Have you heard about cultural diversity? Cultural diversity is the existence of cultural or ethnic groups within a society. It includes the cultural difference of languages, clothes, traditions and religions. There are many countries in the world, and each country has its own native culture and characteristics. However, as technologies have developed a lot recently, it also has become much easier to interact and share many cultures among countries. This promotes globalization, which is the speed up of movements and exchanges of goods, services, technologies or cultural practices all over the planet. For example, Coca-cola, blue jeans and Starbucks coffee are goods that represent globalization because they were spread well in other countries and settled as cultures of other countries. Thus, it shows globalization is closely related to our lives. Then, what are the pros and cons about globalization to cultural diversity? Globalization has enabled countries to keep good relationships with other countries because they share similar cultures, and it has given trade opportunities more than before. However, although it has advantages in terms of world relationships or connections, it doesn’t offer helpful effects to cultural diversity. This is because globalization is the process of not making new various cultures but spreading cultures which already existed to other countries, so mostly globalization affects negatively to cultural diversity. For instance, one native culture may have derived many other cultures. However, if its own culture is eliminated due to the impact of globalization, it will finally result in the disappearance of cultural diversity because the rest of the derived cultures also can’t exist. Because of these consequences, studying ways to accept globalization without serious damage to cultural diversity will be a future homework for people.
By: Hanseul Chang