Satellites, cables, Walkmans, video cassette recorders, CDs, and other marvels of entertainment technology have created the arteries through which modern entertainment conglomerates are homogenising global culture. With the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the embrace of free market ideologies in former communist countries, literally the entire planet is being wired into music, movies, news, TV programmes, and other cultural products that originate primarily in the film and recording studios of the United States. The impact of this homogenisation on the rich cultural diversity of communities all around the world is immense, and its contours are beginning to become clear.

Unlike American automobiles, television sets, and machine tools, American cultural products are sweeping the globe. Reruns of Dallas and the Cosby show fill the TV screens on every continent. The 1990 fairy-tale hit Pretty Woman became the all-time best-selling film in Sweden and Israel within weeks of its release. Disneyland is now a global empire; its Japanese incarnation outside Tokyo draws 300,000 visitors a week, and Euro Disneyland, a theme park on the outskirts of Paris occupying space one-fifth the size of the city itself, eventually hopes to draw more tourists than the Eiffel Tower, Sistine Chapel, British Museum, and the Swiss Alps combined.

When the Berlin Wall came down in late 1989, East German families flocked to West Berlin to taste the pleasures of capitalism; what they wanted most were oranges and pop-music records. In Rio, school kids adorn their workbooks with pictures of Michael Jackson. In Kashmir, teenagers hum Beatles songs. Vegetable stalls in Madras still feature "disco" cauliflower. All over the world people are listening to pop music and watching videos that offer excitement, escape, and the feeling of connectedness to a larger world. Most of these consumers of global cultural products are