1. 27.4.2010 Åbo Akademi - Domkyrkotorget 3 - 20500 Åbo 1 Rethinking social inclusion and the web 2.0: What’s in store for language education? Dr. Ruth Illman ruth.illman@abo.fi Åbo Akademi University, Comparative religion
19. 27.4.2010 Åbo Akademi - Domkyrkotorget 3 - 20500 Åbo 11 Social media and communication Three recommendations: Increase your awareness, think “outside the box”, or at least reflect on your own box and what it is made of, and be prepared for surprises, expect the unexpected!
Editor's Notes
Thank you for the invitation, a pleasure to be here, innovative environment. An expert neither on social media nor language education, my field is comparative religion, specialised in intercultural issues, cultural encounters, interreligious dialogue. My focus: the topic of social inclusion, what the new global situation, coined to a significant degree by social media, has in store for communication across cultures and religions today.
Social media make it possible to be “everywhere, with everyone, always” as a Finnish add for mobile phones had it some ten years ago (then a joke, today reality). Previously: icc was often seen rather straightforwardly as the skills needed to convey a message from person A to person B and minimising the distortions caused by the “cultural filters” between them. Simple symbols often used, as the one above (the morale of the story is that the add is good if you are a Westerner reading from left to right but rather worrying if your mother tongue is e.g. Arabic or Hebrew and you read from right to left). Such images of icc fail to take notice of the complex, global environment in which cultural encounters and communication between persons of different cultural backgrounds, religious convictions, languages and values take place. Cultures A and B never meet, as abstract, ahistoical, coherent entities. Human beings meet, and they build their identities on several different components.
What I want to say: cultural identity is never one-dimensional. Dimensions in space (local, global) and time (present-day, history, myth) A human being is not a simple product (like sorting out apples and oranges) Dynamics, change (in history, in a person’s life time) Time to abandon the idea of cultures as boxes that we can sort different people into: most people today wouldn’t fit nicely in just one box, caught in-between, different from those we’re supposed to identify with Who has the right to define the correct ways of being e.g. Finnish?
Reasons why the box model for icc is so problematic today. What can cultural identity mean today in a world coined by movement, change and encounters? We are included in a constant interchange, ideas and values,trends and problems, influences. A few overarching phenomena: Globalisation – a notoriously abstract term, hard to define. Concerns political & economical sphere, religion and popular culture. The world is shrinking, it is said, we are more interconnected and what happens in one part of the world has effects for others on the other side of the globe. Very few things are limited to just the country where we live, the companies we work in, the food we eat, the films we see and the books we read, all of them are distributed globally.Mobility: people move around the globe as never before, driven by conflicts, famine, as refugeesor for fun, to find a new life, a better job, live with people one identifies with. Immigration, migration. Societies become more mixed, mix is not a new thing.Religion: Hinduism is not the religion of India anymore, it is at home in London and Turku too.People do not necessarily feel the need to continue the tradition that their parents have brought them up in,the personal choice becomes more important.Politics: Conflicts take on global character, the whole world is implied in the war in Iraq or in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Problems of a global character: environmental issues, economic crisis, do not take national borders into account.Society and Values: Proximity not the most important factor for identification: you can share your interest in e.g. science fiction, gardening, fishing or folktales with a tight community of international soul mates over the Internet.In this context, social media make possible new, intensified patterns of identification that are not bound to time or space (e.g. Medieval villages in Second Life; social sites for Manga fans)Not obvious that you identify more with the people living in the same block of flats than you do with people on the other side of the globe (or in another time).Global popular culture: The same but still not everywhere. Sub-groups that have nothing to do with locality or language.
Am I saying that social media really make it possible for us to be anyone, anywhere, anytime? Just up to myself: the project of creating my own culture?Every human being is an island – famous quote by writer John Donne. But that is not true, all part of a context, formed by the place, the family, the culture we have grown up within so we are not forever separated from each other. Actually, Amos Oz says; every human being is a peninsula: on the one hand, we are attached to a certain continent, history, cultural background, religion … but on the other hand we have coast to the open see, new ideas, influences, encounters – personal experiences, emotions …
So, who is included? Does social media make communication across boarders easier? Are there any boarders anymore (or are they just in our heads)? Important to remember: all are affected by globalisation but in different ways: for us it may mean more options, diversity, for other only new hierarchic systems that prevent them from leading a dignified life. Globalisation and localisation: two parallel trends. “Glocal” To make use of social media, be “everywhere with everyine all the time”, you need skills and possibilities (which are not only up to you to develop) The dimension of power always relevant: who sets the stage, who gives out the roles, who benefits from the communication?
recommendations hardly deserving the name: not-so-normative recommendations of how to look at and explore social inclusion and intercultural communication today, with a critical eye, open to new patterns of identifications and relevant localities. outside the box: not taking the norms and categories, dichotomies the world is divided into for granted. See the other side, a new perspective self-reflexivity: rethinking requires that we take a look at ourselves first surprises: like the Icelandic volcano . What do you do? A seminar like this: challenging or disturbing? Communication and the social: both consist of human beings who can surprise and be different in ways we could never even have imagined.
