Entertainment-culture is gaining momentum worldwide. Throughout the last twenty years, more and more individuals around the globe have been fully metabolized into the psychosphere of technological-spectacle: TV, Hollywood, video games, sporting events, and so forth. For many, these activities represent leisure-time and a way to connect with the larger, outside world. However, this rapidly spreading global phenomena of technological-spectacle is having a tremendously negative impact on society's collective ideologies, culture, and overall health. Most importantly, the rest of the world is now consuming media at the same pace, and in the same forms, as those living in the United States.I think that no one has yet to accurately assess the influence of American movies and television have had on people throughout the world. I was first alerted to this phenomenon when traveling in the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany") in 1984. While traveling by rail, I struck up a conversation with some young Germans in my compartment. I was rather astonished at how casually they made reference to American cultural items such as major league baseball teams. Since then this awareness grew by frequently noticing in foreign films characters watching American films and TV programs.
So now I ask myself these questions: Could this inundation of American cultural products which advertised glowing features of "the American way of life" as purveyed by Hollywood and Wall Street throughout the world account for the easy transference of allegiance from former satellite countries (e.g., Poland, Latvia, Lithuania) of the Soviet Union to that of NATO? Could this phenomenon account for the easy conversion of the flawed Soviet form of socialism into a rabid form of capitalism in Russia and to the easy absorption of the GDR by the Federal Republic of Germany?