dilettante

In A Cultural Rut

I had all sorts of dreams and thoughts to share with you, but I've been mired in learning XHTML and mired inside my own brain as well. The view from in here is sort of weird and I think I need to get out more. Does anyone want to have lunch with me?

For now, though, I want to pass on a little bit from one of my class handouts:

"Geert Hofstede saw culture as the collective mental programming of the people in an environment. People with different mental programming perceive the same object in different ways. Hofstede studied IBM employees in 50 countries and identified five cultural dimensions that impact work, home/family life, and education, and that appear in a nation/culture's symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. The cultural dimensions that he identified were:

Power distance (the measure of inequality in a society and the degree to which people accept that inequality)

Individualism and collectivism

Femininity and masculinity (the belief that masculine cultures have clearly defined social gender roles while these roles overlap in feminine societies)

Uncertainty avoidance (the extent to which members of a culture feel threatened by the unknown)

Long-Term Time Orientation (how well a culture adapts tradition to modern perspective)"

--Dr. Main, the SJSU Information Technology Tools and Applications instructor

I know it's dangerous to generalize about people or places or cultures, but think for a moment about how American culture looks against these criteria. It's so hard to put your finger on a culture's statistics with any kind of reasonable accuracy, but take a second. It's not looking good to me. You?