Culture is defined as shared behaviors, ideas, and artifacts that create a way of life passed from one generation to another. Every one grows up in at least one culture and their lives are influenced everyday by being surrounded in that culture. Cultural differences occur because every culture fulfills its needs in different ways and those ways are passed on from generation to generation. There are millions of different cultures throughout the world and each one has its own unique identity and way of life. Culture has greatly benefitted from the invention and use of the internet. It has advanced in education, marketing, communication and cultural practices.
The cultural benefits of the Internet are as stated below:
• Cultural Advancement: With the easy accessibility of information, cultures have been able to advance in many ways. Education is a way in which advancement of cultures has occurred. People can now learn about anything using the internet as a means of information.
• Cultures have also advanced economically because the internet allows for marketing and sales transactions. Marketers now have a whole new way of advertising and selling products or services. They can now post something on the internet and anyone, anywhere at any point in time can see that add. This leads to an increase in business. Businesses are also growing because the internet allows for businesses to be internet based. They can solely run on the internet (facebook) or they can have a land business and increase exposure with a website and/or internet business as well. World wide organizations are now able to exist and run with ease because of the advancement of communication by the internet.
• Exploration of Cultures: Cultures can more easily explore other cultures now that the internet is available. To learn about a culture one can just use a search engine and quickly access information about the desired culture. Prior to the internet, a person would have had to either travel to where the culture was at or find a book which entailed information about that culture. Both of these ways are time consuming and have the potential to be very expensive.
• Another benefit to using the internet for cultural information is that one can learn about the beliefs of that culture before experiencing it if he/she is interested in going there. An example is learning what that culture finds offensive so that he/she does not make the mistake of acting or speaking in a way that offends the people of that culture. This helps with business transactions and any kind of intercultural travel.
• Homogenization of Cultures: With the newfound exploration of cultures, cultural uniqueness has decreased because people see there are other possible ways of living life. A person of one culture may like the way another culture does something and then start to do that something themselves. This can spread throughout the culture and soon the two cultures will contain fewer differences. An easy example of this is cultural food. In the United States, we have Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, Italian, and Thai restaurants. This is because we have learned about the different foods from these cultures, liked it and started eating it ourselves. The internet makes this process very easy by providing recipes from these cultures online. Cultural homogenization will continue to occur as the number of cultures on the internet increases and the “diversity of the internet’s content grows”. Individuals, organizations and cultures can come together on the internet because of a shared interest or goal They can then learn about each other and adopt ideas from one another eventually leading to an alteration in ways of life.
• Increased Cultural Communication: The internet allows information to freely flow from one network to another. Cultural communication is easier now because information from one culture can be posted on the internet and looked at by another culture. This can be through journals, websites and anything else included with the internet. Cultural trends include using Facebook, instant messaging, Myspace, blogs, and other devices like these to communicate.
Cultures can directly communicate with other cultures through these services.
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