Understanding Culture

Culture is a strange thing. It is all around us, around everyone. It is a large part of who we are and how we think. The strange thing is that culture is so ingrained in us that often we don’t even recognize or can’t decipher its effects.

We assume from the very beginning that our way of thinking about and doing things is the universal way of doing so. We so often label certain courses of action and certain thought processes as “common sense.” In one text we read in class, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” Clifford Geertz states that this assumption is a natural inclination. However, he also points out that our ideas of “common sense” aren’t necessarily all that common cross-culturally. “Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions . . . concludes,” he says (84). Our idea of common sense, like so many aspects of culture “lies so artlessly before our eyes it is almost impossible to see” (92).

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson examines the metaphors in our language and claims that they are in fact a major way that culture subconsciously influences our thoughts and actions. When language is examined, these metaphors become clearly apparent. For example, Lakoff and Johnson point out the metaphor of “Time=Money.” This metaphor underlies our commonplace language that assumes that time is valuable: time can be “spent,” “wasted,” “saved,” and “given away.”

Lakoff and Johnson claim that “metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what we cannot comprehend totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness” (193). This is a positive result of me...

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...xperience) publishes mass amounts of information without discriminating based on the authority or reputation of the author. In this way, the Internet is greatly changing our view of author-function.

With these changes in literature and writing, the teaching of such writing will undoubtedly be different. The reader is becoming more important than the author. Meanwhile, with access to the Internet and MUDs, the reader is constructing an identity and a view of the world different than the ones before him. With electronic technology, our culture will enter a new era and will experience changes similar to the ones that occurred with the alphabet and with print technology. But in order to recognize these changes, we’re going to have to keep looking closely at the culture we are a part of and looking closely at the ways it is changing us and the people around us.