositions, fundamental myths, unstated assumptions, linguistic taken-for-granted, historic grounds and creation myths that unite a society: all of those conceptual, linguistic, imaginative, literary, musical, artistic, and intellectual threads that bind people together to make them feel “of one kind”. “Culture” in this anthropological sense, then, is a core part of our identities as human beings, connected to our mother tongues, to our families as children, to our root assumptions about life and the world, to our links to our ancestors, and to the fundamental texts, written or unwritten, of our social world. It is the glue that binds us together with those whom we recognise as being “people like us.” It is what makes a set of individuals, ‘a people’ and not simply a gathering of strangers. This western dominance of indigenous cultures was a form of ‘coca-colonialism’ designed to maintain western power, prevent development, and exploit resources; in short to ‘McDominate’. The accusations often confused the commercial strategies of western multinational corporations with the foreign policies of western governments. Hollywood, for example, was somehow part of an American governmental strategy to sell the American way of life to local foreign cultures by displacing local values. The export of American television shows was also part of this. Globalisation has also brought about what has been called the ‘McDonaldisation’ of societies, most notably through the entry of cultural products like Hollywood movies, U.S. toys, fast food and pop music. The foliage, furniture, plates, utensils and cups are plastic. You are completely disconnected from the natural world. The local youth culture is blended into this context most of the time creating the floating mindset where sometimes the location of life is in crisis. If closely observed the behaviour patterns of this particular group at a fast food outlet or at a shopping mall one can feel it’s a tragically adapted, super imposed spin off from the Bold and the Beautiful or possibly the Australian media googly Ocean Ave. Fast food restaurants create a false sense of abundance. They offer access to a ready supply of condiments, sugar packets, straws, napkins and coffee cream - things that cost the restaurant almost nothing and have no real value. It is indeed English, which served the colonial British empire and now drives the knowledge economy and the Internet, that is all too often seen as a tyrannosaurus rex that voraciously gobbles up cultures and traditions. The new global culture is the expression of de-territorialisation and a borderless world. Operating through the logic of late capitalism, it can be seen as the creation of powerful media empires and transnational companies with a culture of consumption or the capitalist agenda as one of the primary signifiers of the era of globalisation. The commercialisation of culture has a disturbing impact on people. What once was an element of their way of life becomes a product, rather than something unique they had made to suit their own specific needs and circumstances. At the same time, people are increasingly bombarded with new images, new music, new clothes and new values. The familiar and old are to be discarded. Global media is increasingly in the hands of a few, large, powerful organisations, as is the production of music and film. For example, with the dawn of the new millennium the MTV television station was available to 280 million households in over 70 countries. The disoriented youth in Sri Lanka, at the receiving end of the media, even when it comes to education now rush to foreign lands. But there is hope, and that lies in the concept of being ‘glocal’ (global + local), rather than being merely global. That will be a relief for the people who sight and map this disaster, like stargazers, which is rather like a ticking time bomb minus the potential to diffuse. |
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