Intercultural Times No. 20
The fantastic outlook of the American Presidential election has changed into somewhat sober reality of its outcome, which was further influenced by the financial crash of the Wall Street disaster. The latter also shifted the economic balance in the world mostly to the advantage of China, which might take over the economic lead from the USA some day.
The print media further lose their leadership and influence on public opinion, and a social gap is widening in western societies. And a further social problem will come up with a cultural clash between societies of the young and societies of the old, between the educated and the uneducated.
November 2009
Intercultural Times No. 19
The renascence of our electronic newspaper shall mean a change in content as well as in format. Globalization has progressed with all its tensions as nobody would have expected at the end of the past century, and clashes within cultures have opened even where similarity seemed guaranteed by history as in the relationship between the European Union and the United States of America.
The forebodings of the Presidential election reveal cultural differences in fields of religion and education. On the other hand India and China have westernized. And their large metropolitan areas look like Manhattan.
Berlin seems even small and neat in comparison to Shanghai and Shenzhen. On the other hand it gets more and more appreciated by the New Yorkers culturally. And Big Apple despite its size and economic power, its traffic and noise shows some similarity in its old-fashioned snugness and metropolitan outspokenness. But some differences lie deeper and may tell us about our own multicultural drawbacks.
Though the cultural tensions within our city have increased since 1998, there is also a positive development in the fields of intercultural music, literature and art, which has even caused The New York Times to praise Berlin as “the most cultured city in Europe”.
A change of format has certainly to do with the development of the Internet. The technical possibilities have not only enhanced the speed of information, but also the mutually balanced exchange of opinions via chats and blogs.
September 2008