Globalization and cultural identity

Culture · 2026-06-13 · 8 min read

By Sara Iyer, Culture & media

Cultural exchange is not new. What is new is the volume, the speed and the direction most of it travels.

Cultures have always borrowed. Food, music, dress and religion have moved along trade routes for millennia, and the idea of a sealed local tradition is mostly a modern invention looking backwards.

What changed is asymmetry. Distribution infrastructure — platforms, studios, catalogues, recommendation systems — is concentrated, so exchange flows far more easily in some directions than others, and small cultures compete for attention with enormous production budgets.

The result is usually hybridisation rather than erasure. Local scenes absorb global forms and produce something specific: regional cinema with international grammar, pop music in a local language, street food built from imported ingredients.

Policy levers exist and are contested. Local content requirements, public funding for the arts and support for translation all measurably increase what gets made locally, at the cost of decisions about who deserves support.

At an individual level identity has become curated rather than inherited. People assemble it from several sources at once, which is genuinely new and explains much of the anxiety in the debate.

Tags: globalization, culture, society

Sara Iyer — Sara writes about digital culture, entertainment and how creative work is changing for ESPYCRUX. She reads the release notes and the box office, and thinks the two explain more together than either does alone.