Biggest Culture Gaps Within Not Between Countries: Research


For nearly two decades we here at Cultural Detective have gone out of our way to teach people that culture is NOT limited to nationality, despite the fact that so many use the two words interchangeably. National boundaries are frequently rather arbitrary or externally imposed, and they can also change over time. Northern Italians are so different from southern Italians, and living in Mexico I can’t begin to tell you about the huge regional differences within this nation. Culture can be a valuable guide, but it can be sliced a slew of different ways. There is a huge bias, however, even in the intercultural field, to looking almost exclusively at national differences.

Two of the graphics we use to illustrate the multi-dimensionality of various cultural influences upon most of us are above. I even wrote a blog post in June 2014 entitled, We Are Not (Just) Our Nationality(ies).

A few months ago three researchers—Bradley Kirkman, Vas Taras, and Piers Steel—conducted a meta-analysis of 558 studies conducted over the last 35 years on work-related values. Their analysis included 32 countries across four fairly standard cultural dimensions:

  1. Individuals vs. groups
  2. Hierarchy and status in organizations
  3. Having as much certainty as possible at work
  4. Material wealth, assertiveness, and competition vs. societal welfare and harmony in relationships

The results were published in the Management International Review and, for those who don’t have a subscription, a summary is also available on the Harvard Business Review site. What were their results?

Over 80% of values differences occur within countries, and only 20% between countries! Thank you for helping us out, gentlemen! We MUST look at people as unique individuals with multiple cultural influences, not as stereotypical “Chinese” or “Americans.” That approach hollows us out and strips us of our richness—especially in today’s world, where so many of us are Blended Culture beings—multi-racial, global nomad, TCK/third-culture kids, etc. Cultural Detective helps us to look at ourselves and others in context and in our wholeness; it is the only intercultural development tool on the market today that does.

For those who do business globally, the most important takeaway is never to assume that people from a particular country embody the values typically associated with that country. Cultural stereotyping by country will likely lead to a whole host of mistakes when trying to lead and motivate a culturally diverse workforce.

The research team then went on to say, hey, if nationality isn’t a great indicator of culture, what is?

I have long said that, in my experience, occupational culture (e.g., research vs. marketing vs. finance; higher education vs. business vs. healthcare) is one of the best indicators of similarity internationally, along with organizational culture and urban/rural demographics. But hey, predictions aren’t my forte; 30 years ago I said sushi would never take off in the west, but robata-yaki (grilled skewered meat and veg) would. Oops.

Kirkman, Taras, and Steel looked at 17 possible cultural containers, to see how they rank in terms of pull: gender, age, generation, number of years of education, occupation, socio-economic status, and environmental characteristics such as civil and political freedom, economic freedom, GDP/capita, Human Development Index, Globalization Index, long-term unemployment, urbanization, income inequality (using the GINI coefficient), level of corruption, crime rate, and employment in agriculture. Interesting mix of containers, for sure.

Findings in their study showed that demographic groupings such as occupation and socio-economic status are high indicators of cultural similarity. People with similar socio-economic conditions and levels of education had more shared values than did those within nations. Quoting them, “Our data show that it makes much more sense to talk about cultures of professions, rich versus poor, free versus oppressed, than about cultures of countries.”

Obviously their work was limited to four work-related values, and didn’t include more general societal values such as equality or freedom. As the researchers concluded:

“For those who do business globally, the most important takeaway is never to assume that people from a particular country embody the values typically associated with that country. Cultural stereotyping by country will likely lead to a whole host of mistakes when trying lead and motivate a culturally diverse workforce.”

Log into your subscription to Cultural Detective Online now, and take the time to analyze an interaction from just a couple of these “containers” of culture. You’ll realize just how rich the system is, and why using it regularly can improve your intercultural competence.

Sperm Whales and Cultural Diversity


Image from “The Lost Culture of Whales,” by Shane Gero in The New York Times

Our annual year-end gift to each other in our family is a boat trip to visit the humpback whales in our bay in Mazatlán. They are gorgeous, and during the trip we often swim with dolphins, delight in jumping mantas, and greet sea turtles.

I just read an article about sperm whales on the other side of Mexico, in the Eastern Caribbean (The Lost Culture of Whales, in The New York Times); their populations are declining by 4% annually. Horrible, for sure, but why write about that on the Cultural Detective blog? Granted, we here at Cultural Detective very much support sustainability, a reduced footprint, and respect for our planet and its ecology. But what do declining sperm whale populations have to do with culture?

According to Shane Gero, behavioral ecologist and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project: “Behavior is what you do; culture is how you do it. All sperm whales do the same things — feed, swim, defend, socialize — but how they do them is different around the world. Just as humans use forks or chopsticks, they, too, differ in how they eat, what species of squid they eat, how fast they travel and where they roam, their social behavior, and probably many other ways we still do not understand.” Sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean have at least 22 different dialects, and can identify one another. Interestingly, those from a similar culture are more likely to cooperate.

It seems that the lives of sperm whales are remarkably similar to those of humans: extended family members — usually female — babysit calves. Family is critical to survival, and the whales live in communities of neighboring families in a multicultural oceanic society, according to Gero. “We are not just losing specific whales that we have come to know as individuals; we are losing a way of life, a culture — the accumulated wisdom of generations on how to survive in the deep waters of the Caribbean Sea.”

I found all this fascinating, but I especially enjoyed reading Gero’s conclusions, which I post below.

“The definition of biodiversity needs to include cultural diversity. All sperm whales around the world are similar genetically… But genetics may not be particularly helpful when conserving populations of cultural whales. ‘Genetic stocks,’ which we have traditionally used to manage and protect much of the world’s wildlife, simply cannot preserve the diversity of life. Diverse systems are more resilient, and the most important diversity in sperm whales, as in humans, is in their cultural traditions.

I could point to many reasons to protect whales, like the way they mitigate the effects of climate change by cycling nutrients that enable the ocean to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, or how top predators regulate marine food chains. But if we are to preserve life, ours and theirs, we must find ways to succeed together, and value diversity in our societies and in our ecosystems.

—Shane Gero, behavioral ecologist and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project

Life is indeed wholistic, all beings are interconnected, and preserving the diversity amongst ourselves and our animal and plant life may be key to our survival. I have no doubt it’s key to our well being.

The best part of working with Cultural Detective has always been the community — you — like-minded people striving to build intercultural competence. Gero’s opinions and experience would seem to make the case that our community is broader than I thought, including, at a minimum, biologists and ecologists, as well.

Study Supports Ecotonos’ Effectiveness


“This study shows that the use of the Ecotonos: A Simulation for Collaborating Across Cultures supports the development of cultural intelligence (CQ) and an increase in the development of confidence in cross-cultural encounters.

This legitimates the use of Ecotonos in international business education.

Ecotonos may also be effective in preparing students for overseas internships or study abroad programs… and in multinational corporations and universities as a means to improve the CQ of their management and students.”
—Bücker and Korzilius

Since its publication in 1995, Ecotonos: A Simulation for Collaborating Across Cultures has become a classic in the field of intercultural communication competence; it is a go-to resource for corporations, universities and NGOs that require the ability to effectively team across cultures. Two decades of anecdotal evidence strongly support Ecotonos’ usefulness, but it is only recently that management researchers in The Netherlands provided empirical evidence on the simulation’s effectiveness.


Three of the five generations of Ecotonos; compact Fifth Edition on the right.

Developing cultural intelligence: assessing the effect of the Ecotonos cultural simulation game for international business students,” a study published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management (Vol. 26, No. 15, 1995-2014) by Joost JLE Bücker and Hubert Korzilius, found that Ecotonos supports the development of cultural intelligence (CQ), specifically metacognitive, motivational, and behavioral CQ.

Bücker and Korzilius write, “CQ is defined by Earley and Ang (2003) as a person’s capability to adapt effectively to new cultural contexts. It refers to individual capacities which enable one to interact effectively with others from different cultural backgrounds and in different cultural contexts (Brislin, Worthley, & MacNab, 2006). It is the ability to adapt and adjust to one’s environment, and the effective functioning in situations characterized by cultural diversity.”

The research was designed to test the benefits of using Ecotonos as a training method to develop CQ among business students that participate in an international study program, while the researchers also saw applications for corporations and universities. Simulations and role plays “should provide the most suitable opportunity to train someone’s CQ… ECOTONOS (Saphiere, 1995) was created as an attempt to add additional learning goals to those of existing games such as BAFA BAFA and ALBATROSS, by creating simulations that had more complex options.”

The study of 66 students in Toulouse and Nijmegen consisted of an experiment group that engaged in one round of playing Ecotonos, a control group that did not participate in Ecotonos, and the completion of four questionnaires 3-5 weeks apart by members of both groups:

  1. CQS (Ang et al, 2007)
  2. Cross-cultural Communication Effectiveness (adapted from Hammer, Gudykunst & Wiseman, 1978)
  3. Social Desirability Scales (Kleumper, 2008)
  4. New Self-Efficacy Scale (Chen, Gulley and Eden, 2001)

Bücker and Korzilius note the importance of their study:

“Although it has been claimed that simulation games may give positive outcomes, such as more familiarity with people different from ourselves in terms of gender or ethnicity, such games may also reinforce prejudices. Burgstahler and Doe (2006) claim that ‘In all types of simulations there is a risk of long-lasting unintended negative results’ (p. 9).

An evaluation of an intercultural communications simulation called BAFA BAFA (Shirts, 1973) found evidence of a positive change in enthusiasm for learning, an intended result, and an increased ethnocentrism, an unintended result (Bruschke, Gartner, & Seiter, 1993). The simulated experience triggered negative and reactionary attitudes toward other cultures, and did not allow for more positive changes that might come from extended interaction across cultures (Bruschke et al., 1993).

The two simulation games of Bafa Bafa and Ecotonos are different. Whereas in the Bafa Bafa game participants are invited to simulate explicit stated cultural behavior, in the Ecotonos game participants have more freedom to create their own culture. This different way of prescribing behavior in the two games may have implications for the degree of prejudice after the simulation.”

The researchers found that “Ecotonos increases the ability to reflect on cross-cultural interactions, and stimulates interest in intercultural behavior and practicing cross-cultural relevant behavior.”


A concern that came out of the study is that researchers found “there is more understanding and comfort in student interactions, but there is not more progress in the joint project result. For undergraduate business students, feeling comfortable in intercultural situations and becoming interested in other students’ cultural backgrounds is already a great win; it stimulates intercultural learning by opening up students’ mindsets in the international class. For more mature graduate students, extra strategic learning should be expected during the simulation game, in terms of effectiveness of their cross-cultural behavior and effectuating certain predefined targets in their communication. This might be developed by stimulating the competitive side of the role of the participants in the simulation game.”

I would posit that playing Ecotonos multiple times will enable students to practice and improve their collaborative abilities; this is, after all, how the game is designed to be used. A different task or case study can be used each time the game is played, and different rule cards as well, making the play unique each time.

A second way for participants to improve their collaboration skills is for facilitators to urge them to choose one behavior they would like to demonstrate during the simulation. Participants should focus on that. During game play, when collaboration all too frequently breaks down, facilitators can interrupt play to remind players to practice the skill they have previously chosen. Both of these interventions are described in the Ecotonos Manual, 5th Edition, 2016.

I would like to thank both researchers for this work, and express my hope that they will continue with further studies on this topic.

If you haven’t yet conducted Ecotonos with your students, trainees or learners, what are you waiting for? Purchase your copy today. If you have an older copy, you may want to update; the fifth edition has explanations of a whole lot of how-to and underlying theory that you may be missing from earlier versions.

Culture and Memory are Biological: New Research

Mateo Zareba 1970People raised in some cultures learn that memory transcends generations, that it is passed on to our descendants—carried on a cellular level. I’ve always intuitively felt this was true and wise, even though in the culture in which I was raised (German-American), I was told that such beliefs were charming but fantastical. Then, here comes scientific research showing that yet another “old wives’ tale” is, in fact, true.

Edward T. Hall, author of some of the earliest books on intercultural communication, had a strong interest in ethology (the study of animal behavior in its natural setting, and sometimes with attention to evolution) and Paul Maclean’s theory of our evolutionary, triune brain. In the words of Dr. John C. Condon, who was a friend of Hall for many years and is currently authoring a new book on him titled, It Goes Without Saying, “Ned wrote in unpublished papers about the connection between culture and biology. He gave considerable attention to culture and communication as embodied and involving all of the senses, and thought other anthropologists gave too much attention to the cognitive aspects.” So many recent scientific discoveries indeed seem to be proving Hall correct! One of those is in the field of epigenetics.


The fairly new field of behavioral epigenetics offers some interesting advanced insights into what makes us who we are. Epigenetic research shows that tendencies such as preferred smells or tastes, fears and abilities, strengths and resiliencies, weaknesses and deficits—turn out to be not only socially acquired, but also potentially biologically inherited. This means that “culture” and cultural tendencies may be not just communal, but also biological.

The field of epigenetics began, in part, with a simple question in the mind of Michael Meaney: “I’ve always been interested in what makes people different from each other. The way we act, the way we behave—some people are optimistic, some are pessimistic. What produces that variation? Evolution selects the variance that is most successful, but what produces the grist for the mill?”

Decades of research led to the finding that both positive and negative experiences—trauma, love and support—in our own or our recent ancestors’ pasts, leave molecular scars on epigenetic matter that is attached to our DNA. Without a mutation to the DNA code itself, the attached methyl groups cause long-term, heritable change in gene function.


Meaney and Szyf had proved something incredible. Call it postnatal inheritance: With no changes to their genetic code, the baby rats nonetheless gained genetic attachments due solely to their upbringing.”
—Dan Hurley, Discover

Such findings give credence to those who say they still experience the pain of genocide or slavery generations later. It also shows us why grandchildren may inherit their grandmother’s sunny disposition. And, it provides us as interculturalists yet another reason to heal ourselves and our communities: if we can foster understanding, respect, justice, and collaboration, perhaps we can prevent these heritable negatives, and, rather, pass stronger, more positive traits down through the generations.

Research is showing that epigenetic changes to genes active in certain regions of the brain underlie our emotional and intellectual intelligence—our tendency to be calm or fearful, our ability to learn or to forget. It would follow then that if we can truly develop intercultural competence in our communities, we can pass on the epigenetic inheritance that will create communities of emotionally resilient people with the intelligence to solve problems such as hunger and homelessness.

A fuller explanation of the science behind this is explained in this three-page paper in Discover magazine. One thing is for sure, this field of study has a long way to go. What started with rats has slowly moved into the study of human behavior. The full benefits of this incredible research may not be seen in my lifetime, but feel confident that generations that follow will be the true benefactors.

Interdisciplinary Teamwork

Of further interest to me as an interculturalist is the fact that this groundbreaking research came about as the result of specialists working in an interdisciplinary team—specialists who had to overcome significant bias and elitism in order to truly hear one another.

A colleague thought that the work of Michael Meaney, a neurobiologist, might significantly dovetail with the work of Moshe Szyf, a molecular biologist and geneticist. Even though both gentlemen worked at McGill University, they only met each other after traveling to Madrid in 1992.

To those of us who aren’t scientists, these two men seem to work in similar fields; they are both biologists, right? Should be easy enough to collaborate? No, their two disciplines are apparently two very different cultures! As Szyf reported to Dan Hurley in an interview for Discover magazine: “[Meaney’s work] sounded like voodoo at first. For a molecular biologist, anything that didn’t have a clear molecular pathway was not serious science.”

The two scientists overcame their biases and stereotypes, and twelve years later they published a landmark paper, “Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior,” in the June 2004 edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. God bless the nameless colleague who saw the connection between their work!



Cultural “Madeleines”

Image from "Foodies," a blog by L. John Harris on Zester Daily

Image from “Foodies,” a blog by L. John Harris on Zester Daily

Another terrific guest blog post by CD Russia co-author Carrie Cameron, combining two of your favorites: food and literature. Smells and tastes evoke our deepest memories, and for Blended Culture people they can easily lead to a round-the-world reverie…

Perhaps you’re familiar with the famous madeleine of Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, depending on the translation). The author takes a bite of a madeleine, a simple cookie, and the taste-memory drifts him off on a long reverie of his childhood, connecting him to the people and moments of long ago:

“…when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring…remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen, is not a cookbook, but a literary madeleine, evoking through food memories her childhood in Soviet Russia. It’s not about her favorite foods or emblematic Russian dishes. It’s about how a taste connects us with a moment in time and space.

Vobla, dried and salted Caspian roach fish, “brings out that particular Russian masochism: we love it because it’s such a torment to eat…I’d happily trade all Hemingway’s snails and Proust’s cakes for a strip of [this] petrified fish flesh.” A half-piece of black-market Juicy Fruit gum takes her back to the girls’ bathroom in elementary school, where she would auction it off to the other girls, having obtained it through some elite family connections. She describes salat Olivier as a “metaphor for a Soviet émigré’s memory… loosely cemented with mayo.” In her mother’s American kitchen in the 90’s, making the salat, she notes how “a taste of Lebanese pickle that uncannily resembles a Russian gherkin leads to a snippet from a Rodina song, which in turn rouses a political morality tale, or reawakens a recollection of a long-ago dream, of a fleeting pang of yearning.” Starting from these tastes and smells, the author skillfully depicts the cultural intimacies of a point in time and place which no longer exists, yet is very real and alive in her memory.

What tastes and smells evoke your cultural insights? What clues do they provide to other ways of life, and why?? Post your answers in the comments, and let’s compare!

Using Social Media to Rebrand Culture

What's the story...?

What’s the story…?








Branding a Nation











If the medium is the message, what is the cultural message of a new medium?


Once upon a time a carriage return returned the carriage and a folder was made of paper and we dialed the phone with a dial and mail needed a stamp. New media have changed all that though we still use the old words…

This is the fifth in a series (#1, #2, #3, #4 are here.)

If, as we have been discussing, the new media, and in particularly social networks, have been delivering such an enormous quantity of conversations into our mailboxes and our minds each day, it is important for us to look at the process of shaping the culture that is involved here. There are, I believe, two dimensions to look at. The first is what these media, as media, manifest about the cultures that create them, as well as what their own cultural message may be. The second is how can new media be used to shape discourse and create culture? We will discuss the first question today and the second in next week’s post.

When asking, “What is the cultural message of a new medium?” I am looking at the media through the lens that Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan offered us when he enunciated his famous dictum, “The medium is the message.” While we can look at the abundance of new media tools, platforms, and connections and ask about their role in connecting contemporary culture, it will be important for students of communication to have a careful look at each of the new media to determine what kind of message it sends simply by being what it is and working in the fashion it does.

Here are some of McLuhan’s distinctions that might provide starting points: for example, his distinction between hot and cool media in terms of its impact on the perceiver as well as the intentions of the sender. Generally speaking, hot media engage one or more senses rather completely and demand little interaction, while cool media require more participation to fill the gaps. What media and aspects of new media operate in one way or the other? Does this say something about the propensity to contribute or to lurk? This will require careful research and study, so I have to be satisfied with simply calling attention to this side of new media and their possible impacts on the users (the medium is the massage). I leave it up to experts in academic communication departments and think tanks to provide the workforce that will help us to understand what is happening to us as end-users of each medium and how their extensive use may shape culture.

McLuhan himself offered a model, which could be another starting point for steering our impressions and generating research about what a medium may actually do and how it affects cultural discourse and behavior. We can examine the media we are using and ask ourselves:


What changes when we use different forms of new media?

  1. What does it enhance, what is amplified, enlarged, intensified?
  2. What does it obsolesce, what drops in prominence or even disappears?
  3. What does it retrieve, what is recovered, brought back of what was previously lost or diminished?
  4. What does it reverse, what does it do when pushed to its limits?

Movement in any of these directions may affect the culture of the users, for example the mass availability of cell phones seems to have significantly increased frequency of communication in some cultures where people were inclined to be more taciturn in face to face situations. The documentary, McLuhan’s Wake, uses the cell phone as one example of these changes: the cell phone enhances the free use of the voice; it obsolesces the phone booth; it retrieves childhood yelling (to the point where we have coaches on the train that are “zen,” where cell phone conversations are forbidden); when pushed to its limits, it reverses freedom from the wire and becomes a virtual leash for those who cannot be without it. So the starting point for inquiry here is probably sharing your own experience with peers and across generations as to how your life has been affected, changed, as new media acquired more prominent places in your life and work. Such discussion should provide suggestions for more in-depth research.

How do new media emerge from culture?
McCluhan also observed, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” This should not surprise us as interculturalists, knowing that what we make in the world, scooters or cellphones, are products of our inner discourse. We make culture and culture makes us. When we’re talking about media, new or old, we are talking about ways we have projected our culture on reality. They are part of our culture.

So, the question is how, from what discourse, and from what need the development of new media tools and resources emerge. While the possibilities seem infinite, still what we create emerges from discourse we have about our needs and ourselves. Here’s an impossible question, but I find it fascinating to speculate on: what the Internet and new media would look like today, if their birth and infancy had occurred through the efforts of housewives rather than the exigencies of the 1950s military. How much to we have to feel threatened, in order to move forward?  Apparently quite a bit, at least given the prevailing expression of our primitive discourse.

Today’s dominant discourse, in the socially constructed global marketplace that we live in, is Darwinian, despite the niceties we would like to embellish it with. This is rooted in the more ancestral and primitive biological discourse of survival, which at its worst is Homo homini lupus—”Man is a wolf to [his fellow] man.” This, to say the least, is unfair to wolves. “Kill and eat!” Survival shapes the first layers of primitive discourse and the stories that it tells. If we accept some validity for Maslow’s hierarchy, we must sadly admit that much of the time decisions are made in its basement, out of real or fictive insecurity and fear for one’s existence. Despite our technology and ability to create abundance, we have not been able to significantly alter or transcend this urcultural discourse.

Consequently we live in a world where both primitive and high-tech slaughter, violence, and torture contribute to the opulence of the few and the deprivation of the many despite it being a place where, paradoxically, there is more than enough to go around. New media are enablers of war by drone and pinpoint assassination. To date social media have done little to change this culture of survival by violence, though they have already provided support to movements and counter movements, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Without a shift in our primitive conversations about survival, the best intended movements and revolutions ultimately re-create the problem that summoned them forth in the first place. Harold Robbins, in The Adventurers (later made into a rather bad film), shows us a cynical picture of how revolution follows on revolution as the starry-eyed thirst for justice, almost overnight, turns into the steely-eyed exercise of power. The novel is stereotypically set in Latin America, but as contemporary history is proving, it could be anywhere and everywhere.

So creating discourse and shaping culture on a deeper level is the perennial challenge facing humanity, even as our consciousness grows about how the internecine wars of tribes, nations and classes over resources now threatens the human race as a whole. Those who are comfortable enough, throw up their hands and say, “Well it’s just human nature.” Alternative discourses of faith and philosophy, aimed at turning “swords into plowshares,” are quickly appropriated by discourses of fear and power and used to set the people’s faiths against each other.  are fearful of cultural identity, of being labeled. This challenge of managing the larger social constructions of reality, what I have elsewhere called the “urcultures” has all too little been the focus of intercultural work and study, despite the fact that the kind of insight and tools needed to do this are more likely to be found in this field than in many others.

How new are our new media?
Do new media indeed bring something fresh to life or simply bring us more and faster same-old, same-old? Are they a “game changer,” a paradigm change or shift? Does the ease and abundance of communication change the shape of how we will think about ourselves or simply widen the channels for what we are already saying and doing or does it create a new dimension? Certainly given our understanding of the social construction of our realities, it’s we who are prone to bring the same-old, same-old to the construction and use of media, and we face each new development either with hope or horror, or both. There is strong tendency to look at new media as resources, goods, tools for power to be fought over, controlled, at the same time that we would like to see their accessibility is an enabler of democracy on a level not experienced before. If so, that would signal the arrival of a culture shift of significant proportions?

A SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) colleague of mine in Argentina, Natalia Sarro, has raised the question in a recent blog post as to whether we possess our stories, or whether they possess us. I am sure that the answer is, both! One of the prevailing discourses in the contemporary self-development movement at the personal level is that we must change negative stories into positive ones, limiting ones into liberating ones. This is becoming a sacred, almost religious discourse in US culture, whence it is rapidly globalizing. It is, as so many values in the US, focused on the individual, premised on individual salvation. One comes to the altar to profess one’s faith, whether it be in God or in Mammon. Both deities are pretty popular these days.

How do new media connect us, when they also disconnect us from each other and from our past?
McLuhan’s analysis of the effects of media raises interesting questions from a cultural point of view. One of these is whether the new media are creating a new sense of community in the human family or enhancing individuation—or both. Is there anything inherent in them that leads in one direction or another? Again my suspicion is both, hesitatingly said, hoping that users and scholars will offer reflection and research on if and how this is taking place. To what degree are the human connections that new media create, “real” or rather, avoiding the essentialist tone of that question, what is the nature of the reality they construct, how does it function?

A few weeks ago I was on an extremely crowded bus for the usual half hour ride home, which in this case took an hour and a half. As the bus left the station, standing room only, just about everyone under 50 (including a few over 50 like myself) was connected to their iPhone, iPod or iPad. Almost no one was talking to anyone else. When the bus ground to a halt due to road construction and traffic obstructions, gradually people put their handheld devices away and began talking to each other, both to peers and across generations, asking questions, telling stories related to our common plight. “You had to be there.” In other words, when the bus was reduced to a stop-start, mostly stop, creep, we grounded ourselves in the physical present and connected face-to-face. Sure, there were a few phone calls of the, “Honey, I’m going to be late” kind, but the focus had shifted from the distant and virtual to the here and now as people came to the presence of warm flesh and blood. I suspect this is an example of how stress reverts our discourse to more primitive levels, in this case one of tribal solidarity.

Another tantalizing question, raised by the emergence of new media, is that of the permanence, or at least endurance of the discourse and the stories that we create with them. This is about culture, what a discourse produces, its art and its arts and its artists, its architecture and literature. Fame depends on both memory and forgetfulness. It requires we hold the memorable and create the discourse that preserves it; prevailing discourse also demands that we forget those in the crowd in favor of those who stand out from the crowd. The charm of the tiny old streets of now high-rise Singapore lives in fewer and fewer of our memories. No future archeology is likely to reconstruct it. So inevitable we ask, “What human factors are the new media rendering obsolete?”

If you Google “Madonna”, most of the 230 million hits have to do with the singer, Madonna Louise Ciccone. You have to get a search a lot more specifically to find mediaeval or Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary, which would have been the culturally obvious meaning of “Madonna” for many only a few decades ago.


Will new media build on or over the cultural past? Will they create their own memorable cultural icons or lead us to a cultural fragmentation where identity is transitory and incidental? Should we worry about this? Culture is a discourse that requires consensus to exist. If, as Dominique Wolton insists, “Communication is cohabitation,” what is the human domestic architecture of new media for how we share the planet? We will look at the possibilities of rebranding identities that these media offer in the next post.


Unsolicited Review

coverAfAmI just had a chance to review the newly released Cultural Detective: African-American, by Kelli McCloud-Schingen and Patricia Coleman, as well as talk to the authors yesterday in the teleconference on the topic of “Black versus African-American.” Normally, I don’t review items in this series, not just because I’m the co-author of several, but because the formula for their success both in printed versions and now online hardly requires special notice for the individual items which now number well over 50.

However, in this case I think a word is necessary. Necessary, particularly because my suspicion is that most folks reading the title twill probably think largely in terms of diversity and inclusion, rather than in terms of culture. While these issues are at a certain point inseparable, one of the weak points of the diversity movement in the USA has been to imagine itself as intercultural, with little attention, and sometimes fear of dealing with the attitudes and values of targeted groups. There is still a lot of sensitivity here. Consequently when people, particularly outside the US, see publications focused on US minorities, they may think to dismiss them as some of the same-old, same-old diversity stuff.

That is not the case here. This is truly a work of intercultural significance, despite the fact that the participant guide runs to only about 30 pages. First of all, the introduction, slightly longer than the average instrument in this series is absolutely brilliant. It gives the user an overview that is rich, thoughtful, insightful, even for, perhaps particularly for US Americans who tend to see racial issues one at a time, without a sense of heritage and culture in their historical context. But it is certainly what outsiders need and should want to know in order to work well with African-Americans.

“Truly a work of intercultural significance!”
“Absolutely brilliant.”
“Rich, thoughtful, insightful.”
“Heritage and culture in historical context.”

For the many expats going from other parts of the world to the USA, there is usually a question of, “What should I know about… How should I behave around… What should I avoid when dealing with African-Americans?” This instrument helps you cut to the chase, not by offering “kiss, bow, and shake hands tips” but providing insight into the values, strengths, and sensitivities peculiar to a part of the US population who are still to a great degree consciously heirs of a trajectory anchored in slavery, passing through personal pain even while also arriving in corporate boardrooms and occupying the Oval Office. This is a solid cultural perspective on the discourse, on the story that leads to the core values of African-Americans today, in all their diversity, and in contexts where bias and discrimination are still possible obstacles to appreciating cultural identity.

So, if you are preparing expats to go to the USA, or if you are one, this is an important tool, and now one of several dealing with internal cultural dimensions of the very diverse USA, now available in the easily accessible online versions of Cultural Detective.


Can you read this?

No? Yes? If you can read the above, quick, tell me what it has to do with culture. If not….

Can you read the next one?

Yes? Perhaps this second one was easier for you? Why? Why is it we can read the above?

Our minds interpret a lot of things every day, constantly. They make sense of the world around us. They do this by recognizing patterns, putting information into templates that are familiar to us.

Obviously when we enter a new culture, the rules are different. The patterns are different, the templates unfamiliar. Our inability to make sense of what’s happening around us can cause us to feel disconcerted, maybe to lose confidence. Our past knowledge, from another place, can cause confusion. It can lead us to think we understand what we really don’t, to fail to see what is really there, or to miss important information.

There are so many interesting photos and images floating around social media networks. How many of them are you able to use to promote cross-cultural understanding, like the two above? Come on, share your favorites!

Reading key to the above images is below:

Este mensaje es para demostrar las
cosas tan increibles que puede
hacer nuestro cerebro. si logras
leer esto puedes sentirte
orgulloso de tu inteligencia, ya
que solo ciertas personas lo
logran. esto se debe a que el
hemisferio derecho del cerebro
asocia los simbolos parecidos a las
letras que conocemos normalmente
y asi logramos leer con facilidad.

This message
serves to prove how our minds
can do amazing things!
Impressive things!
In the beginning it was hard but now,
on this line your mind is reading
automatically without even
thinking about it. Be proud!
Only certain people can read this.