Topic 9.6 Notes – Globalized Culture After 1900

What Globalized Culture Was After 1900

Cultural globalization means the rapid cross-border spread of art, entertainment, information, sports, brands, and consumer habits. The main change was not that exchange suddenly began. Exchange had existed for centuries. The change was speed, scale, mass audiences, and commercial distribution.

A few forces worked together:

• Radio, records, and film let the same songs and stories reach huge audiences.
• Television and satellites carried news and entertainment across borders.
• Air travel and container shipping moved performers, products, and media quickly.
• Multinational corporations and global advertising sold similar goods and lifestyles in many countries.
• Internet, cell phones, and social media made cultural exchange instant and interactive.

The timeline matters:

1. Early to mid-1900s: cinema, radio, recorded music, and print created mass culture.
2. After 1945: television, commercial aviation, and growing trade widened global reach.
3. Late 1900s to early 2000s: internet, social media, and digital commerce sped everything up.

One AP trap here is thinking globalization made everyone the same. It created shared reference points, but people still adapted global culture to local tastes. That mix is called hybridity.

How Political and Social Change Reshaped the Arts

The violence and upheaval of the 20th century changed both what artists made and how they made it. World wars, revolutions, decolonization, migration, urbanization, industrialization, and struggles over race, gender, and national identity pushed artists away from simple realism and heroic praise of rulers.

Guernica

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica shows this shift clearly.

• Painted in 1937 after the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War
• Uses distorted, broken figures to show terror and suffering
• Became an international antiwar symbol

Picasso, Guernica (1937)

In the painting, the fractured human and animal figures turn a specific wartime attack into a broader image of chaos, pain, and destruction.

You should recognize movement names like Cubism, Dadaism, and Abstract Expressionism, but the bigger point is that modern art often used experimentation, fragmentation, and critique to respond to crisis.

Decolonization and migration also widened global audiences. African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, and Indigenous cultural forms reached more people. During the Cold War, governments used culture as soft power through broadcasts, tours, arts funding, and sports prestige.

Forms of Global Popular Culture

Popular culture became global through media networks, migration, and mass audiences.

Music

Reggae is the key example.

• Developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s
• Connected to poverty, colonialism, independence, racial identity, and Rastafari
• Bob Marley became its best-known global figure
• Spread through records, radio, migration, touring, and music companies

Reggae matters because it shows culture also moved outward from the Caribbean, not just from Western powers.

Film and broadcasting

Bollywood is the Hindi-language commercial film industry centered in Mumbai.

• Reached South Asia, diaspora communities, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond
• Mixed local languages, music, dance, and family themes with global film technology
• Proves globalization was multidirectional, not just Hollywood taking over

BBC broadcasting spread shared news and entertainment across borders, but it also projected British influence.

Social media and sports

Facebook and Twitter made communication many-to-many. Users themselves spread images, trends, music, commentary, and products in real time. They also tied culture closely to advertising.

World Cup soccer and the Olympics became global spectacles. Broadcasts, sponsorships, tourism, and merchandise built huge audiences, yet these events also strengthened national identity.

Global Consumer Culture

Consumer culture means people express identity, status, and lifestyle through buying things. After 1900, branding, trade, and advertising made this global.

Products carried meanings beyond use:

• Toyota could signal reliability and middle-class modern life.
• Coca-Cola could signal youth, leisure, or American-style branding.
• Alibaba and eBay turned digital trends into actual purchases through payment systems, shipping, and supply chains.

What Globalization Changed and What Stayed Different

Culture after 1900 crossed borders more quickly, reached larger audiences, and became more commercialized. That is the big change.

The continuity is that local, national, religious, and linguistic identities stayed powerful. Globalization sometimes caused homogenization, but AP World usually pushes harder on adaptation and hybridity.

The best examples of multidirectional exchange are reggae, Bollywood, and Toyota. They show global culture was interconnected, but it was not simply Westernization.