With globalization, migration, and cutting edge technologies that tie people over vast geographical distances once unimaginable, ethnicity, culture and identity have blurred to the point where many have argued that “race is dead.”
Just how true is this? The answer seems to be more historical than it is contemporary, stemming from theorists and academics laying the foundation of these answers to the present early in the 20th century.
Cultural relativism
First proposed by anthropologist Franz Boaz, the idea that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture intrigued researchers in 1887, and forever altered social science. As a paradigm shift in 20th century, Boaz and his followers ascertained that civilization is not something absolute, but relative, with the caveat that “ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes." The idea eventually evolved into "cultural relativism."
MacLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy
In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan painstakingly argued that communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) not only influences human cognition, but also profoundly changes human social organization. As he saw it, a “new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture.”
As he asserted, technological innovation is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. With his iconic phrase, "the medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. For instance, the invention of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, rise of rationalism, empiricism, and ultimately, standardization of culture.
Identity in cyberculture
A concept first coined by science fiction writer William Gibson in the 1980’s, cyberculture relies on establishing identity and credibility. Although in the absence of direct physical interaction, thus leading the process for such establishment to be more difficult, human relationships are two-way in cyberculture, with identity and credibility being both used to define community in cyberspace and to be created within and by online communities.
Where a community is mediated by information communication technologies, culture is seamlessly “mediated" by computer screens. Although cyberculture allows like-minded people finding a common ‘place’ to gather and interact in cyberspace, it is inherently more "fragile" than traditional forms of physical community and culture.
Cultural Diversity as Software Package
With the rise of social media in the web 2.0 mashup and remix world, some have coined this era “diversity 2.0” where technology impacts the way people view themselves and interacts with those around them. This cultural engineering in fact takes on the cyber qualities of mashing up videos, text, and web coding and remixing them with anachronistic analogies and metaphors.
But unlike the stilted one-way publishing universe of the early web frontier, the emergence of the social web has allowed for closer interaction of peoples using inexpensive, cutting edge technologies such as web cameras, instant message, location-based media, and ubiquitous wifi. Such cultural critics like Jamais Cascio and Lawrence Lessig have argued that “remixing” as we know it in fact predates the web, and in fact, has existed throughout human existence, with the printed word and academia both heavily relying on remixing the thoughts and ideas of previous thinkers. Technology has not only simply accelerated the process in more highly visual realms, it’s ultimately diversified thought altogether.
As such, cultural diversity can no longer be explained in simple classificatory languages, it also cannot be pinpointed with any origins of change.
References
MacLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Allan Cho - I am an academic librarian. I research and write about emerging technologies, educational trends,and popular culture in the media.
