Yahya Zaki
The late thinker Jalal Amin once described globalization as the era of the average American man who searches for the easy and exciting in the media and the arts.
What the follower can notice is the ease that approaches the level of superficiality in the cultural product in general. Poetry in the entire world is in a state of decline. This literary genre requires a rather high taste, in addition to a high level of education. The smoothness that is devoid of complexity, and has now relied on “the story” only, does not raise problematic or confusing questions related to the fate of the individual, and the hero in it is like a man of the era, cloudy in features, who is not preoccupied with major issues and does not stand in his way with obstacles that the novelist used to put in the past in front of his heroes to analyze the entanglements and issues of his society As for cinema, there is nothing wrong with it, and this unprecedented popularity of films such as “Barbie” can only be understood by analyzing the spirit of our time, which is dominated by the spirit of the common man, and the same applies to theater and various other arts and literature.
The ordinary man only searches for everything that is unidirectional without the realization of reason, and does not need thinking, and the problem does not lie in him, but in the makers of culture. The ordinary or simple man has always been on the scene, and sometimes the cultural product did not meet his desires, but this Most of the time, the product was subject to the conditions of balanced and sober culture in the first place. As for the common man to impose his taste on most of the cultural product, it is a feature that characterizes the latest stage in globalization, the stage of communication sites and artificial intelligence.
The most important feature of this stage is not represented in the rise of the ordinary man, but rather in the emergence of what might be called the “ordinary intellectual.” Culture is no longer concerned with man’s problems, but rather aims to enjoy him in the first place. It no longer cares about asking basic questions in life and trying to present answers, but became concerned with reproducing a life of luxury and consumerism.
Modern technology has brought about a historical revolution in the concept of culture itself. After the latter was the product of an elite and moved from the top of the social hierarchy to the bottom of it, that elite became affected by what the audience of that technology produced and tried to recycle and present it to that audience again, and most importantly, the presence of that elite What is at stake is the emergence and prosperity of a class of influencers who can understand more with the audience and know its needs.
In fact, we are facing two types of elites, the first is represented by the socially influential, and the second is the new edition of the old, effective intellectual, who is the ordinary intellectual, who differs little or much from the common man except in his possession of the talent of writing or making art, but it is a talent subject to simplicity. New technology.
