We all belong to a culture subset, some knowingly and some unknowingly. It is the recognition of our subset that allows us the needed social lubrication to interact with ‘others’; those individuals not from our subset. I see our modern age as one that is not so much blurring the traditional subsets, but rather creating more subsets. I also feel that rather than evolving into the ‘newer’ subset some silo themselves and polarize against outsiders.
I’m not sure what is the point I’m trying to pry out of my head, but I’m thinking quite a-bit about how culture affects societies mesh.
Living in Jordan’s capital Amman and working in the communications industry I’m becoming a very keen observer of this evolving phenomenon, more poignantly because of my interest in social networks and new media. So I think about how broader band communications can be effective if we have so many different deviations of linguistic cognition caused by cultural diffusion.
I revisit my paper on the subject of knowledge networks and remember that creativity and knowledge sharing through social networks (be they virtual or not) is predominantly dependant on individuals ability to understand one-another*. Getting back to my location here in Amman it’s plain to see people react and interact with other people based on how they perceive a) themselves b)their place in society c)the perception of their interaction partners position in society as they see it. Where they overlap you reach communicational consensus points which can be leveraged to communicate less explicitly. When they don’t… well you need to get sensitive to communicational drift or risk miss-communicating.
*skip to the conclusions section in my paper to read about it
this post isn’t associated but would help reading the following story on the Middle East Forum
muradq's space for words 