Culturalglobalization refers to the diffusion ortransmission of various forms of media and arts, including decorative or applied arts across national borders. Therefore, cultural globalization generally refersto cultural products or artifacts that are circulated among advanced or advancing countries in particular thosethat constitute desirable markets or those that possess sufficient levels of national income for investment in the arts and in industries that produce cultural artifact.

To understand the process of globalization, one shouldanalyzeculture homogenization and heterogenization.Cultural heterogenization is simply the notion of ethnic fundamentalism and purity that drives a group of people claiming a shared historic and cultural heritage to insist on closing its boundaries to the world in order to preserve and maintain thisheritage. Cultural homogenization on the other hand happens when one culture is made to resemble another through cultural influences. It is often regarded as Americanization. Agood example of these is the indigenization of Japanese fashion in Taiwan and the actual construction of a Korean Town in Beijing.
KarlMarx noticed that there is a number of features of goods that later observers have argued underpin the nature of modern consumer culture.  Some of these features are the enigmatic quality of the commodity. He therefore adopted the phrase “fetishism of commodities” in describing the mysterious process by which the external appearance of some goods conceal the story of who made them and under what conditions. He argues that in market societies, commoditieshide and replace relationships between people and hence the presumed unity between production and consumption is broken. People’s thinking about themselves and others is distorted by a fetishism, in which beliefs about the material products of laborare substituted for an understanding of the social relations which made the production of the goods possible. Therefore, the object that labor produces stands as a power independent of the producer. This process is described by the term reification. As a result, the social relations represented in an object come to appear absolutely fixed beyond human control.

Many Marxists argue that is that the fetishism of a commodity in the modern society is highly manipulated in the practices of packaging, advertising and promotion. This enables goods to be fitted with masks expressly designed to manipulate the possible relations between things and human wants.Commodities take on a wide range of cultural associations and illusions (commodity aesthetics). Advertising is able to exploit this freedom to attach images of romance, fulfillment, exotica or the good life to mundane consumer goods such as cars, soap, washing machines, and alcoholic drinks. These images fix the ways material objects are able to act as carriers of meaning in social interaction. They portray goods in symbolic codes that consumers cannot resist.

Marx argues that capitalism always tries to expand into overseas markets resulting in a market system in which commodities are completely alienated from those who produced them and consumers only know how much their commodities cost but never where they are made .Appadurai then follows with the creation of five scapes or flows which characterize globalization, namely the technoscape, the ethnoscape, the ideoscape the financescape, andthe mediascape. He argues that fetishism results from the capitalist nature of these scapes that take place in globalizations, a phenomenon which results to production fetishism and fetishism of the consumer.

Production fetishism happens when “production has itself become a fetish, obscuring not social relations as such but the relations of production, which are increasingly transnational”(Appadurai1990 p. 596). This happens when there is an insatiable desire to produce to facilitate the scapes that characterize globalizations. This allows for the Marxist notion of alienation to take up root and find a contemporary adaptation. This degree of alienation is the alienation of man from his product, in the sense that he is not able to enjoy the fruits of his labor which he creates for others.

Mediascape, for example, defined as the “distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information”(Appadurai 1990, p.590), paints a good picture of production fetishism. A good example of this is the global exportation of Bollywood, the largest movie producing country in the world. It targets the whole globe for its market. Mediascapes inhabit the space between reality and fantasy, the same way as the distinction blurs between the addresser and addressee in the closed confines of a cinema. It is this function of the Bollywood dream factory that provides the illusion of other countries in all their types and formulaic presentations of generational, mytho-religious, musical, gender and universalities that become real.

Through them, “the lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other imagined world… fantasies that could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement”(Appadurai 1990,p. 590,591).

It is therefore clear that we live a world of tremendous globalization and it is impossible to assume that global processes do not contribute to the formation of cultural identities.

Works cited

APPADURAI, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Middleborough, Theory, Culture and Society.

APPADURAI, A. (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, Minn, University of Minnesota Press.

Allman, Paula. 2001. Critical education against global capitalism: Karl Marx and revolutionary critical education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

WELLER, R. P. (2006). Discovering nature: globalization and environmental culture in China and Taiwan. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

TOMLINSON, J. (1999). Globalization and culture. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.