Detailed reading
5 American popular culture is the closest approximation today to a global lingua franca, drawing the urban and young in particular into a common cultural zone where they share some dreams of freedom, wealth, comfort, innocence, and power - and perhaps most of all, youth as a state of mind. In general, despite the rhetoric of “identity,” young people do not live in monocultures. They are not monocular. They are both local and cosmopolitan. Cultural bilingualism is routine. Just as their “cultures” are neither hard-wired nor uniform, so there is no simple way in which they are “Americanized”, though there are American tags on their experience - low-cost links to status and fun.