What is culture?

'A culture is a group of people's total socially acquired life-way or lifestyle. It consists of the

patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are characteristic of the

members of a particular society or segment of a society' (Harris [25])

Culture is a common value of a group of people, community, or society - something that transcends the obvious binders such as geographical position, race, and religion. By stating it is socially acquired it implies that is created historically out of social relationships, not individually but in a community. It is a learned patterned repetitive behaviour and shared system of beliefs.

If that culture is exhibited in most members, it becomes a characteristic of that group. From a neuroscience point of view, culture is a variational evolutionary system involving some degree of coupling between variation and selection… the copying and transmitting of cultural information happen in the brains.(Arne Dietrich ,2015). It is important to mention culture is something that could be inherited or imposed not just adopted by choice. We are conditioned since birth to adhere to cultural rules and opinions; we are born into cultures. People representing our culture could be imposing their values and views on us. There are also countercultures, where members choose to oppose the wider spread social norms. Culture is binding consciously and unconsciously the members of society.

Belonging to a group is a primal instinct for survival, humans are biologically built to seek acceptance and live in groups, we are herd animals, and we are designed to pick up social cues and

coordinate and align our behaviour with those around us. Recent research has shown that

social disapproval provokes the brain's danger circuits. Conformity soothes. ( N. Shpancer,

2010).

We can involve in groups of choice and hence choose our culture. Cultural belonging can

bring certain advantages but could also lead to disadvantages. In logic humans should make

a conscious effort to adopt cultures that they consider will bring them advantages in

survival. We are emotional beings and often act on an unconscious level so in reality we also

choose cultural groups that don’t bring any obvious benefits but make us feel like we “belong”. In to try and fit into chosen group individuals will change behaviours or attitudes.

Chartrand and Bargh (1999) recognize this type of conformist behaviour when they describe

this perception-behaviour link where a mechanism allows one’s behaviour to passively

and unintentionally change to match that of others in one’s current social environment.

As humans could choose their culture, a single person may belong to a variety of cultures

simultaneously, often there aren’t hard boundaries between cultures and they overlap.

Moreover, globalization has brought about the problem of the interaction of cultures. Today

one can get easily lost in the intricate tapestry of complex multicultural relationships and fail

to spot the appropriation, misuse, and propaganda.

Culture is fluid and constantly changing and every certain moment is representative of a current snapshot. There are contemporary cultures but also cultures of the past that no longer exist, which became now our cultural memory that can be no longer altered.

“Culture is one of the most important concepts within sociology because sociologists

recognise that it plays a crucial role in our social lives. It is important for shaping social

relationships, maintaining and challenging social order, determining how we make sense of the world and our place, and shaping our everyday actions and experiences in society. It is composed of both non-material and material things.” (Cole, Nicki Lisa, Ph.D. "So What Is Culture, Exactly?" ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/culture-definition-4135409) In order to produce culture we need at least two components –

a group of people that will adopt it, and a form of communication between the members of

that society. Also a recipe for a cult. In today’s environment of a super-connected world enabled by technology, there appear deliberate cultural producers or culture industry (to mention a few - television, luxury brands or mass-produced consumer goods that could be considered cultures such as food or fashion) who use a very well-established route of psychological approaches and technological tools as methods of information diffusion on spreading beliefs and knowledge solely for the use of their own benefit or manipulate cultures in such a way to achieve their own economic growth or other (power, influence, different social order) purposes.

Producing culture/Being a creative today

The amount of global spending on advertising, communications and PR, shows that many

industries and individuals are dependent on shaping how people think. They thrive on the

amount of attention they receive. “In advertising, dollars go where the eyeballs are”.

Attention-seeking is no longer a bad thing, it is beneficial and is gratified with economic

prosperity. We rely on signals like popularity. If everyone else is buying something, the

reasoning goes, there is a good chance the item is worth our attention. In his

book Influence, Cialdini uses the example of advertisers informing us that a product is the

“fastest-growing” or “best-selling.” Advertisers don’t have to persuade us that a product is

good, they only need to say others think so. One should rely solely on own fair judgement

and common sense when being bombarded with messages with different agendas,

communicated from all places. Work has always been creative

but centuries of capitalist appropriation have leeched the use value of all forms of labour.

Members of the “creative class” are currently being creative only in so far as they are

producing new ways for capitalism to appropriate the world. (O. Mould, 2018)

Creativity is a key element of cultural production. Creatives are cultural producers,

entering professionally “the creative industries”. It is important that we approach with

strong personal ethics and critical thinking, evaluating and questioning purposes and

methods of how our creativity is utilised, staying aware of our contribution to consumerism

culture, and feeding further capitalist entities. Whilst the creative process could possibly be very lucrative for the creators themselves, the impact of creativity and culture on society is

undeniable. I am not saying all inventors should be idealists,

“starving artists” and not profit

but keep in mind what the messages we pass.

We rarely consider what influences our decision-making. We are what we eat, they say, but

also what we watch, how and with whom we talk, what we read, which languages we are

reading in, what we listen to, what we believe or don’t – most of that brought by our, often

seemingly random and nonbiased choice making, serving only our illusion of free will. Most of our preferences and dislikes are pre-determined and with underlying reasons. There are both internal evolutionary and

biological forces and external influences, a complex interaction of variables that the

individual’s behaviour could be subjected to or influenced by manipulation. Our choices and

behaviour are an active response to these forces.

In order to choose and act completely self-determined, and exercise personal agency, one

should take full responsibility for their own actions.

Reducing distractions and making choices about what comes into mind and preoccupies us,

helps to increase personal agency. “Being tied to your mobile phone and all the notifications

is not a personal agency, and doing this will extract a price in terms of your feelings of

personal empowerment.” Pearson, R. (2019)

In “Fear of Freedom,” Eric Fromm argues that all of us have the potential to control our own

lives but that many of us are too afraid to do so. As a result, we give up our freedom and

allow our lives to be governed by circumstances, other people, political ideologies, or

irrational feelings. However, determinism is not inevitable, and in the very choice we all

have to do good, or evil, Fromm sees the essence of human freedom. (1941)