© Getty/Bernhard Lang
How surprising to think that digital telephones, high-speed lines for computers, digitized print media, and the World Wide Web were all invented within about the past half century, many within the last 20 years. Vinyl records, dial telephones, VHS tapes, and more recently CDs and DVDs have been surpassed by smartphones and streamed and downloaded movies and music. Slim laptops, tablets, and handheld computers have replaced bulky desktop computers. The following timeline shows the advances of the Internet and World Wide Web in recent years; the point of this timeline is to illustrate the rapid advance of technology and the place it holds in our lives. Technology is now a primary conveyor of culture, especially pop culture.
An Internet and World Wide Web Timeline
1946: The first general-purpose computer is created, developed for military purposes.
1951: The first civilian computer is created.
1971: The first personal computer (PC) is launched.
1978: Cellular phone service begins.
1982: Invention of high-speed communications network leads to the Internet.
1984: Apple’s Macintosh introduces the first PC with graphics.
1991: The Internet opens to commercial use; the World Wide Web is launched.
1996: Google makes its debut.
2002: Amazon Web Services debuts, followed in 2006 by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
2004: Mark Zuckerberg debuts Facebook while still a college student.
2005: YouTube is created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
2009: “Killer apps” from Microsoft and Google debut.
2013: Wristbands to collect biological data and living, breathing running shoes debut.
2014: Video glasses with head-mounted display screen debut, and smartwatches connect to the Internet and smartphones.
2015: Three-dimensional computer cursors and robotic exoskeletons are controlled by human thoughts.
2018: Genetically modified future challenges humans to think about the relationship between technology and society (Illing 2018).
The continuing rapid advances in technology have paralleled the development of shared pop culture in the United States and around the world, culture that is accessible to everyone. Music groups from other continents have gained audiences in the United States, with some becoming instant success stories through YouTube.
Engaging Sociology
1 Identify four innovations that you feel are particularly significant. What are some ways in which they have impacted your life?
2 Identify three positive and three negative ways these rapid advances in technology might impact less developed parts of the world.
3 How can the spread of pop culture across the globe (a) bring different societies closer together and (b) cause tensions within and between societies?
Characteristics of Culture
Culture has certain characteristics in common that define and illustrate the purposes it serves for our societies. What are these common elements?
All people share a culture with others in their society.
Culture provides the rules, routines, patterns, and expectations for carrying out daily rituals and interactions. Within a society, the process of learning how to act is called socialization (discussed in Chapter 4). From birth, we learn the patterns of behavior approved in our society.
Culture evolves over time and is adaptive.
What is normal, proper, and good behavior in hunter-gatherer societies, where cooperation and communal loyalty are critical to the hunt, differs from appropriate behavior in the information age, where individualism and competition are encouraged and enhance one’s position and well-being.
The creation of culture is ongoing and cumulative.
Individuals and societies continually build on existing culture to adapt to new challenges and opportunities. Your culture shapes the behaviors, values, and institutions that seem natural to you. Culture is so much a part of life that you may not even notice behaviors that outsiders find unusual or even abhorrent. You may not think about it when handing food to someone with your left hand, but in some other cultures, such an act may be defined as disgusting and rude.
The transmission of culture is the feature that most separates humans from other animals.
Some societies of higher primates have shared cultures but do not systematically enculturate (teach a way of life to) the next generation. Primate cultures focus on behaviors relating to obtaining food, use of territory, protection, and social status. Human cultures have significantly more content and are mediated by language. Humans are the only mammals with cultures that enable them to adapt to and even modify their environments so that they can survive on the equator, in the Arctic, or even beyond the planet.
Thinking Sociologically
Imagine playing a game of cards with four people in which each player thinks a different suit is trump (a rule whereby any card from the trump suit wins over any card from a different suit). In this game, one person believes hearts is trump, another assumes spades is trump, and so forth. What would happen? Try it with some friends. How would the result be similar to a society with no common culture?
Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativity
“What’s morally acceptable? It depends on where in the world you live” (Poushter 2014). In a study of 40 countries around the world about what is morally acceptable—and not—researchers at the Pew Research Center found that 78% of respondents around the world say extramarital affairs are morally unacceptable (84% in the United States), compared with 46% responding that premarital sex was unacceptable (30% in the United States). Other morality issues included gambling (62% unacceptable), homosexuality (59%), abortion (56%), alcohol use (42%), divorce (24%), and contraception use (14%). The point is that what is morally acceptable varies across societies, causing judgments of others based on one’s own standards. The tendency to view one’s own group and its cultural expectations as right, proper, and superior to others is called ethnocentrism—ethno for ethnic group and centrism for centered on. However, even within a diverse society, what is considered morally acceptable can vary between subgroups and change over time. In the United States, for example, 56% of respondents in 2017 felt it is not necessary to believe in God to have good values, compared to 49% in 2011 (Smith 2017a). As you can see, social values, beliefs, and behaviors can vary dramatically within one society and from one society to the next. These differences can be threatening and even offensive to people who judge others according to their own perspectives, experiences, and values.
If you were brought up in a society that forbids premarital or extramarital sex, for instance, you might judge many from the United States to be immoral. In a few Muslim societies, people who have premarital sex may be severely punished or even executed, because such behavior is seen as an offense against the faith and the family and as a weakening of social bonds. It threatens the lineage and inheritance systems of family groups. In turn, some Americans would find such strict rules of abstinence to be