Category Archives: Culture

Pragamatic Chaos: The Physics of Culture

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Sometimes things cluster. They appear close enough together that patterns emerge. Today I would like to introduce a cluster of items that I’ve recently come across courtesy of Yahoo movies, TED, and the BBC.

Let’s start with Yahoo movies, where I regularly go to watch the previews for upcoming movies that I will mostly never see. I feel each chew of my lunch with my headset on as I run through tw0-minute introductions to horror flicks, kid movies, chick flicks, made-to-be blockbusters, and occasionally very interesting movies whose titles I hopefully will recognize in a year or so when they show up for rental here in Japan. Among the few previews I watched a few weeks back was Moneyball, more because it was there than because it stars Brad Pitt, is about baseball, or is the story of Billy Beane–a list with two didn’t-really-cares and one didn’t-know. But to my surprise, the topic and the movie grabbed my interest. Because of this:  Sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is the use of empirical statistical evidence to evaluate past success and predict future success. In my understanding of baseball, it is a game of statistics, and so a movie based on a book based on a  team that uses a new statistical approach to get phenomenal results with fractional investments made me interested in the topic of how someone could effectively use more stats, different stats, in a world driven by stats, and make a big difference. It is a merging of cultural self-awareness and math that allows for the seeing of things that are there but had not been noticed, because people lived with a different culture and because they didn’t do/ read the math. The stats people watched had been based on old thinking about the game, knowledge and norms amassed over generations–prevalent and flawed, or at least incomplete.

And then yesterday a BBC article steered me toward a TED talk. Skim the article but watch every moment of the presentation. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Kevin Slavin begins to explain the physics of culture. The talk is mostly about Wall Street and the algorithms they use to play the market and the infrastructure being built to give those algorithms a few milliseconds headstart to do their job, but his comments about culture and algorithms brought me back to Moneyball and how things people think of as esoteric (and by esoteric I mean knowable only by a select group that does not include many people and all machines) are knowable, convertible into algorithms, and effective on you. Did you know that 70 % of choices made on Netflix are the result of suggestions made by an algorithm, one called Pragmatic Chaos? Or that algorithms are helping to decide what movies get made at all?

This is a challenge to culture and I do not mean big “C” culture, but rather the way we view what culture is, who creates it, and what it means for all of us. The BBC article sounds practically ominous:

…our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe. Their weapon of choice – the algorithm. Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers – calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook’s friend finding and image tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net. It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.

In typical hyperbolic  fashion this confuses the point with the fear. It is not only about our electronic worlds, and if we have overlords it is by virtue of not understanding ourselves and our own culture(s) very well, not because some new type of insidious new electronic overlords have recently been put in place.

What do Teachers Need to Know About Culture?

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Starting this year, I am part of a team that is including culture in training sessions for Japanese senior high school teachers of English. I’m not unfamiliar with the topic, having taught a content course at junior college called Anglo-American culture for eight years. But it still was hard in the beginning to come up with content for our sessions. We wondered what exactly  high school teachers need to know about culture.

Recent visits to some high school classes have made me think that the answer to that last question is “lots.” In all of the classes, there was a definite focus on the isolated utterance, strings of words held together by grammar plucked from the communicationosphere and duly explained, and manipulated in drills. High school teachers have an almost gravitational attraction to grammar from what I’ve seen. There seems to be a strong tendency to conceptualize language as (man, I am tempted to write “merely” here) a collection of grammar and lexis; one that that must be taught in order. Compared to many other language education settings, the junior and senior high school system in Japan possesses a level of comprehensiveness and order that I am in awe of. The approach followed focuses on discreet items pulled from textbooks that are far too advanced for the level of users. It is mechanical. And here is where culture rears its head. First, such language is often similar to the model diagrams we find in applied linguistics textbooks or psychology textbooks, all boxes connected by lines or arrows to show relationships and processes, a shorthand for the messy biological reality taking place in living breathing organisms. We get so focused on the abstract that we forget that language is communication, and communication is context, and context means people, and people means culture. Culture influences how people make sense of social situations and how they approach communication opportunities. Culture influences the action chains or scripts people follow as they navigate situations and interact with others. So an understanding of how culture influences thinking and language use is essential, what is often called deep culture (see Joseph Shaules’s book for an excellent introduction, or visit his website), but that is not all that comes to mind.

It is a sad truth in Japan (and probably most places) that language education is not incredibly successful. After six years of instruction, most learners cannot adequately introduce themselves, ask for or give basic directions, understand an opinion and voice their own, etc. etc. But they have been exposed to a comprehensive list of grammatical structures and a very long list of “essential” vocabulary. An entire conversation industry and pages of courses in university and college catalogs are devoted to simply getting people to remember, re-learn, or  try to use the contents of those six years of lessons. Which brings up the second culture point I want to mention: the culture of teaching situations. There is a clear cultural separation between two “camps”, the serious, comprehensive camp of Japanese junior and senior high school teachers of English, and the looser, more eclectic eikaiwa (or English for use) camp. It is, of course, a false dichotomy, but I think in cultural terms, there is enough difference to constitute looking at these as different cultures. And a book I read by accident helped me to see that. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner specialize in culture and business and they provide some important insights into culture just with their approach. I ordered one of their books,  Managing People Across Cultures, thinking it would be a collection of tidbits on how to get people from different countries to work well together, but it is much more than that Actually, they have some earlier books that explain their theories more comprehensively, but the book I ordered deals more with the application of those theories in a business setting. In widening that idea of culture to look at the cultures of organizations and the people who work for them, this book helped me to see culture in a different way. It made me think that this is another important learning point about culture that I think our teacher participants might benefit from knowing. It is contained in this quotation from the book:

Culture is the pattern by which a group habitually mediates between value differences… Cultures can learn to reconcile such values at ever-higher levels of attainment, so that better rules are created from the study of numerous exceptions. From such reconciliation come health, wealth, and wisdom. But cultures in which one value polarity dominates and militates against another will be stressful and stagnate. (pg. 23)

The shift of thinking here is important. There is a focus on cultures within an enterprise, rather than a focus on specific national cultures, to be sure, but this has much wider applications. There is  a conceptualization of cultures as being interconnected. We are connected by our differences and our similarities. The differences and similarities can  be leveraged if we just are able to see them for what they are. By reconciling cultures within an organization  we thrive; if we push our cultures on others, we deny ourselves the chance to thrive. Ultimately, culture learning means living with the reality of cultural patterns that may or may not be different, understanding who we are and where we are going as individuals and as parts of a greater whole. This lesson applies to small groups of individuals, larger groups like teams and classes, and huge groups like cities or nations.