On the ride home after school last evening, I couldn't stop wondering about Singapore's identity. We're such a young but immeasurably successful nation. Within forty years, we developed and emerged to be one of the key resounding players in the global market and had been promoted as a First World nation.
I gave some thoughts about our cultural identity. As we know it, Singapore is a amalgam of Chinese, Malay, Indian and European immigrants. In the last ten years, however, Singapore saw, and is continuing to see, a vast number of foreigners to enter Singapore to seek a better living here. We have the Westerners, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Arabs, the Thais, the Filipinos, the Indonesians, the Indians, the Chinese (and the list goes on). Singapore thus, achieves a significant degree of cultural diffusion with its unique combination of these ethnic groups which has given her a rich mixture of diversity.
I feel that, because of the continuous migration, Singapore’s culture has been greatly imperialised. Cultural imperialism is defined as the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating, or artificially injecting the culture or language of one nation into another. Ms Hui prompted us to think about the relationship between cultural imperialism and media globalisation.
I guess it makes sense for a thriving economy like Singapore to be immersed in the process of globalisation. We have nothing but our people, our creative and innovative ideas and our skills. We invest in anything we can lay our hands on. We bring foreign talents into our country and they, in return, inject their cultures and traditions to us. We built up on the latest technology and are up to date with big players such as America and Japan. With such developments, we have greater access to media products such as magazines, tv programmes, internet and so on.
And such, it is typical that we will be highly inclined to adapt the different cultures that are presented to us. Our people, especially the young, absorb the media products to a great degree. This is to a greater extent true with respect to “Americanism”, as they are the dominant players in the mass media such as film, news, comics, and television hit shows. This is largely due to the fact that they are more financially powerful to invest in good productions. Singapore purchase these products for entertainment purposed. In return, the American culture has been imposed onto Singaporeans. We have thus become more liberated and “westernized”.
I guess we are a living example of cultural imperialism at work. haha!
