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The unseen danger of digital monoculturalism

Francisco Miraval

One of the biggest paradoxes of our time is that the same techno-globalization enabling us to connect people from many different cultures is erasing cultural differences, thus creating a sort of digital monoculturalism which, as it happens with all other kinds of monoculturalism, forces us into only one way of seeing reality and prevents us from recognizing that situation.

In sociology they talk about ethnocentrism, that is, assuming that the only culture you really know (yours) is not only unique, but better than or superior to all other cultures. For example, ancient Greek thought that most of non-Greeks were simply “barbarians.” And when the first modern Europeans arrived in the Americas, they had serious doubts about the humanity of natives.

In our time, thanks to social media, ethnocentrism has changed. The old ethnocentrism is now global. We now think that those who are not active in social networks are “barbarians” and “primitives”. The new digital culture has many defenders, as blind about their own monoculturalism as the Greeks and the modern Europeans were about their ethnocentrism.

Thanks to social media, for example, a person in Mongolia and another one in Argentina can wear the same NBA T-shirt and listen to the same music while they are chatting in real time, regardless of the time difference. Also, an entrepreneur in Finland can open a business with another one in Australia and hire employees in India and Canada.

Yet, in spite of those wonderful opportunities, the new global culture has created a digital monoculturalism which serves as the foundation to perpetuate the new culture.

We just accept the new digital monoculturalism as “normal”, which means that we can’t see the hidden consequences of what it has been created. We are as unaware of the new reality as a fish is (so to speak) unaware of the ocean because the fish has never been anywhere else.

Let’s say it in this way: the techno-globalized digital monoculturalism undoubtedly creates a closed space and generates dependency. Let’s be honest: we feel isolated and forgotten if we don’t get the number of “Likes” we wanted in our social media sites.

In addition, people are more focused on the sequence of posting they receive, regardless of how disconnected one is from the next one, than in the sequences of thoughts in their own minds, regardless of how connected one is with the next one.

For that reason, people carefully calculate what to say and what not to say, whom to message and whom to avoid, what images to share, and whom we are going to impress with the pictures of beautiful sunsets or of our vacation at an exotic place.

In a few words, the new digital monoculturalism forces us to filter all our lives through social media sites and, in doing so, forces us to think according to whatever is accepted by the algorithms governing those sites. That’s dangerous, because in doing so we are at risk of losing our own humanity without even realizing it.

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