A Recent Report Also Emphasises The Increasing Importance Of Regions In A

A recent report also emphasises the increasing importance of regions in a global world (The Newspaper Society 2000). It states that people in the UK tend to lead most of their lives with a 14 mile radius, emphasises the importance of regional and local papers in addressing people's concerns and lifestyle, and that people trust regional and local newspapers twice as much as national papers. It further states that 60% of local business people interviewed believed that regional newspapers are the most useful media for local business news. These findings in no way jeopardise or prevent people from engaging in any form of global interaction or globalised culture and do not stop the process of globalisation.
The above discussion has shown that the affirmation of regional identities is not incompatible with globalisation. Indeed, this is not in itself particularly surprising considering that socialisation of infants usually takes place in a restricted territory with some kind of sub-national identity and even if children are increasingly globalised, in the sense that they access non-local cultures through music, the cinema, the TV, the internet, make use of international commodities, and the world they live in is shrinking, the local usually becomes an integral part of identity. To assume that Coca Cola or McDonald's, or any other global commodity unthinkingly wipes out variation and regional identity is simplistic. No culture has ever been static or monolithic to the extent to which it never included physical or metaphysical products from outside itself and failed to use them in its own way. A good example of this is the Kayapó Indians of Brazil, who use video recorders to record their dances and rituals for the next generations they find watching these more interesting than national TV (Green 1997, 91). They also use the cameras to record meetings with politicians, in case of later disagreements. Some have suspected that globalisation would bring a shallow and superficial global monoculture, perhaps made up of ethnic 'artifacts' (Tomlinson 1999, 100) but this misunderstands the extent to which individuals can actively use aspects of culture, whether they originally 'belonged' to them or not. Japanese TVs do not render a Scottish person any less Scottish, in the same way as a Dutch video camera does not render a Kayapó any less Kayapó.
It seems to be widely agreed that globalisation, as a set of processes and results, is happening and also that regional identities, whether these be national or sub-national are being (re)affirmed and it seems best to interpret this as showing that the two are not at all incompatible. Certainly some commentators on globalisation, for example Giddens and Ohmae, see increased regionalism as a natural byproduct of globalisation.