We have freedom of mobility and consumption accompanied by an awareness of these freedoms and our ability to choose them. But ironically, in the wake of all this choice, we actually become less free to act because we are constantly struggling to make sense of the overload that modernity offers. While the infrastructure of global capitalism has imposed economic structure on our lives, the pressures of the modern capitalist world have created a cultural instability. As I have said before, cultures are not static and fragile and cultural fate recognizes this. However, the cultural fate model does not account for the complexity and ambiguity of the causal problems of modernity.
Modernity involves complex historical processes that result in fragmented values and identity.
People are no longer able to define themselves by national identity. Nation-states used to be the locus of national identity and thus allowed people to define who they were. We can talk of domination in economic terms when speaking of transnational corporation practices as Schiller explains them. However, this account does not address how cultural domination and, consequently, cultural instability take place. It does not allow for the possibility that there can be a collective will to define cultural experience even in the face of the fragmentation and confusion of modern life.