Traditions of Life
September 21, 2018 6:13 AM   Subscribe

Human culture is now a Google search Our retention of information and our ability to pass it down changes traditions. Now we rely on Google to tell us about our people’s and how we react and act towards events and what we traditionally do.
posted by Yellow (14 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite


 
You know, I actually like it. The article frames the development in negative terms – loss of information, etc. – but I think not being restricted to a certain subset of cultural knowledge – whatever your community has deemed correct and morally good – is very empowering for the individual. We have put a lot of effort into advancing our society so that we don't have to spend our whole lives in the same tiny community, so why not take advantage of it? I'd much rather Google different ways of doing things, try them out and and select the one I think fits me best, than be shunned by my community because I dared to question their particular traditions.

Traditional ways of doing things are not automatically better because they are traditional.
posted by Vesihiisi at 8:02 AM on September 21, 2018 [8 favorites]


I was watching this videoabout schooling and flocking behaviors last night and towards the end they make a point about how schooling and flocking makes complex large scale behaviors emerge out of many local, small scale ones.

They think these kinds of systems have inbuilt safeguards against single origin large scale signals, so that they can't override the one on one interactions, and that this makes them more robust and adaptive.

I think there's something to be said for resisting global single-source information for this reason.

Something is lost when we stop relying on information that originates nearby and is negotiated face-to-face in favor of information filtered by a single company that doesn't interact with you in any way except in the aggregate big data ad money cambridge analytica collusion sense.
posted by signal at 8:20 AM on September 21, 2018 [6 favorites]


To reiterate signal, this part here is where you make a category error:

not being restricted to a certain subset of cultural knowledge
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:46 AM on September 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was struck by this passage, and by the gender shift which occurs in the middle:

From an early age, most people—particularly young girls—are tasked with caring for their siblings, so by the time they are having their own children, they already have years of experience. This experience can prove useful because babies are confusing, especially at first. Countless new fathers have begun their lifelong foray into dad jokes by quipping about the need for some sort of user’s manual—a need an enterprising doctor and his son have recently responded to.

Most people, especially young girls, are traditionally taught to care for babies, say the article. Transition to the idea that in our contemporary society, men don't know how to care for babies and this is a shame. Those two sentences don't actually connect very well, since she's not talking about how, in traditional societies, men learn to care for babies - it's "especially young girls" who learn. And men who complain now today about not knowing how to care for babies have access to an enormous amount of resources - there are tons of "users' manuals". What doesn't exist and can't exist is a manual about "how to care for a baby without actually doing any work or challenging your ideas of masculinity".

I think we waaaaaaaay idealize "traditional" societies, lumping together all kinds of ones with different habits, relations to modernity, gender roles, etc.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened to me in a lot of "traditional societies'. Unless I happened to be really lucky and get born into one that allowed AFAB people to live as men, I would almost certainly have been strong-armed into marriage and, absent birth control, would have popped out babies until I killed myself out of dysphoria. Sure, I might have known about, like, knives and death and how straight people fuck, but it still gives me the creeping horrors.

Also, "traditional" societies have various and evolving relationships with modernity, as is hinted at in this article. In particular, I think about some stuff I read about indigenous women's organizing in Oaxaca - it was an article about culture and radio as part of broader indigenous organizing against the state, and it talked about how indigenous women were organizing together so that they could learn to do radio and various other political tasks that had hitherto been for men only.

I dunno, I am wary of the baggage this article's approach brings along with it.
posted by Frowner at 8:50 AM on September 21, 2018 [16 favorites]


I mean, I think what's missing in this article is any account of how "traditional" societies become modern - it's as though "tradition" and "modernity" sit side by side, unconnected, and we can just pick and choose elements of each, or plump for one or the other - as if elements of any society aren't extremely tightly bound to the rest of it.

For instance, I have a friend with a young girl child. How would she be taught to care for babies, since she has no siblings? Would her mother be expected to continue to have lots of kids? How would that work? Would her mother be able to do anything except have kids and keep house? How would the mother support herself? Would she be totally dependent on her family or a man? What if two women marry? What if the daughter doesn't like babies? What would she miss while she was caring for them? It's not easy to say "if only we all, especially young girls, learned to care for babies by constantly being around babies" without raising a lot of questions about how this theoretically baby-dense society would be structured.
posted by Frowner at 8:56 AM on September 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


Why don’t we allow children access to the world as we know it, a world that involves death and sex and, yes, sometimes even machetes?

Well, to literally answer that question one could look for some example to farm work where children of farmers do still constitute a significant portion of the workforce. While those children may be learning something about their families traditions and culture, they also suffer injury at the rate of 33 kids a day and one child every three days dies in farming related accidents. The culture being passed on is largely conservative, and often more abusive than in urban environments while being reported less frequently.

Paleoculture is no better than paleodiets, and it isn't much of a stretch to imagine if given access to the same levels of opportunity, wealth, and goods many of those living in "traditional" lifestyles would be all to happy to adopt more "modern" cultural practices. Doing something out of need isn't the same thing as doing it out of choice. Even in cases where choice may be involved, it still doesn't follow that the "old ways" are better just for being older.

Does that mean we should just accept Google as our cultural master? Of course not, but looking backwards to solve the problems of the future isn't an inherently sensible answer. One can make the argument, for example, that kids right now are learning to wield the equivalent of machetes for how the world will operate in a internet age, with kids seeming to be producing online culture in greater frequency than their parents generation, with some even earning money doing so to help support their families. We need to focus on those areas and look to better the changes technology is creating, both the pressures on the family and their livelihoods and in trying to determine where the culture is going and what effect its having on everyone.

Traditional societies aren't going to have the answer for living in worldwide communities, that doesn't mean they should be ignored, just that the answer won't be in going backward when technology is leaping forward as retreat at this point doesn't seem like a workable option. We can tut-tut the internet and the problems it does cause, as well as nod to the advantages it provides, but unless there is a complete overthrow of the system, it isn't going anywhere.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:21 AM on September 21, 2018 [4 favorites]


I would have liked to see some actual data in this article rather than anecdotes and broad generalizations. Every one of the things the author mentions as something Westerners might be "shocked" by is something I experienced regularly as a child except perhaps for familial preparation of dead bodies. However funerals for family members when I was a child were large ritualistic affairs and bodies were displayed at the funeral parlor while we chatted and talked and viewed the body.

Co-sleeping? I don't remember my own infancy, but both of my siblings had cribs in my parents' room so they were close and often slept in bed the same bed if they were fussy. Breastfeeding? Done freely by my mother while working or out and about. Care of younger siblings by older siblings? I started babysitting at 10. Use of dangerous tools? I mowed our lawn with a riding mower, also at 10. I had a machete too, but that was just for fun. Extended family network with matriarchal grandmother for guidance. Yep, that too. Knowledge of sex and reproduction? Again, I got "the talk" at around the same age and a little later got a more clinical view of things from my school. Is that better or worse than being in the room for the act? Dunno, but the knowledge wasn't kept from me.

Maybe my experience is atypical. Or maybe the author's point is that the structures of knowledge transmission in a place like America are splintered and sometimes broken, but they don't really make that case with any evidence to back it up. Instead the author asserts facts about what Westerners or Americans do or do not know or do or do not learn without actually citing any source for that assertion.
posted by runcibleshaw at 9:41 AM on September 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


I would like to contrast this article with this one on Autostraddle, about an Indian girl who explored her sexuality through clandestine internet reading:
My head was a muddled mess of could-haves and would-haves, and I felt suddenly inexplicably tired. Tired of having to hide, of having to cover up my tracks like a criminal. I had always been a model child, but this was making me break every rule without concern for the consequences. How was I supposed to care about trigonometry when I was, every minute of the day, going over every interaction I’d had with a female friend? How was I supposed to study when the internet was at my disposal? The internet which could tell me stories of women marrying other women, of women falling in love with other women, of happy endings?
While I don't entirely think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to considering how we relate traditions to future generations, I read this article wondering if the author has ever considered the existence of people who deviate from the norms in their society. Many queer folks my age (and most ages, I expect) had to learn about our traditions far away from the communities we grew up on. Like the author I linked above, furtive internet searches were really all I had to learn about queer culture until I was able to move far away.

To read a romanticized version of a time before I even know I had any choices other than to marry a man and have children is really a troubling one. And other thoughts this article brought up, like: what about how in my case, I cut off my most of my family because of sexual abuse perpetuated by a precious boy child who the family wanted to protect at all costs? It was worth it, even if I lost the protection of a family and the knowledge of older generations. How does the Shuar handle something like this? What do traditional communities pass on about sexual assault, about women's worth, about gender and sexuality?

I do wish that I had grown up in a culture that didn't shy away from talking about death. Death scares me more than anything and I can barely type this without wanting to go do something else immediately to shake off the thoughts. This is what I mean by seeing the value in what this article discusses — it wasn't entirely wrong, but it just left out a lot of important things to make the point.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 10:25 AM on September 21, 2018 [8 favorites]


Maybe my experience is atypical.

It is, unfortunately.

I don't have hard data on hand to back it up but I do have some anecdata to share. My partner works in the birthing & postnatal field here in Canada and she teaches about 400 to 500 couples per year. Her students are drawn from a very wide spectrum of the population. In recent years she has had to change her curriculum based on what she is seeing in her students. She's had educated women in their twenties and early 30s who have argued with her about what she has taken for granted as basic biological knowledge - how one is impregnated, the existence of placentas, inability to understand what a cervix is, the names for the parts of the vagina, whether it is acceptable to use the word vagina, where a baby comes out of the mother, etc. This wouldn't be so surprising if it didn't happen every single class and with a very wide range of people from different social classes, genders, religons and races. She's always had the odd person, usually a man, who didn't understand basic baby care or how to hold a baby that sort of thing but she's found that the majority of her students, men and women, in the majority of her classes have no knowledge of even the most simplistic care for babies or children.

Recently she helped a young woman with a breast feeding problem. The young woman noticed some discoloration and changes to her nipple. She asked her mother, aunts, cousins, friends who largely brushed her off or had no idea. So she turned to Dr. Google. Dr. Google told her she had cancer (she didn't) and decided to see what the random people on Facebook had to say about it. Facebook took the picture of her nipple down. That's when she called my partner. In the span an hour, my partner kindly explained that these changes happen with breastfeeding, helped her with breastfeeding, helped her with diagnosing future problems, and helped her feel empowered. This is an anecdote but based on partner's experience, she has dozens of such stories, it is part of a trend she has seen towards a reliance on sources that are unreliable and don't have your best interests in my mind.

What I got from the article, which is a discussion piece at best due to a lack firm stats, is as runcibleshaw says that that cultural transmission of specific insights that a culture has developed in order to help with existing in this world has fractured in Western society. It is talking less about us returning to some kind of "traditional" society (whatever that is) and integrating a transmission of shared knowledge, from person to person, into our society about aspects of life which are increasingly being pushed into the hands of specialists, apps and Youtube videos. Like in my anecdote about my partner helping the young woman with breast feeding issues - it is about cultural transmission of knowledge about living in this world that is being neglected by the culture (for a whole host of reasons).
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:26 AM on September 21, 2018 [3 favorites]


Like in my anecdote about my partner helping the young woman with breast feeding issues - it is about cultural transmission of knowledge about living in this world that is being neglected by the culture (for a whole host of reasons).

But cultures aren't just bits and pieces. The things that make cultural transmission easy and natural among the Shuar (people don't move around a lot, everyone has lots of kids, families live in very close proximity, craft-type physical tasks are more common than, eg, pushing a button to do something) wouldn't hold up very well if people went away to school, or if more people wanted to or were required to do labor for cash outside the village. Do all the women of the Shuar want to spend their reproductive years having child after child? If they do now, would they continue to want this if, for instance, the tax structure changed and necessitated a lot of women to work for cash outside the community such that they went different places and had different experiences, and such that their social positions in the community changed?

Transmitting culture in an unbroken chain along generations requires a lot of stability, and stability has its price. (And also raises the question of just what culture is transmitted.) It's like what they say about buying stuff - you can have it be quick and cheap but not good, or quick and good but not cheap, or cheap and good but not quick, but it's very hard to find things that are quick, cheap and good.
posted by Frowner at 10:44 AM on September 21, 2018 [4 favorites]


Culture doesn't necessarily have to be all that monolithic. Certainly many cultures rely on that kind of forced stability but more often then not culture is dynamic and mutable. Every culture will at some point need to address a challenge made to its continuance. Sometimes that means adopting values of the colonizer, going to war in order to wipe out the opposing culture, modifying traditions to work in situations outside of where those traditions come from, changing food traditions, on and on. Humans do a remarkable job of pruning what doesn't work for them but they can also do a bad job of picking up things that do. Sometimes cultures will fail to change or change poorly or too slowly and go extinct but that doesn't mean the people go extinct just their culture. They adopt or create new patterns of behaviour and values. Some stability is important but as long one is alive and has an identity you have culture. It is one of humanity's enduring survival strategies.

The argument being made in the article, at least as far as I see it, is that in the West we've largely farmed out some of our cultural duties, specifically ones dealing with birth & death, to specialists and something that is external to us & largely controlled by corporate entities - namely the Internet and related technologies. While true the ease of use and access to the Internet has changed how we think and interact and we as a culture utilise the Internet more as an extension of culture (rather than an artifact of our culture). As such we rely on it as repository of "what we should know". While that is sort of true, personally, I think the argument is a bit more complex then that. Couple with that argument trends in pedagogical approach and massive political & social changes and I think you might be getting nearer the truth. Regardless the set of problems our culture needs to deal with as a whole haven't been figured out yet.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:38 AM on September 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


Perhaps should write a bot that reviews google and 'social media' to ensure I've maintained my proper place in the online culture, that is virtually invisible.
posted by sammyo at 12:19 PM on September 21, 2018


She's always had the odd person, usually a man, who didn't understand basic baby care or how to hold a baby that sort of thing but she's found that the majority of her students, men and women, in the majority of her classes have no knowledge of even the most simplistic care for babies or children.

And they're there to learn. Isn't that good? It means the class is attracting the right sort of audience. Unless the class is obligatory, which you don't mention, the people who feel they're ready to take care of a child won't be attending it.
posted by Vesihiisi at 11:27 PM on September 21, 2018


And they're there to learn. Isn't that good?

Yes, for sure it is.

To clarify, the class is not obligatory but the midwives she works with will strongly encourage the clients to take the class. The class does cost money but she does allow people who can't afford the class to take it for free. People don't take the class for a variety of reasons not just because they are feeling prepared. Her market research has shown the majority of the midwives' clients who don't take her class do so because of inconvient class times, social anxiety and "they watched a Youtube video".

In regards to learning about childbirth (and how it relates to the article), there was a time when my partner could assume that soon-to-be parents had a basic knowledge: babies need to be fed regularly, need to be burped from time to time, babies shouldn't stay in an soiled diaper for 12 hours, won't sleep the same amount of hours as an adult, etc. The baseline knowledge of what a baby is and how to care for one has changed dramatically in less than a decade for women as much as for men. Also, the class was never designed to be a sexual education or a conception class but a class to help a couple deal with the childbirth in a successful way. In past years, she could assume people had a basic understanding of, at the very least, sex if not biology. She's had enough people come through her class that didn't understand that babies are born vaginally or there is a placenta that's she had to change the curriculum to reflect this growing absence in knowledge. Overwhelmingly, the group that lacks this knowledge the most are men & women, in their 20s to early 30's, white and highly educated.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:51 AM on September 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


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