The Question of Culture

Culture is continuously changing. Though the prevailing culture in a country may be collectivist or polychronic, one can easily find co-cultures within the culture that may be staunchly individualistic. Even if one manages to dissect a culture into pieces like this, it's impossible to place each part into one category or the other, for these guidelines are more like opposing ends on a scale than two absolutes that one must choose between.

Is the American culture experiencing a shift even as this blog entry is typed? Absolutely. As a reactionary entity, it is impossible for any culture to be static. We are undergoing a communication shift just as people in the past have. Before printed media, all cultures were oral cultures; those involved in the culture didn't have a choice but to receive their information purely from verbal exchanges with other people. As printed communication became more efficient and widespread, the information people received came from these physical resources rather than from their neighbors. Now that we are entering a new era of communication through electronic media, people try to compare it to the past by labeling it as being more like a print or oral culture, but this line of reasoning seems faulty at best.

In today's culture, one has to choose how he wants to receive his communication. Each individual person determines for himself whether he lives in a primarily print or oral culture. Does he keep himself enlightened through newspapers and literature? Then he participates in the active print culture. Does he keep his world view smaller through only hearing the local news from his friends? In this case, he lives in an oral culture.

What if the individual turns on the radio or watches CNN? What kind of culture do these media belong in? This is where the confusion begins. Are electronic media a part of print culture in the sense that the source is impersonal and not instantaneous? Are they part of oral culture, considering that the viewer listens in to the newscasters' "conversations"?

Because this is an entirely new way of getting information, putting television and radio into the categories of oral or print communication can ever be completely accurate since it contains aspects of both. Perhaps it exists on the continuum between oral and print cultures. Until we can dream up of a definable category for electronic media to claim for itself, we should accept that we can't fit it into the classifications we currently stand by. The prevailing American culture today can not be neatly tucked away into the definitions of print or oral culture; America's obsession with individual choice forces that option upon each citizen. Therefore, the only culture any person can define is for himself.

So - which culture do you live in?