Sam Gentle.com

Shallow culture

One thing that people seem to get upset about a lot is the watering down of culture. Instead of being real gamers, the kids these days just play Candy Farm on their phones and have never even been to a LAN. Instead of real Chinese food, we get westernised crap like dim sims and chop suey. Ireland has a beautiful and rich history, but all we've taken away from it is Paddy O'Mc'Donergherty's Irish Pub. Outrageous! Where is the respect for Real Culture?

Of course, there is an argument to be made that there's no such thing as real culture, it's subjective and evolves over time and who are we to etc etc. But to me it's obviously true that culture can be deep or shallow, and that you lose something valuable by making it shallow. Turning the entire history of American Indians into facepaint and feathers is undoubtedly losing a lot of meaning! Much like you can have deep or shallow ideas depending on how complex and meaningful they are, I believe you can have deep or shallow versions of culture. After all, isn't culture just a cluster of ideas?

Regardless, although I think culture can be deep, and deep culture is more interesting, I would not agree that shallow culture is necessarily bad. Yes, of course, if you're steeped in the traditional culture and cuisine of India, you're going to think butter chicken is an abomination. But, much like the oversimplified film adaptation of a much-loved book, its shallowness can be a virtue. It would be a mistake to think that people who watched the movie would necessarily have time to read the book, and thus a mistake to think of it as a loss. More people have been exposed to the story, even if it wasn't the best rendition.

That only holds true if you think it's better that someone learn a shallow culture than no culture at all. Maybe it would be better to be absolutist about these things; if they want to learn about our culture, they should learn it properly! And that's an answer that makes a kind of sense, especially if it's more important to you that the deep culture remain intact than that more people are exposed to it. What good is it having people like a watered-down version of your culture?

Well, there is one way that a shallow culture really makes a difference, and that is familiarity. A funny thing happens when we are confronted by people who are very different from us: we get scared. Perhaps it's a historical relic from a more tribal time, where people very different to you were more likely to be dangerous. Whatever the cause, even today, different cultures in close proximity have a difficult time getting along. At the core of that, I believe, is an essential strangeness that comes with an unfamiliar culture.

Think about various western cultural stereotypes: England has tea and royals, America has guns and freedom, France has cheese and wine, Germany has sausages and ruthless efficiency. These shallow impressions, simplistic and sometimes outright inaccurate as they are, are comforting in their own way. I at least have something that feels relatable. Now, tell me, what's an Egyptian stereotype? Or Turkish? Or Yemeni? If you're from the anglosphere, as I am, you probably have no idea. It's not that I have a shallow understanding of these cultures, it's that I have none at all.

So when people from those countries try to integrate, I believe the lack of available shallow culture makes things much more difficult. Without those facile hooks into someone's context, you just feel like you have absolutely nothing in common. And when people have nothing in common on a large enough scale, it's bound to cause conflict. And yet commodifying culture is a thing that many people feel honour-bound to fight against. It seems like such a waste when it could help reduce that tension.

Obviously, there is such a thing as negative stereotyping, and I'm not advocating for more of that. Deliberately misrepresenting someone's culture to make it seem worse is both cruel and dishonest. But not all reductions have to be bad ones, and I think if people were more willing to embrace and participate in simplifications of their own culture, the results would be pretty favourable. And, of course, that simplification doesn't have to replace the real culture, just act as a more accessible starting point. Not everyone will follow that all the way to deep culture, but that's okay too.

I think, in many ways, the casual gaming market has contributed to the normalisation of video games. They used to be a fringe market for basement nerds, but you'd have trouble finding an 8-12 year old today who hasn't played Minecraft. Similarly, it used to be really weird to make friends on the internet and even meet up with them in real life sometimes. These days, socialising is what most people use it for. Does Minecraft compare to Quake? Does Facebook compare to the Newsgroups, MUDs or IRC of old? I feel like they don't, that by being more accessible they have lost something of the essential differentness that made them so interesting in the first place.

But at least it means that I can talk about doing those things without people assuming I come from a different planet. And, who knows, maybe some of them will get curious and start to learn about the deep culture that the shallow culture came from.