Global connections bring cultural ideas, products and practices to people beyond their place of origin.
A student watches a drama made abroad, learns a few phrases from it and shares a song from its soundtrack. The programme, language and music have reached a new audience through an online platform.
Culture includes shared beliefs, values, customs, language, arts and ways of life. Ethnic culture is associated with a group's heritage: traditions and knowledge inherited from earlier generations. Popular and consumer culture includes widely enjoyed entertainment, fashion, food and products. These can overlap, and cultures change as people create, exchange and adapt ideas. Passing on cultural skills, knowledge and meanings is called transmission.
Digital platforms distribute cultural content across borders. Travel and international migration, when people move to live in another country, bring people and their practices into contact. Multinational businesses run activities in several countries and distribute entertainment, clothing and food. Greater reach can make unfamiliar influences easier to encounter and try.
Spread can widen choices, encourage learning and influence tastes or values. But exposure is different from adoption: someone can watch a programme without copying its characters' behaviour. Access and responses also vary between people.
Worked example: A series reaches new viewers
An overseas producer adds subtitles to a series and releases it through a streaming service in several countries. A Singapore viewer follows the series, searches for the soundtrack and starts learning some of its language.
- The streaming service carries the programme across borders. Subtitles help viewers who do not already know its language.
- The viewer's search and language learning show engagement beyond merely having access to the programme.
- The programme can therefore spread music and language as well as entertainment. The viewer chooses which interests to pursue.
- This does not establish that the viewer adopts every value shown in the series or stops practising their existing culture.
Watch out for this
Watching a foreign programme means accepting every value it presents.
Viewers can enjoy, question or reject different parts of a programme. Look for evidence of what they actually think or do, rather than inferring all their beliefs from a viewing choice.
Check your understanding
An overseas musician's tutorial is available on a platform in Singapore. Several local students use it to learn a new playing technique. What is supported?
- Digital connections have helped a cultural practice reach and be used by a new audience.
- The students have accepted all the musician's personal beliefs.
- Everyone in Singapore now prefers foreign music.