1. Evaluate the relevance of one model of culture in relation to today’s hyper-connected
world.
Since 20th century, with the advancement of technology, the world has become much hyper-connected in terms of culture and communication. The relationship and distance between cultures and nations are getting closer and closer since then.
Different cultures from countries all around the world started to integrate with each other due to the rise of globalization. For instance, some people arguethat Asian countries’ cultures, such as China, changed from past oriented to present or future oriented culture.Although the time (past) orientation model of culture was closely related to China throughout the past hundreds of years, the relevance and
importance of it started to decline in today hyper connected world as it no longer fully applies to the current global and national (Chinese) culture.
In the following paragraphs, this essay will be explaining how past orientation was closely related to its culture in the past, then come up with mentioning how the orientation basis changes from past to present and future. Last but not least, the essay will be discussing the reason why the oriented model changes through time and its relativity with Chinese culture and lifestyle in modern days.
China, a country which has lots of historical background, is highly relevant to the Hofstede’s value Dimensions. According to Hofstede G (2001), societies with past oriented are more concerned with traditional values and ways of doing things. In general, past-oriented cultures have a strong belief in the significance of prior events like rituals and traditions, which are the guidelines for making decisions. China is a good example to show how time orientation is deeply related to its culture. Being one of the four ancient civilizations, Chinese culture has a very complex structure which consists of a past oriented basis. Throughout more than 5,000 years of civilizations, lots of traditions and ceremonials have been preserved and made a spectacular contribution to its society. Therefore, its culture formed a strong linkage with the time orientation model. There is an ancient Chinese proverb which states “The past is as clear as a mirror, the future as dark as lacquer.” Besides, even though with its fast growing economy, lots of historical monuments still exist and preserved in Beijing, the capital of China. Apart from culture, the lifestyle of Chinese also shows the indestructible connection with the time orientation model. For instance, Chinese parents used fables or ancient stories, which have been passed on from generation to generation throughout hundreds of years, to give moral education to their offspring. Moreover, ancient Chinese peasants and farmers usually predict the
Lawrence Liu English 3: Information and Cultural Literacy 2108613 weather according to the past climate and study.These examples show the evidence that past Chinese society relies much on the previous events and history rather than counting on the present and predicting the unknown future. All in all, this implies that the past oriented model of culture had an unbreakable bonding with the
Chinese culture and helped contributing the lifestyle of the past Chinese society and people.
However, as time passes, the correlation between global cultures has become
shortened. It is mainly caused by cutting down the cost and the distance through the improvement of technology. Through technological advancement, culture has been moving beyond borders and boundaries and no longer sticks to its neighboring area, transforming through locations the shared meanings of culture. Through the process of sharing the concepts and values of one culture to another ultimately leads to interconnectedness between various populations from diverse cultures. As a result, Chinese culture started to merge with others from America and Europe nations which have different time orientation models. Thus the significance and importance of the past orientation declined. The variations of the time orientation model directly alter the lifestyles of most of the Chinese. One of the most obvious changes is that people stopped always using history and passed events as a reference, while they tend to estimate what is going to happen and try to do some more planning.Refer to Syed and Joyce Zafar from the Cultural Diversity Group (2010), they stated that most of the European and American countries have the time orientation of present or future.For example, because of the influence of the United States’ future oriented ideology, citizens or society became less aware of the past, they started to think that the bygones areunchangeable and couldn’t be reversed.In modern days, since the past study or the traditions are not precise enough, peasants and farmers are now relying on the weather forecast and no longer count on their traditional methods. Through the comparison between the prediction of the weather in the past and present, it suggests that even though the past orientation has been influencing the Chinese lifestyle for more than thousands of years, under the rise of cultural globalization in nowadays hyper connected world, its prominence started to fade out while the present and future orientation started to gain their positions.
There are several contributing factors which caused China’s time orientation relativity change through time. Firstly, it is mainly because the way of communication has changed. In the past, the communication of people are discrete, the speed of the communication are much slower than present due to the distance between people were a lot further away. From Donald L M (2009), he suggested that the
Lawrence Liu English 3: Information and Cultural Literacy 2108613 socialnetworking websites rearrange the whole global communication and culture structure. He stated that “social networks allow you to reconnectand connect with new and old friends from just about anywhere in the world. There are a number of other social networks. Many of them also are accessible by wireless devices.”He implies that the distance between people around the world are getting closer and closer, people from different cultures and be easily connected by different social network channels. Secondly, the nature of the country (China) also helped
contributing the change and relativity. After World War II, the world split into two separate groups, which are the communists and capitalists. The communists’ party which China was belonged to, had a past oriented basis. People from the nations had to follow the rules set by their former decision maker and they never look for the future. However, after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1990s, nations from communists’ party started to get influenced by other capitalists’ countries mainly from Europe and America. Thus this explains why and how their time orientation model of culture changed in the 21st century. Referring to the Mansour javidan from Harvard Business Review (2007), he conducted a survey on how different countries have their time orientation basis. The result shows the western countries like the US, United
Kingdom and Canada have a high level of future orientation basis, meanwhile former communists’ countries such as Russia and China have a low level of future
orientation basis. Therefore this implies that background and the history of China also caused the relativity of the model of culture change in today’s modern world.
In conclusion, as the technological improvement in the mid-1990s created a strong influential power to the world, global cultural integration is caused. Cultures and communication between countries merged together and have a mixed time oriented basis. For example, due to its unique history and background, China’s past
orientation concept was influenced by other countries and turned to multi time orientated. Although the past time orientation model of culture no longer fully applies to current hyper connected world, it still has its influence and relevance to china’s culture, and the importance and significance of it cannot be neglected.
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