Globalization, like technological change, is often perceived as an agent of homogenization, dilution, even destruction. These fears have some validity, particularly where globalization translates as Americanization ... perhaps even more so, now that Disney and McDonald's plan to bring the Golden Arches inside the walls of the Magic Kingdom. Disneyfication, of course, is demonized even within the US. Yet anxiety about a global Big Mac Attack overlooks some basic truths about the nature of culture in a digital world.
The lines between high and low culture have long since disappeared, if they ever existed - the driving forces behind American mass culture are the icons produced by Madison Avenue and Hollywood. Today's master manipulators, as it happens, work at Wieden & Kennedy, not Andy Warhol's Factory, so we get Michael Jordan and Microsoft, rather than Marilyn and Campbell's Soup.
This corporate pop culture, however, is anything but a unilateral emanation. We export Mickey Mouse and import Hello Kitty; we swap Nikes for Tamagotchis. Even the archetypally American McDonald's hamburger takes on subtle new flavors overseas: a "Bigu Maku" in Tokyo's Roppongi district, for instance, is topped with shredded cabbage.
The intercontinental drift of consumer culture is far from a simple back-and-forth. Osamu Tezuka, a postwar Japanese manga artist, was hugely influenced by classic Disney animation. His cartoon series Jangaru Taitei in turn made something of a mark on the American mind in the 1960s, renamed Kimba the White Lion - and again in the '90s as an undeniable influence on the Disney blockbuster The Lion King.
Ultimately, the migration of culture is not monolithic but mosaic, flowing over and around borders, washing away strict definitions, surging into new social spaces created by the tools of the age. Likewise, the merging of culture and consuming images is nothing new. Just as commercialism propelled pop art in postwar America, the "floating world" that sprang from a dynamic merchant class in 17th-century Japan pumped both its styles and its subjects into the fortress of high art, informing everything from haiku to French impressionism.
Today's technology has created another floating world. The culture of this free-form realm is fluid, mutative, and global, and its aesthetic increasingly steals mindshare from its cinematic/televisual predecessors. Embracing individual initiative and industrial imperative more than ever before, this digital culture is synthetic and authentic incorporated. Did somebody say 
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John S. Couch (jcouch@wiredmag.com) shapes the pictures inside people's heads for Wired Digital; he also wrote "The Artist of the Future Is a Technologist" in this issue.
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Culture Incorporated
