In Culture, Media, and Communication by
Eric Klinenberg with David Wachsmuth, Klinenberg explores the sociology of
culture and how the changes in culture and communication over time affect an
individual’s lifestyle. A question that Klinenberg refers to several times in
this piece is why Americans are more and more frequently living alone. His
answer consists of a combination of modern day culture and means of
communication. The American culture is characterized by the “[promotion of]
freedom, personal control, and self-realization” and living alone is made
possible by “economic prosperity, rising status of women, communications
revolution, mass urbanization, and longevity revolution (110, 123). Not only
are people able to live alone without the fear of becoming isolated from the
social world, but they are also able to engage with others on their own terms,
when and how they want, promoting freedom and personal control with the ability
to explore their own preferences.
In order to
understand changes in lifestyle, we must first understand culture and
communication. Culture is an important part of life that is different from race
or biology—it is socially produced and learned. An interesting example
Klinenberg uses to differentiate biology and culture is that biologically,
people are generally the same: everyone gets hungry, but culturally, people
have different tastes or preferences and kinds of food they eat and how. Taste
also plays another role in society offering it as a way to differentiate class
and status. As Mark Greif explains in his article “The Hipster in the Mirror”,
“taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition.
Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups
closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use
taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up”. People have
different taste and this can be reflected upon what class they are in.
The
globalization of culture is made possible through communication. Klinenberg
refers to America’s melting pot as an example of ethnocentrism (the “inability
to understand or accept cultural practices different from one’s own”), which is
a huge problem considering the diversity of cultures that have immigrated to
the United States (121). Ethnocentrism is essentially completely unavoidable
because the way we interpret things is guided by our own individual
experiences. In order to be able to function as a collective whole, one but be
able to understand and accept—not necessarily partake in, but at the very least
keep an open mind to the different cultures.
What is
important to note is the concept of “culture as a system” and the importance of
symbols in every society. Symbols are only important if there is a meaning
behind it “allowing us to understand things about society that are not often
discussed” (115). In a way, symbols are a form of communication. The tricky
part about symbols is how people interpret them—one thing can mean a completely
different thing somewhere else in another society. Symbols and how they are
interpreted is important to the definition of a culture.
The set of
sociological images in the “Representation of the ‘Primitive’ American Indian”
is a prime example of the importance of symbols and the interpretation of
symbols. These images are a huge misinterpretation of a group of people and the
fact that that certain group of people does not have the power to defend
themselves and their image is extremely destructive to their culture.
A huge part of
modern day culture and communication is texting. In this video by Jimmy Tatro
called “Lost in Textlation”, the way people interpret symbols or “texts” is a
bit far fetched, but I thought it was a good example of how things can be
misinterpreted, guiding the actions of people.
While reading the portion about misinterpretation, I found myself thinking of texting. It is hard to understand exactly what someone is trying to say without being able to hear their voice inflection. Even though this doesn't deal directly with culture, it plays a role in how we understand each other.
ReplyDeleteI also found myself thinking about the difference between being conservative and being liberal, because I grew up in a very conservative town. When i travel and experience different parts of the world, I find myself feeling "out of place," because my thoughts and actions do not always match others. I think this is common for students in the college world, because there are so many different groups and the minute you cross the line into another group, there is room to feel discomfort.
Sarah L. provided a great example of misinterpretation, which happens frequently via text. It may seem odd to some folks nowadays, but I dislike texting unless it is a message like "study group hours" or "prescription ready for pickup from CVS". If I want to hold a conversation with a friend, I prefer to call. Texting is similar to chatting with someone online because as Sarah K mentioned we can't hear their voice inflection which makes it difficult to understand their intentions. Therefore, people look for signs like 3 "y's" after in the word hey to see if someone is interested in the person they are texting.
ReplyDeleteTexting is a great example of how misinterpretation can occur! This is also an example of how the world is increasingly using technology to communicate, as mentioned in the article. With texting you lose all physical signs that are important for determining how to react to a situation. The same exact words can be misinterpreted by different people, especially if the text includes a message that is specific to a particular culture or group, i.e. slang words. It is much too ambiguous.
ReplyDeleteAnother example that I thought about while reading your post about symbols was how the meaning associated with certain actions, such as body or eye contact, differs across cultures. Different cultures have different norms for what is acceptable. For example, in Western societies, making eye contact is considered respectful, while in parts of Africa, eye contact is only made between "equals."
Through globalization it has become easier for different cultures and practices to join together,but this can cause misinterpretation of that practice. It can also change the symbolic meaning of a particular cultural practice. An example would be mediation. Today Americans meditate as a form of relaxation. Meditation used to actually be a cultural practice by people in Asia and India as a form of calming the mind, body, and soul in order to reach Enlightenment. It was part of a cultural practice for the Asia monk and part of their everyday life. It was taught from one generation to the next just like any other practice within a society. Now through globalization and mass communication, meditation is just a common practice by Americans for relaxation. The meaning is not the same.
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult to define what culture really is. It could mean a variety of things to different groups of people and places, such as different belief systems, languages, and customs. I think culture is what defines groups of people. Culture is different for everyone and is historically contingent. For instance, cultural capital such as technology has affected societies from different time periods in a number of ways. For instance, the video you posted showed how technology has become a mean of communication nowadays. Moreover, it displayed how the text messaging culture has evolved and how it has altered language by the development of slang and how we, as a younger generation, interpret letters and words.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely love the video you added Sarah, and everyone who commented so far all thinks very similarly to myself. I say this all the time about texting and it being so hard to interpret what others are saying, not only from the actual words, but I feel this way more so about emojis.
ReplyDeleteIf you have every heard the term "emotional texter", that is how I would define myself. It is someone who does their best to convey their feeling through the different facial expressions that emojis Before the majority of the people I texted had iPhones or SmartPhones with emoji compatibility, they couldn't see the emojis I would send them. I feel as though, if we aren't talking face to face, which would be the best case scenario, or even over the phone to hear their voice, as Sarah mentioned in her comment, then I have to try and convey my emotions somehow.
Just thinking about how society has changed overtime, with the evolving of texting and engaging in less intimate social activity, it definitely makes me definitively say that symbols, their interpretations/meanings and comunication are very important in learning about ones culture
It is funny to think how large of a role texting plays in communication, or in this case, miscommunication, in developed societies, specifically in the United States. As Klinenburg and Wachsmuth stated, language is a cultural universal, but the means of conveying that language are becoming increasingly divergent among societies. An increasing population are gaining consistent access to the internet as seen in the graph at the bottom of page 118 of the Klinenburg piece, graphing 'the Facebook Explosion'. But it should be noted that this chart only represents less than 10 percent of the entire world's population, meaning that approximately 90 percent of the world does not frequent the internet (measured in active Facebook users). I feel that communicating through the overuseage of texting and the internet is an unsocial tendency that is a characteristic of culture in the United States. I also feel that the extreme and sometimes outlandish methods in which text messages are interpreted (demonstrated in the supplemental video posted) is a sub-culture of the texting culture, specific to those of younger ages. For example, when I visited my family living in the Caribbean, nobody texted one another. Different parts of my family found out we were coming when we surprised them with a visit. There was much less of a need to be involved in instantaneous communication there than there is in the US--nobody posted on Facebook about our arrival or their surprise, nobody texted, the major means of communication was face-to-face or through speaking on the telephone. In comparison to the culture of communication in North America, there is a vast difference.
ReplyDelete