One chilly fall night last semester, I decided to venture off campus to study. But where to go? After sitting in my car a few minutes with a friend, we both decided to head to the “cool Borders, you know, the one with the cool sections and the neat caf?, the one that used to be Library Ltd.” When we arrived there, we realized, to our horror, it was closed. Where were two SLU students on a mission to study while simultaneously socializing to go? We finally discovered another Borders nearby, but it was a store without personality, a store just like all the others.
Nowadays, any place we go everything is exactly the same. Our world is becoming more and more homogenized, with only a few bastions of quirkiness left to hold on to. It may be convenient to realize that “wherever you go, Walgreens is nearby,” but at the same time it is also frightening (Shades of 1984, perhaps?). I will freely admit that after several days of frou-frou food in France, I was plenty glad to have a good-old American fast-food restaurant to turn to. However, the fact that the Gap in London is exactly the same as a Gap in St. Louis, with the same design, same music, and the same clothes, is certainly a reason to pause and think about the changes in our world that we are living through.
The excitement of traveling is in experiencing new cultures, but in a world that is slowly becoming more and more homogenized, the differences between cultures are slowly eroding as well. Imagine finding a Pepsi stand in the midst of the Sahara desert – half a world away, U.S. commercial culture is still with us (I am not exaggerating here, this actually happened to a friend of mine). Wherever we go, our food, music, movies and clothes are there. Chicago Bulls hats in India. Britney Spears in Japan. McDonalds everywhere. There is no escape anymore.
This increased homogeneity is accompanied by the rapid death of the “mom and pop” stores of old. Family-run stores are going out of business, their “inefficient ways” replaced by the sameness of the franchise. Although it may be awfully convenient to go to one place for my books, music and coffee-I would prefer to sit in a bookstore with personality, and then go to a unique music store, and then venture off to a non-Starbucks coffee shop. Sure, it is all rather inefficient, but at least this way I feel like I have been places that I cannot find every other place in the world.
In addition to the sameness of our stores and restaurants throughout the world, American culture is being exported throughout the world as well. Although there can be some benefits to this, what often results is a changing of cultures in a dangerous way. This is a new form of imperialism, a cultural imperialism. In parts of Africa, being slightly heavier was seen as a sign of beauty, but after “Friends” began to air, rates of anorexia increased dramatically. In Japan, rates of obesity and heart disease began to increase once American fast food found its way there. The good with the bad is being taken to other countries (our bad movies for instance – no one, no matter where they live should have to suffer through Armageddon). We are not exporting ideas of freedom, plurality and tolerance; we are exporting corporations and consumer culture.
That chilly fall night as I sat in Borders, it didn’t matter that I was in St. Louis, MO; I could have just as easily been in Seattle or Boston or anyplace else Borders exists. The store would have been the same wherever I went. It was a return of the “Middle School phenomena”- the strange occurrence around early puberty where everyone dresses exactly the same. If we all hated middle school because everyone was pressured to act the same, why would we want to subject that to the entire world?
I say, bring back the foibles and diversity of the wider world! It only makes traveling that much more fun.
Lubna Alam is a junior studying history.
