When we think about culture and its relationships to technology and education, it might be useful to consider an idea that flitted through here a couple of weeks ago about the different cultures we each belong to. We keep talking about Culture like it’s a monolith. “I am a member of THIS Culture.”
Really? Is that the only culture you’re a member of?
If we step back and take a meta-cognitive scan of the area, it’s not difficult to see we — all of us involved in this course — belong to some cultures in common and others we don’t share at all. Even simple ideas like “teacher” have components and layers. We all (or nearly all) belong to the “Educator” culture, but many of you belong to a different tribe — the K-12 Teacher subculture. We have some ideals in common but we have differentiation as well. I’m a member of the Grad School Instructor subculture, and one of the more radical members at that.
At higher levels we all belong to something we can agree on is “American culture” altho our perceptions of that culture are undoubtedly varied. We don’t all belong to the same — for lack of a better term — “spiritual” culture, and we are actually inhabiting different worlds in terms of the technologies we use and the levels at which we use them. Not just a “me-and-the-class” view, but to some extent I think this may be the most fragmented “culture” in terms of how we relate to each other as a group.
My point here, and I made it earlier, is that culture is defined by its technology. Bronze Age, Iron Age, Dark Ages — we think of them as if they represent some homogeneous construct in cultural development but I submit that they’re only homogeneous because they are historical. There almost certianly had to be more variation in the world than these handy labels might indicate.
Industrial Age, Information Age, Automobile Age … even North American Mall Culture … It’s handy from a mnemonic perspective to apply these labels so we know what context a discussion might have, but the reality that we shouldn’t lose sight of is that membership in one culture does not preclude membership in — and cross pollination of — other cultures which are contiguous in time, but perhaps variant in belief.
A culture is defined by its technology. Education is the process of maintaining cultural identity in the face of technological change.
Gibson said it:
The future is already here. It’s just not uniformly distributed.
I’ll add:
And it never will be.
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I totally agree that we are part of many cultures. We share many, but there are some that we most likely don’t share. Each person is unique in the way that they fit into that culture and so again we are different, but the same.