Communication: Is Our Culture Failing Us?

"We live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists."  Dana Gioia, Chair for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts

How many writers, artists, scientists can the average American name?

In a speech delivered to the graduating class of Stanford University, Dana Gioia decried the lack of interest in cultural figures (other than pop culture) in America today.

He claims that the cultural entities of today are all for the sake of entertainment. And so ultimately it follows that everything today comes with a price tag. When celebrities appear on radio or TV talk shows, their main, and often only, purpose is to push their book, movie, new TV show, or a new vote.

What has happened to American culture?

Fifty years ago, Gioia says, Americans could rattle off a laundry list of names, names prominent throughout the country. Carl Sandburg, Rachel Carson, Georgia O’Keeffe, these names were familiar to Americans outside the university or literary circles.

"I don’t think Americans were smarter then, but American culture was," he says. "Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement."

According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the average American knows less about current events today than they did in 1989. That is, unless written about in People or flashed on Entertainment Tonight. An exception, one might claim, is those who watch the Daily Show; those watchers can identify figures in the news far more ably than those who watch Fox News, which purports to being "fair and balanced."

Our American culture today is a world of popular icons which we spread throughout the world, dispersing our brand of entertainment widely and cheaply to others who desire Western culture. So that other countries can be part of pop culture, many countries end up with a double culture: their own indigenous one, plus our pop culture: tennis shoes and tee-shirts; Mickey Mouse and Britney Spears.

With the onset of instant information at our fingertips, via Google, Wikipedia and other internet sources, we no longer need to study to access facts and/or ideas.

The need to know is quickly rewarded by a click of the mouse. Without accessing other available resources for research (the "old-fashioned" kind, like the library, encyclopedia, dictionary) the fact seeker is rewarded with just that one fact they were seeking.

No off chance of running into unsought information, extra facts gleaned from in-depth research on a subject, as you might experience in the library stacks or while poring over a reference book. No. Just that one fact, then…..next click.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, about intuition and cognition, tells a story about a group of art experts studying a piece of Greek sculpture. Because of decades of training and bone-deep knowledge, they quickly evaluated the sculpture and pronounce it a fake. This knowledge did not come by typing in "Greek sculpture" on the Yahoo search box or spending five minutes scanning a Wikipedia page on the subject. It came from years of training, research and learning, not from instant fact gleaning.

In the article, Is Google making us stupid?, Nicholas Carr writes "I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

In today’s world, it seems that ideas, not knowledge, reign in our culture. Instead of learning, retaining and knowing information, today’s internet sources – Google, Wikipedia, etc. – make the need to know information less critical than the ability to know WHERE to find good, reliable information and which site to look at for "creative" ideas. 

But in the end, a broader understanding of a culture is valuable. Facts alone aren’t enough. Ideas alone aren’t enough. They need to connect. Where do the facts and ideas on the internet come from anyway? Undoubtedly from minds which have studied and learned and so possess a broad understanding of a culture, whether it’s about Greek sculpture, theater or the problems facing business.

In business, communication is key. And wouldn’t it be great if you tossed out a worthwhile name or a cultural figure (not pop culture) or a valued book and your audience knew what you were talking about. A shared cultural experience would hold great value if we could elevate it beyond Entertainment Tonight. If we learn only this fact, that fact, and the name of the newest slasher film, how will we be able to communicate with each other in a deeper sense?

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