What Are The Benefits Of Cultural Globalization

Cultural globalization is the rapid exchange of ideas, meanings, attitudes, and values across national borders and around the world in a way that intensifies social relations and interactions between people of diverse cultures. Although often considered a relatively modern concept, the processes of cultural globalization can be traced back along most of history. Even when most cultures existed isolated and dispersed, it 's through trade and exploration that our ancestors expanded their ideas and values. There are many conflicting ideas whether globalization increases or reduces cultural diversity or homogenization. For many, the influences of Western culture through Television, cinema/movies, advertising, radio, magazines, etc. are substituting and competing with local cultures and minority cultures. This cultural globalization is often blamed for increasing risk behaviors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, identity loss, social conflicts and the likes. Others argue that greater cultural exchange is expected to help increase tolerance and understanding. With more access to information, this can create lifestyle and social changes with health benefits, such as gender equality, greater respect for human rights and women’s rights, cancer awareness, and more.

It is already noticed on an international level how American brands have strongly taken over so many industries, most noticeably fast-food chains. McDonalds connects more than 35,000 chains serving approximately 70 million people thanks to 1.8 million employees in more than 100 countries each day (McDonald 's. "Getting to Know Us". April, 2014). Not far behind are: KFC, Burger King, and Starbucks. Television shows have spread like wildfire since the mid 1980’s with shows like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" gaining enormous popularity outside the US (Radley Balko, The Institute of Human Studies, 2003) along with other channels like The Discovery Channel, MTV, and so forth. Come the digital age, where the internet is the main source of exposure to information and

It is useful to point out that the 3 other options are Italian pizzas, where true pizzas originated.

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We then showed two pictures of kids dressed up in costumes and asked what is the occasion portrayed in these images: Finally, we asked the respondents to identify 6 celebrities. 2 Americans, 2 French, 1 Arab, 1 Lebanese. Results show the number of times a celebrity was identified by name:

Kim Kardashian: 58

Tom Cruise: 67

Gerard Depardieu: 39

Jean Reno: 25

Adel Imam: 32

Nadine Labaki: 25 It is needless to say that American culture has prevailed when it came to popular subjects like food, celebrities and holidays. With the results shown through the previous questions, it was clear to say that the Lebanese youth in particular have adopted a large chunk of the American culture. The Lebanese cultural fabric seems to include many American strands, which creates a gap within the local culture and narrows the gap extensively with foreign cultures, the US most