Building Your Culture, One Choice at a Time
Read this article in French:
Vous choisissez déjà votre culture
A scene from everyday life.
I log in…
The Web offers me:
- a Led Zeppelin concert;
- a retrospective of Van Gogh’s works;
- a documentary on climate change;
- a talk on contemporary art;
- an introduction to Chinese calligraphy;
- a poetry reading.
I won’t watch everything.
I will choose.
Global networked culture has profoundly transformed the way we discover works, ideas, and knowledge. In just a few clicks, we can explore music, books, knowledge, traditions and creative works from almost every part of the world. Search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence have become the main mediators of our cultural discoveries. They suggest, recommend and organize a vast stream of content.
But they do not choose for us.
Culture is no longer only an inheritance. It has also become something we build ourselves.
It was not always this way.
When I was a teenager in the early 1970s, our opportunities for cultural discovery were far more limited than they are today. A few television channels, magazines, cinemas, live music performances, libraries and bookstores were our main gateways to works of art, ideas and knowledge.
Building a personal culture is a continuous process. It does not happen in a single day, but through the works, readings, discoveries and encounters that gradually shape our journey.
Every day, we choose the works we watch, the books we read, the music we listen to, the talks we attend and the subjects we decide to explore. Each choice may seem small. Yet, over time, these choices gradually shape our worldview, our references and our cultural identity.
Recommendations sometimes open doors to works we might never have discovered otherwise. They never replace our freedom to choose the direction of our own cultural journey.
The greatest cultural challenge is no longer gaining access to culture. It is learning to consciously build our own cultural path within an almost unlimited global cultural landscape.
Choosing fragments of global culture to enrich our own culture has become part of the human experience.
Scrolling is moving through the flow. Choosing is building your culture.
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This text is part of the series Understanding Today’s Culture, a cultural chronicle of global networked culture.
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Further Reading
🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic
🟦 Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor