related links:

Unesco Worldreport
Unesco Culture
Unesco Multilingualism

Cultures UNPLUGGED: Charting the Divide

Paradoxically, globalization and digitisation generate new forces of fragmentation. As the world wide web integrates global flows of information and cultural goods on the highest levels, locally and regionally, things dramatically fall apart. Case studies, facts and figures, analyses.

An Update by Rüdiger Wischenbart

In the recently emerging world of integrated flows of information, of ideas and cultural goods, a few leading markets dominate to the detriment of the vast majority of all the other actors. Between 1980 and 1998, the value of imports of cultural goods worldwide grew from 47,8 to 213,7 bn US dollars. But only a handful of countries can be seen as the main actors in this trade. Some 60 bn of imports where aimed at the USA alone. The top 13 importing countries were the recipients of some 80 percent of all global imports of cultural goods. The paradoxical result of globalization and the advent of a world wide web of information and integration is the emergence of a highly complex system of cascading sub-divides in terms of culture and information flows.

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