I．Brainstorming

Can you list some characteristics of culture?

II. Characteristics of culture

1. Reasons:

As we move through these characteristics, the strong connection between culture and communication will become apparent.

Most of culture is in the taken-for-granted realm and beneath the conscious level. Learning about culture can be simulating and awakening as you give meaning to your actions and the actions of others.

2. Characteristics of culture

(1) Learnability

Enculturation is conscious or unconscious conditioning occurring with that process whereby the individual achieves competence in a particular culture. Enculturation usually takes place through interaction, observation and imitation.

Conscious learning in its simplest form is learning at the cognitive level. It is reading about or being told or shown what a culture wants us to know. The presence of culture is so subtle and pervasive that it simply goes unnoticed

Subconscious learning of cultural perceptions, rules, and behaviors usually goes on in everyday life. The essential messages of a culture get reinforced and repeated.

(2) Codifiability

Our cerebral cortex and all the neurological structures associated with it have developed in a way that enables us to use symbols at a level of sophistication not shared by any other creature.

Language enables people to communicate what they would do if such-and-such happened, to organize their experience into abstract categories, and to express thoughts never spoken before.

The portability of symbols allows us to package and store them as well as transmit them. Culture is accumulative, historical, and preserved.

(3) Transmittability

For a culture to exist and develop, it must ensure that its crucial message and elements are passed on. Culture is a continuous process. The content of culture is what gets transferred from generation to generation.

(4) Changeability

Cultures are dynamic in that every culture must confront ideas and information from outside sources that may bring about change.

1) Innovation is defined as the discovery of new practices, tools, or concepts that many members of the culture eventually accepted and that may produce slight changes in social habits and behaviors.

2) Diffusion is the borrowing by one culture from another. It is part of cultural contact for as long as cultures have existed.

3) Acculturation is a type of cultural change occurs when a society undergoes drastic culture change under the influence of a more dominant culture and society with which it has come in contact.

(5) Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is found in every culture. It is based on the idea that one’s own race, nation, group, etc. is better than any other. People generally believe that their own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. Ethnocentrism can cause the alienation of co-cultures from the dominant culture.