Trends in Contemporary American Culture/Society

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Trends in Contemporary American Culture/Society

Definition

Ambiguity…

How can we define America?

How can we define culture?

‘Culture ... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ Tyler (British anthropologist) 1870: 1; cited by Avruch 1998: 6

‘Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditional elements of future action.’ Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952: 181; cited by Adler 1997: 14

‘Culture consists of the derivatives of experience, more or less organized, learned or created by the individuals of a population, including those images or encodements and their interpretations (meanings) transmitted from past generations, from contemporaries, or formed by individuals themselves.’ T.Schwartz 1992; cited by Avruch 1998: 17

‘[Culture] is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.’ Hofstede 1994: 5

‘... the set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one generation to the next.’ Matsumoto 1996: 16

‘Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioral conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behavior and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behavior.’ Spencer-Oatey 2008: 3

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012) What is culture? A compilation of quotations. GlobalPAD Core Concepts. Available at GlobalPAD Open House http://go.warwick.ac.uk/globalpadintercultural

Speeding up Why?

How?

Result?

The result is 24/7 access to goods and services, multi-tasking, meals in minutes, hectic households, microwave mums, meals on the run, insecurity, one minute wins and individuals (and organisations) that want everything tomorrow. The result is stress, anxiety, a lack of sleep, a blurring of boundaries between work and home, work-life imbalance and, conversely, an interest in slowing things down. 

Top Trends in Society & Culture

http://www.nowandnext.com/?action=top_trend/list_trends&sectorId=1

Anxiety

There are approximately 40 wars in 35 countries going on as you read this. Terrorism is rife and if 'they' don't get you a global pandemic probably will. At least that's how quite a few people feel.

Post 9/11 the feeling …

Demographic change

Demographics is the mother of all trends (or, as someone more eloquently once put it, ('demographics is destiny'). The big demographic shift is ageing.

(42% of the US workforce is unmarried).

Add a declining fertility rate (below the replacement rate in many developed nations) and you have a recipe for significant socio-economic change.

Global and local

Globalization is obviously a huge trend but if you look forward far enough it looks like the future will be local. You can already see evidence for this shift in the fact that the opposite, localization - is a major trend in everything from food to politics.

Globalization…meaning…results….

Happiness

Materialism is still in full swing but for many people it's starting to lose its appeal.

We are working harder and working longer - and earning more money as a result - but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that money can't buy you happiness. People are also starting to realize that identity is not shaped by what you own or consume but by who you are and how you live.

Result

To some extent the happiness phenomenon is really a search for meaning. Hence the increase in spiritualism.

Authenticity

Too Much Information (TMI), Too Much Choice (TMC) Too Much Technology (TMT).

We are also being subjected to multiple truths (one minute coffee is going to kill you, the next it's a miracle cure) half-truths and lies from companies

The response to all this is an interest in authenticity or 'realness'. People want to know where things (or people) are from and whether they can trust them. They also want to know what the story is. We expect people and products to be trustworthy, ethical, real and tell stories about their history. we are ourselves leading increasingly fake lives.

Memory

We increasingly live in a world that forgets. Companies have almost no sense of their own history while politicians positively revel in the fact that voters cannot remember (or choose to forget) lies, deceptions and even criminal behavior.

Unfortunately, memory loss is a by-product of trends like speeding-up and convergence. It means that attention spans can almost be measured in nano-seconds (have you noticed how members of Generation Y won’t wait for anything anymore

‘Life caching’ is a major trend (and a US $2.5 billion industry) where people effectively download (or upload) everything from emails and text messages to photographs, video clips, words and spoken words.

Networked

They used to say that when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. Everything from countries and computers to industries and gadgets are increasingly linked together.

This means everything becomes transparent. It’s bad because in the future there will be little or no privacy and, since everything is connected, if something fails in one area the whole ‘network’ can be effected (‘cascading failure’ is the term used by some people).

US and them

It would obviously be too simplistic to carve up the world between America (and its allies) and the rest of the world, but some people see it that way…

Personalization

How can you have a list of top trends and innovations without mentioning Apple’s i-Pod somewhere? The i-Pod is an excellent example of all sorts of trends including place shifting, device convergence, Moore’s Law and miniaturization.

However, the most interesting thing about the innovation is that it personifies personalization.

Expect dozens of products in different markets to offer a similar degree of personalization in the coming years as customer desire meets technological possibilities. 

Connection

“virtual reality”—populated by avatars and existing only in the realm of the ideal.

Facebook

Place

The average American drove less in 2010 than in 2000.

Mobility, the hallmark of twentieth-century United States culture, declined throughout the decade and reached a post-war low in 2010, with less than 10% of American households changing their address.

Urbanologist Richard Florida observed that young adults meeting one another no longer ask, “What do you do?” They ask, “Where do you live?”

More and more people will change careers in order to stay in a place—connected to family, friends, and local culture—than will change place to stay in a career.

The 20th-century American dream was to move out and move up; the 21st-century dream seems to be to put down deeper roots. This quest for local, embodied, physical presence may well be driven by the omnipresence of the virtual and a dawning awareness of the thinness of disembodied life.

Cities

The revival of American cities was underway already in 2000, but it reached its full flowering by 2010. Of course not every single American city flourished in the last decade

The challenges often associated with urban life, meanwhile, began a movement to the suburbs that may well accelerate in the 2010s.

The really radical and difficult place to raise a family by 2020 will be . . . …the suburbs.

http://old.qideas.org/video/the-future-of-the-suburbs.aspx

The End of the Majority

Everywhere in the 2000s, cultural majorities collapsed. Predominantly black neighborhoods became half Hispanic. White rural communities saw dramatic immigration from Asia and Latin America.

City centers became internationalized.

White Americans were still a bare majority of the population by the end of the decade, but in delivery rooms they were already only a plurality (the largest of many minorities).

The Self Shot

When movie directors in the 2030s are trying to convey in a single glance that their scene is set in the 2000s, they will use the self shot—the self-portrait shot from a digital camera or cell phone held by one hand extended away from the subject. We look out at our own hand, perhaps squeezing another friend into the frame, composing our face in a smile or a laugh. We are shooting ourselves.

Mirrors vs let’ take a selfie

“manscaping.” Enough said.

Pornography

Underneath it all was porn.

Pornography is as old as visual art

Superimposed on every image of our own bodies

And yet as omnipresent as porn was, it remained underground—a subject of shame even among the most secular and urbane.

Men untucked their shirts. Billionaires wore jeans. The most powerful CEO in America was universally known as “Steve.”

Indeed, informality was now a sign of privilege—only low-status workers wore uniforms.

Informality

Liquidity

Wealth was ever more disconnected from real assets.

Countries that pumped one particular liquid from the ground acquired vast resources of sovereign wealth that went looking for high returns. Money sloshed around the globe like quicksilver

As money sloshed, prices of oil, food, housing, and labor spiked, then collapsed, then threatened to spike again. Those who could trade on volatility often made untold fortunes; those actually needing to buy and sell real goods often suffered.

ComplexityThere was a bull market in oversimplification, and no shortage of attempts to find someone to blame or, more hopefully, some way to make a difference.

Yet all this complexity also contained the seed of certain kinds of promise. The human brain, after all, is also complex, interconnected, embodied, improvisational, constantly being rewired—simply put, the most complex system known in our universe. The culture of North America in the 2000s took several not inconsiderable steps toward having those same qualities.

And yet in the most surprising places what was emerging could be called intelligence. Of course, intelligence needs to be married to wisdom…

Ethnic and Racial Minorities & Socioeconomic Status

http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-erm.aspx

Socioeconomic status (SES) is often measured as a combination of education, income, and occupation.

It is commonly conceptualized as the social standing or class of an individual or group. When viewed through a social class lens, privilege, power, and control are emphasized.

Low SES and its correlates, such as lower education, poverty, and poor health, ultimately affect our society as a whole. Inequities in wealth and quality of life are increasing in the United States and globally.

Variance in socioeconomic status, including disparities in the distribution of wealth, income, and access to resources, affects everyone.

Why is SES relevant?

SES Impacts the Lives of Many Ethnic and Racial Minorities

Pine Ridge Reservation

African American children are three times more likely to live in poverty than Caucasian children. American Indian/Alaska Native, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian families are more likely than Caucasian and Asian families to live in poverty (Costello, Keeler, & Angold, 2001; National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).

Although the income of Asian American families is often markedly above other minorities, these families also often have four to five family members working (Le, 2008).

Minorities are more likely to receive high-cost mortgages: African Americans (53 percent) and Latinos (43 percent), in comparison to Caucasians (18 percent) (Logan,2008).

African Americans and Latinos are more likely to attend high-poverty schools than Asian Americans and Caucasians (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).

In 2005, the high school dropout rate of Latinos was highest, followed by those of African Americans and American Indians/Alaska Natives (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).

Physical HealthSystemic prejudices against ethnic minorities in the United States create additional barriers in health care that exist regardless of class.In one study, one-fourth of American women of South Asian descent from affluent backgrounds did not have a Pap smear in over 3 years. Those from low socioeconomic status are even more at risk for not having this early detection test yearly (Chaudhry, Fink, Gelberg, & Brook, 2003).

Socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity have been associated with avoidable procedures, avoidable hospitalizations, and untreated disease (Fiscella, Franks, Gold, & Clancy, 2008).Low birth weight, which is related to a number of negative child health outcomes, has been associated with lower SES and ethnic/minority status (Fiscella et al., 2008).

Psychological Health

Socioeconomic deprivation and racial discrimination have been implicated higher psychological distress.

Minority children in high-poverty areas are more likely to be exposed to alcohol and tobacco advertisements (Wallace, 1999) and drug distribution (Wallace, 1999); they are also more likely to use drugs and exhibit antisocial behaviors (Dubow, Edwards, & Ippolito, 1997).

The odds of being diagnosed with schizophrenia were significantly higher for African Americans than Caucasians in lower poverty areas (Chow et al., 2003).

African Americans are at higher risk for involuntary psychiatric commitment than any other racial group. African Americans and Latinos in low-poverty areas were more likely to be referred for commitment by a law enforcement official than any other racial group (Chow et al., 2003).

Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy Trends and Interactions with Native AmericansSETH HOPKINS, OCT 31 2014

To What Extent Are Trends in Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy Framed by Interactions with Native Americans?

the history of 19th century and show how the trends become ‘embedded’ in American ideology

these trends are also visible in the contemporary foreign policy of the United States

U.S. ideology by the nature of interactions with Native Americans, are also relied upon to support certain trends in U.S. foreign policy.

trends that were set from the beginning of European

interactions with Native People in the Americas

Violence

the construction of the Native People as inferior or, at least

different

Europeans and finally the connected belief that Europeans

can ‘civilize’ Native People

‘inheritable’ and set stage for demonstrating their

‘inheritance’ by the U.S.

The argument of this study then

‘There are trends that were established during European interactions with Native People in the Americas which were ‘inherited’ by U.S. and became embedded in U.S. culture and ideology.

Michel Foucault

GenealogyDescent“knowledge of details and… a vast accumulation of source material”

Problems?

“unbroken continuity” and reminds us that the “past does not actively exist in the present”

From Columbus to American Independence – Encounters

Characterized by?

Othering

Inheritable

Patterns of violence

To try to civilize

a general way of dealing with Native People

what we see here, is a two-way violent relationship

Native attack in 1622 which killed 350 English settlers

British began to behave “like conquerors rather than brothers”

the trend of ‘othering’

inferior to Europeans

who were religiously or politically incomplete

Columbus’s “naked as the day they were born” and had “no more embarrassment than animals.”

This portrayal of the Native People as naïve and simple may seem harmless, however it does betray a belief that Native People were somehow “incomplete” from the very start of interactions.

For example Thomas Hobbes, an Englishmen writing in 1651, asserts that the “Savages” of America continue to live in the State of Nature or “Condition of Warre”,

“Brutish” lack of order and organization. politically incomplete by still being in the State of Nature, but

they are also devoid of some form of natural rationality that compelled Europeans to leave the State of Nature behind and therefore presumably inferior to Europeans.

Attempt by Europeans to ‘complete’ Native People or bring them civilization. Violent projects or projects of subjugation undertaken by Europeans towards Native People were often justified as attempts to civilize the uncivilized.

Virginia Company in 1606 :“Christian Religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God and… bring[ing] the Infidels and Savages living in those parts, to human civility and quiet government.”

Conclusion

‘othering’, ‘civilizing’ and violence

Complete vs. Incomplete

Disease

Value systems of the two civilizations simply did not match

Inherited?

Thank you

for your Attention!