by Irie Bliss

Created on: July 03, 2007

Ideas, goods, market economics, and communication technologies are aggressively spreading, often under the control of Western corporations and international businesses. Consequently, new challenges for local cultures and values in other non-Western societies are rapidly occurring. A tidal wave of Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant tub of pudding oozing over the planet. However, the flavor is sickly sweet and disturbingly homogenous.

Suddenly, people all over the non-Westernized world, appear to be implementing materialistic and individualistic values previously associated with Western culture. One major explanation for this structural change in the world economy is globalization, which floods poor countries with goods that are marketed by the media's seductive and superficial, but nonetheless successful, advertising. Tyler Cowen writes in his book Creative Destruction that "cultural globalization can increase the diversity of choices for the individual while reducing the diversity between societies across the globe." This in turn, creates fresh desires in peoples of non-Western societies, who otherwise may not have had desires to purchase CD-players or wear name brand tennis shoes.

Most people, especially the young, view these new products and new ideas as exhilarating and progressive. Change for many cultures may mean escape from oppressive traditions, bringing new opportunities for individuals to mingle in creative ways. Culture should be allowed to develop, however there a genuine cause for concern about the rate at which non-Western cultures are being undermined in a world that is bound together by incredibly strong economic ties.

Tourism, which creates these economic ties between countries, also beings different groups of people into contact with one another (Spradley, 342). One example of how tourism affects the global economy as well as cultures is the tourism in the Dominican Republic and Sosa. The international tourism in these areas has not benefited the local Dominicans. Instead, the successful resorts in Sosa are foreign owned, hardly pay their employees, and push smaller Dominican businesses out of business. "Foreign ownership, repatriation of profits, and the monopolistic nature of these all-inclusive resorts make it difficult for the local population in tourist economies to profit," writes Denise Brennan in her ethnography Men's Pleasure, Women's Labor: Tourism for Sex (Spradley, 358). Tourism is one of the largest industries

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