Episode 60 - What Happened to the Global Village?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Grabbing guavas or mangoes from the neighbor's tree was not stealing. This was even true for my first dog. I owned her for 10 years, but for the first five, she was actually the neighbor's dog. She came over during some celebration, liked the food, and ultimately decided to stay with us full time. [00:00:31] Speaker B: Hello, this. This is Joseph Scholz, and welcome to the Deep Culture Experience, the podcast that dives deep into the psychology of intercultural understanding. And I am here with Ishita Rai. [00:00:43] Speaker C: Hi, Joseph, it's great to be here with you again. [00:00:46] Speaker B: And Sane Bosma, thank you for stopping by. Sana, how's it going? [00:00:51] Speaker D: Hi, Joseph and Ishita, it's such a pleasure to be here with you. I'm well, my holiday memories are still sweet, and the new academic year has started at my university. I'm meeting new students, making plans for the year to come. So exciting times. [00:01:07] Speaker B: That sounds great. Well, the team had August off, and so our batteries are charged, ready to go, and we are starting season six. How does that feel? [00:01:18] Speaker D: It's just wonderful that the podcast is still going strong with topics that resonate with so many of our listeners. [00:01:26] Speaker C: And talking about listeners, we wanted to let you know about some changes. First of all, we've adjusted the name from the Deep Culture Podcast to the Deep Culture Experience. [00:01:39] Speaker B: And I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I realized we don't need to have the word podcast in the title of our podcast. And then we discussed this and sane. The new version was your idea. [00:01:54] Speaker D: Well, yeah, just the addition, but I think now it's really a perfect name. It describes exactly what I love about this podcast because it's focusing on experience and the stories from the team members. [00:02:06] Speaker C: And speaking of the team, we've expanded. We will be hearing from new members today. Very excited to have them with us. [00:02:14] Speaker D: And we are kicking things off this season with the title what Happened to the Global Village? And this topic takes us back to the very first episode of this podcast. [00:02:26] Speaker C: Indeed. Joseph, you and Yvonne started this podcast during the pandemic, and you talked about how there used to be such an optimistic view of the global village. [00:02:39] Speaker D: Well, it's been five years since then, so it seems like a good time to check in to see how the global village is doing. What Marshal McLuhan meant when he invented the term, what he thought about commun. Technology might surprise you. And we'll talk about the difference between life in an actual village and the idealized global village. [00:03:00] Speaker C: We will also geek out look at how technology is affecting our minds. The Eco Chamber Partisan Sorting Construal theory, disinhibition, and more. We will hear from old and new podcast team members and how they navigate the realities of our digital global village. [00:03:22] Speaker D: Unfortunately, I have a work meeting now, so I will have to leave the episode to you, but I look forward to listening to it very soon. [00:03:30] Speaker C: Thank you, Sane, for kicking off the season with us and for hanging out with us. It was fun as always. [00:03:39] Speaker B: And that brings us to part one. What's a village Any? So let's start with some background. First of all, what does the global village refer to? [00:03:58] Speaker C: When Marshall McLuhan created the term, he used it as a metaphor to talk about the idea that communication technology is bringing the world together into a single, more unified community. [00:04:13] Speaker B: And I guess people don't use this term so much anymore simply because we're less optimistic about the state of the world. But the question I have is technology was supposed to bring humanity together, but it didn't. Then why not? [00:04:28] Speaker C: But first, who was McLuhan and what did he mean when he created that term? [00:04:35] Speaker B: Well, Marshall McLuhan was Canadian, born in 1911. Wikipedia calls him a philosopher. But originally he was a professor of English, and he was interested in how we are influenced by popular culture, by advertisements, television, movies. [00:04:51] Speaker C: He basically invented the field of media theory. In 1951, he wrote the Mechanical Folklore of Industrial Man. It was about how the culture industry was having a huge psychological impact on people, making them passive or helpless. And then his next book, the Gutenberg, the Making of the Typographic man, was centered on one very big idea. He believed the printing press had a massive effect on society, that it quote, unquote, detribalized people. [00:05:33] Speaker B: I hadn't heard this until we were getting ready for this episode, and I found it pretty wild. He said that before books, people lived in largely oral cultures, which he described as emotionally spontaneous and tightly integrated. But he believed that books and printed culture had broken up cultural communities and that that led to individualism and rationalism. And this was really a critique of modern society. [00:06:00] Speaker C: But that raised a question for him. If books had had such an impact on culture and community, then what effects was mass media like television and radio going to have? [00:06:12] Speaker B: And I think we should take a slight detour here because it can be hard to remember or grasp just how revolutionary those technologies were at the time. Millions of people all across the country tuned into the same TV show, watching the same advertisements, but also being exposed to new ideas. News from around the world. In 1967, the BBC did the first ever live global television broadcast in Fact, the Beatles wrote a song for the occasion, the song all you need is love, dun dun dun dun dun that was written for this BBC broadcast. [00:06:50] Speaker C: So McLuhan's idea was that mass media was having this huge impact on the world, and this is what led him to predict that it could lead to a vast interconnected community, which he called the global village. The odd thing is that McLuhan was not predicting that our minds would evolve in some futuristic way like the Matrix. He talked about communication technology reversing the effects of printed media. He said it would retribalize us. The world would be, in his words, integrated and decentralized, which I guess is how he imagined life in a village. [00:07:35] Speaker B: Well, the idea that we would be retribalized is a bit weird to me, but he certainly was right about certain things. One is that communication technology can connect us in radical ways. And another is that communication technology can have a huge impact on society and on our minds. [00:07:55] Speaker C: And these are things that team member Leah has given some thought to in her life. [00:08:04] Speaker E: People tend to focus on the negative side of communication technology. But throughout history, our minds have naturally evolved together with communication, from telling stories around a fire to the printed word. Imagine the cognitive change that came with the printing of books, then photographs, movies, radio, the Internet, search engines, AI. Years ago, researchers worried that our reading ability would deteriorate by reading online. Sounds ridiculous now. Now everyone's worried about social media. Well, I love social media. I live in Norway, isolated geographically in many ways, but I have access to new worlds of knowledge, to faraway people and places, entertainment, and I really do connect with people that way. [00:09:04] Speaker C: I take Leah's point. These technologies are the new normal. Our minds naturally evolve with technology, and it can be hard to say whether that's a good or a bad thing. [00:09:17] Speaker B: But I find it a bit difficult to connect this to McLuhan's ideas because his work was a critique of Western thinking, of rationalism, of individualism, and he thought communication technology would take us back to a more integrated life. I mean, honestly, it sounds simplistic, and. [00:09:36] Speaker C: That'S something that team member Sana Bozma has been thinking about. [00:09:44] Speaker D: I cannot help but think that the global village is a very Western or weird concept. It asks us to imagine everyone on Earth as part of a single global community that feels both universalistic and technocratic. Technology unites us in our common humanity. Does it subtly promote the idea, the wish, the hope, maybe even the arrogant belief that the world would become more like us, the weird ones? I agree with the economist Pankaj Kemawat, who argues that we need to move beyond the cosmopolitan, integrationist idea of the global village. First of all, we are not as globalized as we think. Less than 10% of voice calls are international. First generation immigrants are only 3% of the world's population. And then only 2% of students study abroad. And then 90% of the people will never leave the country they were born in. Globalization does produce unifying forces of integration, but difference is here to stay. [00:11:02] Speaker C: 90% of the people will never leave the country they were born in. So despite connectivity, for most people, life is still very local. [00:11:13] Speaker B: And I think this brings us back to McLuhan's image of a village. When he says that technology will retribalize us, he means that life on the planet will be more integrated. So once you bring people together, they naturally live in harmony. [00:11:27] Speaker C: There's a missing piece to this. When people talk about the so called global village, I never hear them discuss what life is really like in a village. [00:11:39] Speaker B: And this is something you've been thinking about. You have been spending time in a village in India and you recorded a segment about that. [00:11:47] Speaker A: Let's. [00:12:01] Speaker C: Recently, I found myself sitting in a Hindu temple in my family village in Jara, West Bengal, attending a ceremony to celebrate the birthday of Krishna. I watched the priest give a bath to the idol of the God, clean it up, wrap it up in new clothes, decorate it with flowers and sandalwood paste. Singers and musicians chanted holy songs, bells rung and incense burnt. Sharing in the smoky drone of this ritual is intended to connect those present to divinity as well as provide a deeply embodied sense of belonging. This sense of belonging has a cost. On this day, for example, one of the women I know was excluded. She sat outside the Kohr temple area because she was on her period. The people from the adjacent neighborhood cannot enter this temple because they are from a different caste or community. And these expectations are enforced by the patriarch who sits on a higher platform, closer to the gods. Life in a village may provide community, but it can be crippling for anyone who seeks other options. Moral peril is everywhere. I heard people question the character of a family simply because they sent their teenage daughter to live on campus at a better school in a bigger town. So, no, I don't believe virtual connection creates anything close to life in a village. And I don't think that's a bad thing. [00:14:34] Speaker B: Well, the sentence that sticks in my mind is this sense of belonging has a cost. [00:14:40] Speaker C: But there's also something else. First of all, books and the written Word did not change culture around the world. India did not suddenly become individualist when people learned to read. [00:14:53] Speaker B: And also, you don't have to live in a village to have an interconnected life. In fact, the majority of the world's populations live in societies that are quite collective rather than regardless of technology. [00:15:05] Speaker C: This is something that new podcast contributor Albert has been thinking about. He grew up in Zimbabwe, but has lived in the United States, China, and is now living and working in the Netherlands. [00:15:22] Speaker A: I grew up in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. But even someone from the city like me understands that the web of obligations and support that you would find in a village. In my neighborhood, for example, everyone knew. Everyone's business and social distinctions were blurry. You'll find kids from every family playing pada, what Americans call hopscotch on the street together. If you are hungry or thirsty, you could get food or water from any of your friends houses. The notion of ownership was also collective. Grabbing guavas or mangoes from the neighbor's tree was not stealing. This was even true for my first dog. I owned her for 10 years, but for the first five she was actually the neighbor's dog. She came over during some celebration, liked the food, and ultimately decided to stay with us full time. When I was a child, if I did something wrong, the adult that was around had an obligation to parent me in that moment, whether that happened to be an uncle, a neighbor, or literally a random stranger on the street. This is something that is hard for my Dutch students to understand. One student told me that if someone from five houses down felt they had the authority to discipline her, it would not only be inappropriate, it would violate her human rights. [00:17:06] Speaker C: Wow. Having grown up in India, there is so much that I can relate to. [00:17:13] Speaker B: But the idea that the dog started out as the neighbor's dog, I have to say I did not see that coming. [00:17:19] Speaker C: This is really a reminder that the so called village that Marshall McLuhan was talking about was a metaphor and an idealized image. A village is tightly knit, but that doesn't make it harmonious. [00:17:34] Speaker B: So let's fast forward to now. So what is the nature of the global village today and how can we navigate it? [00:17:43] Speaker C: And that brings us to part two, navigating the global village. In McLuhan's time, television and radio was the cutting edge communication technology. Of course, now it's social media. [00:18:09] Speaker B: And I think it would have blown McLuhan's mind to think that everyone can broadcast to the whole world like your personal T or radio show. [00:18:18] Speaker C: There are 5.4 billion social media users in the world two out of every three people on the planet. [00:18:26] Speaker B: There are 20 million videos uploaded to YouTube every day. YouTube shorts average 70 billion daily views. There are 3 billion active monthly users on Facebook, 2 billion Instagram users. The amount of content and all of the interaction being generated on these platforms is just staggering. [00:18:49] Speaker C: And this complexity is something new podcast contributor Skirmante Cairns has been thinking about. Skirmante was raised in a multicultural environment in Lithuania and has a background in language, education, translation and interpretation. Let's take a listen. [00:19:11] Speaker F: Instead of one global village, we have many. We participate in multiple communities which are tied together by the unifying force of a common language, shared interests, social values, cultural identity, and political ideology. There are 50,000 YouTube channels with more than 1 million followers, each one a village of its own. According to the Pew Research center, about half of Facebook users regularly get news there, rarely if ever questioning their source. And access to these villages is not equal. About one third of the world's population does not have access to the Internet. Also, can a person living in China participate in a global village unhindered, the same as someone in North America? Can a woman or a non binary person participate in a global village the same as a heterosexual white male? If you don't speak English, vast portions of the global village remain hard to access. So yes, we are more connected than ever. But this is not the unified global village that Marshall McLuhan Dre. [00:20:43] Speaker C: 50,000 YouTube channels with a million followers. Whether you are interested in anime or Italian sports cars or extreme politics, you can connect to people everywhere and that's your global village. [00:21:00] Speaker B: And that also sheds light on the major contradiction. We're more connected than ever, but we're also more fragmented than ever. [00:21:08] Speaker C: The hard question is, what is the impact of all this on culture and intercultural understanding? This is something that Leah has been giving some thought to. [00:21:23] Speaker E: Communication technology makes culture and community more complex. The anthropologist T.H. ericsson wrote that a Norwegian skateboarder might have more in common with the Brazilian skateboarder than with an elderly Norwegian fisherman. Now that's not true in a deep sense, that Brazilian skateboarder would still struggle to learn Norwegian and adapt to life here. [00:21:53] Speaker C: I have heard this argument before that maybe a Norwegian skateboarder feels more connected to a Brazilian skateboarder than to a Norwegian fisherman. [00:22:03] Speaker B: And the point is that virtual connections can create real community. But this also leads to fragmentation, since now the Norwegian skateboarder may feel less connected to the Norwegian fisherman. And there's another distinction that's important. The Norwegian Skateboarder and Norwegian fishermen do share a lot. Even if they don't notice they grew up in the same society, they speak the same language, they both know navigate Norwegian society without thinking. And this brings us back to the difference between virtual connections and face to face interactions. [00:22:38] Speaker C: And one key difference is what relational psychology calls friction, the natural tension that occurs when people have different needs or values. So the Norwegian skateboarder and the Norwegian fishermen may have different interests, but they can benefit a lot from learning to work together. Friction can be frustrating, but it helps us grow. But of course, digital ecosystems reduce friction. Everything is a click away, which is one reason that real world relationships are often deeper than virtual interaction. And that's something Leah has been reflecting on. [00:23:25] Speaker E: I used to work at the center for asylum seekers, helping them navigate the Norwegian welfare system. I remember one very polite Somali man. He was friendly, respectful and deeply religious. I'm a woman, so he would not shake my hand when we met. I was used to that. But what I cannot forget is that he regularly came to my office to learn from me. Managing finances, navigating the healthcare system. And we always had good conversations. I was pregnant at that time, but before I started my maternity leave, he came by to give me a gift, A set of baby clothes he had carefully picked out. According to policy, I was not allowed to accept personal gifts. He was so shocked when I told him and I felt so bad. In Norway, if a Muslim will not shake hands with the opposite sex, people may take this as a rejection, thinking there is no room for interaction. It was good to experience that this was not true. But the best way to discover these things is interacting in person, working things out together, bumping up into differences and then moving beyond them. And it's this ongoing trial and error for face to face contact that creates deeper connections. [00:24:52] Speaker B: This is a great story. Liya's interaction with the Somali man took place over a long period. It involved lots of real world challenges, problem solving. That's lots of friction. [00:25:07] Speaker C: So here's another complication. Foreign experiences today are mediated by technology. We plan our trip online. We check out YouTube videos to look for cool spots. We use Google Maps to get around translation apps to order in a restaurant. [00:25:26] Speaker B: Technology makes foreign experiences accessible, but it protects you from friction. And it makes your foreign experience work. One small part of the world you already know. [00:25:38] Speaker C: And I think this is especially true if you are an expat. And this is something new. Podcast contributor Vanessa, who was born in Tokyo, grew up in Singapore and studied in the UK as a third culture kid, has thought about. [00:25:59] Speaker D: I grew up. [00:26:00] Speaker G: As a third culture kid in Tokyo and Singapore attending British International schools, so some might say I was living the global village lifestyle. The question is, does an international lifestyle lead to deep intercultural understanding? I know people who have lived in Singapore for years, yet know next to nothing about Singapore's history, food or customs, despite having that cultural information at their fingertips. My own family has spent more years living in Asia than we have in England, but our closest community is largely other people, British expats. Human relations take a lot of effort in the expat community. It's a common experience for our friends families to suddenly leave for a new job on the other side of the world. And yes, in theory we could easily keep in touch with them after they leave. But a lot of contact ends up being passive, perhaps simply liking the occasional post on Instagram. I think that the freedom to pick and choose our relationships can make us lazy. On my year abroad I made friends with someone from Canada and when they left for home they told me that they probably wouldn't bother to stay in touch with anyone. I was surprised and asked them why. They said, well, what's the point if I'm never going to see you again? Growing up as a third culture kid has forced me to think about how to form deeper connections and I think that the key is intentionality. To feel connected you have to invest yourself in others. To make it beyond surface level culture, you need to interact with your surroundings purposefully. The connectivity of the so called global village gives us the chance to form deep connections, but it doesn't mean that we always succeed. [00:27:55] Speaker C: What she said about the freedom to choose our relationships making us lazy really resonated with me. There is always the new message on the group chat, the new comments, the new notification sound, the new friend recommendations. [00:28:10] Speaker B: But being connected often does not add to our well being. So let us hear from new podcast contributor Yuto, currently an MA student specializing in neuro linguistics and he has thoughts about the psychological impact of Instagram and social media. [00:28:30] Speaker H: I started Instagram after entering college. That's rather late compared to my peers. Immediately I could see that Instagram is all about visual information creating a catchy image. But what people post on Instagram is not snippets of their actual lives. They shape and reshape what they want others to see and how they want others to see it. First they filter the content, selecting from countless photos photos they've taken for the purpose of impressing others. Perhaps you add sound or captions, you construct an image of yourself that you want others to see. Then you post. But you're not done because posting creates anticipation. You watch for the reaction, how many likes, how many comments, who liked it, who commented and who didn't. But here's the thing. This constant creation and surveillance seeps into the way we think about ourselves. It creates a huge pressure to always look presentable, to have an update to show that you are doing well. What's worse is that we're not comparing ourselves to someone else, we're comparing ourselves to their edited highlight reel. And when that's all you see, polished, smiling, endlessly productive, happy episodes, you start to feel that your ordinary, messy, tired, lonely moments don't measure up. This doesn't just make you feel inadequate, it also makes you fragile because your sense of self worth gets tied to likes, comments and fleeting signals of approval. It can make you more anxious in real life too, feeling vaguely that your life doesn't measure up. [00:30:37] Speaker C: There's a lot of wisdom in what Yuto says. Virtual connections often don't make us feel very connected. Which does bring us back to the question of how cultural bridge people can navigate all of this. And that is something new podcast contributor Hashini has been thinking about. Hashini was born in Sri Lanka and then moved to Italy with her family as a child and is now doing graduate studies in New Zealand. [00:31:10] Speaker I: When I first moved to New Zealand, I mostly spent time with other international students. It felt safe. Shared culture, shared language, shared confusion about people in grocery stores without their shoes on. But it also kept me lonely. I was digitally connected to people back home, but not truly present in the local community. My best intercultural lessons came through mistakes. If I had a penny for every time I unintentionally offended a Kiwi by simply disagreeing, I would be a very rich woman. I did not realize how strong disagreement can feel here, whereas in Italy it would feel strange if you did not speak your mind. I thought sweet ass was an unfinished sentence, but it's actually a compliment. These moments only made sense once I immersed myself in Kiwi culture. I've used translation apps, but they cannot teach you to read between the lines of different cultures. They miss so much tone, gesture, humor and context. Real connection started when I stopped hiding behind my phone, asked neighbors for help, wrist sounding silly, and laughed at myself. That is when connection became real, not virtual. [00:32:37] Speaker B: Wow. Real connection started when I stopped hiding behind my phone. I love that. Words to live by. [00:32:44] Speaker C: And that brings us to part three, the Psychology of Deep Connection. So I think we should geek out a little bit. What can cultural psychology teach us about navigating all of this complexity? [00:33:11] Speaker B: Well, I think lesson one is that culture still matters where you grow up, still shapes how you see the world and how you relate to others. Virtual connections don't change that. [00:33:23] Speaker C: And this means that cultural difference runs deep, which is something that Albert has experienced after growing up in Zimbabwe and now living in the Netherlands. [00:33:37] Speaker A: Recently, I was at the grocery store and noticed an older lady in a mobility scooter struggling to pick up a shopping basket. I helped her, and she thanked me in French, and through a translation app, I was able to understand that she was from West Africa, which is culturally very, very different from Southern Africa. But we share this sense of filial piety and interdependence. So without question. Soon I was recycling her used water bottles, collecting the receipt to get her the cash back, helping her to get groceries, and arguing with her to let me pay for them altogether. It made me about 20 minutes late for a football game I was playing with some friends. It's unusual for me to be that late, and so some of the guys asked about it. When I told them the story, the other Africans didn't think much of it. Same with a friend from Indonesia and one from Syria. But my friends from Germany, the Netherlands, England, Belgium, they really had a hard time processing it all. They asked, she was a stranger. I said yes. But you called her Auntie. Yes. She expected you to help her put the bottles away? Yes. Well, kind of. She wouldn't have been surprised if I did. Like how someone may hope you'll hold the door open for them. The whole thing tickled us for a while. In the Netherlands, you could easily offend an elderly person by trying to do their groceries and offering to pay. But for my friends from more interdependent societies, it's normal. Every person is from your village, and you owe a debt of kindness and duty to them because of it, no matter where you are. [00:35:43] Speaker C: My favorite line is, but you called her Auntie. [00:35:49] Speaker B: Well, and it strikes me that Albert and his friends all share a love of soccer, and that does bring them together. But as you said, the cultural differences. [00:35:58] Speaker C: Still run deep, and this maybe helps us understand why. Virtual interactions are often not deep in the same way that in person relationships are. [00:36:09] Speaker B: And this is something that podcast team member Emre7 has experienced. [00:36:15] Speaker J: The digital village forces us into micropolarizations. Already in modern life, we juggle with multiple identities. We are one person watching the game with our buddies, another at a meeting at work, another joking with our favorite uncle, and Another playing with our kids. Now, to all these roles, we add a new dimension. A digital self in constant contact with people who themselves are juggling multiple selves. This brings into our life constant navigation and interaction, tiny connections, partings, and a cacophony of clashes. [00:37:06] Speaker B: Micropolarizations. I love that. And we talk a lot about how social media is creating polarization, that it encourages extremism. Sometimes you hear people say that we, we get trapped in an information bubble or an echo chamber. [00:37:22] Speaker C: And in the brainstorming, Albert shared some great research by Peter Thornberg about this idea of the echo chamber. But research suggests that this doesn't work in the way we might think. [00:37:36] Speaker B: Thornberg argues that social media exposes us to more difference, not less. We are most isolated from difference when we only interact with people in our hometown. People generally have a similar background to us. They agree about a lot of things. And so even if your uncle has different political opinions from you, you have many other things which you share. So you don't categorize people as belonging to this camp or that camp, what psychologists call partisan sorting online. [00:38:07] Speaker C: However, we run into people and opinions that are against what we believe, but we don't share those rich relationships. So the only thing our mind is able to process is that they are on the other team. And this increases effective polarization. We feel positive towards us and negative towards them. [00:38:31] Speaker B: And this is a reminder of just how different face to face interaction can be compared to virtual interaction. And Emre has some thoughts on that as well. [00:38:42] Speaker J: I was 15 years old when I met my first foreign friend, Enrique from Guadalajara, Mexico. It was something like magic. We became good friends and after his departure, our only means of communication was email. Enrique was the first time that I had contact with someone from a totally different world. Through him, I learned that different worlds exist. After he left, exchanging emails with him was as exciting as receiving a message from outer space. The idea that I could communicate with a friend 10,000km away was amazing. Today I am in constant contact with friends and colleagues from countries all over the world. Having a WhatsApp chat with my colleagues in Ethiopia, then Cuba, then Latvia, then Vietnam is an ordinary part of my daily work. I am totally grateful for this opportunity. Yet I can't help but miss the excitement I felt when I met Enrique. And I wonder if I will ever be able to have that experience again. [00:40:04] Speaker B: Oh, there's so much to unpack here. So Emre's experience with Enrique was life changing. He says that he learned that different worlds exist. So why is it that A virtual connection often doesn't have that power. [00:40:19] Speaker C: The thing that can shed light on this is called construal theory, something that Vanessa brought up in the brainstorming. When something is perceived as far away, we experience it in more abstract terms. We know from cognitive neuroscience that our perceptions are grounded in a mental model of the world around us, which we construct based on our lived experience. People from a foreign place or that we only experience virtually feel more distant, and it's easier to put them in the other category. [00:40:57] Speaker B: And when you add on top of that the online disinhibition effect that we act out more frequently or more intensely in online environments. [00:41:07] Speaker C: And we learned about this from research that Skirmante introduced. Virtual environments do weird things to our cognitive systems, which lead us to become a kind of alternate virtual self, doing things we wouldn't do in everyday life. [00:41:24] Speaker B: Virtual environments encourage disassociative anonymity, which is the feeling of disconnection with people that we don't know, and also invisibility, the feeling that we cannot be seen and thus don't need to hold back. And then there's asynchronicity, the fact that when we comment, we don't get an immediate response, so we're likely to go further. [00:41:48] Speaker C: And then there is solipsistic introjection. [00:41:51] Speaker B: Oh, I love that term. It makes me feel smart just to hear it. [00:41:55] Speaker C: Solipsistic interjection is how we experience virtual others as though they are imaginary characters that exist in some other space, which leads to what is called dissociative imagination, the feeling that the rules that apply in normal life don't apply online. And finally, there's minimization of authority, which refers to the ways that status markers online are not clear, so we don't censor ourselves. [00:42:27] Speaker B: So where does all of this leave cultural bridge people? [00:42:31] Speaker C: Well, one main takeaway is that virtual communication and digital devices do have a cognitive impact, and they also affect our intercultural foreign experiences. And that is something Hashini has been thinking about. [00:42:52] Speaker I: Our devices make our brain lazy. Cognitive psychologists call this cognitive offloading. We outsource mental tasks to our devices. Directions, Google Maps, birthdays, Facebook, Random trivia, Wikipedia. The problem is, the more we rely on our phones, the less we remember for ourselves. This is called digital amnesia. This fundamentally changes our foreign experiences. Relying too much on digital devices can make it harder to remember personal experiences. And that matters because the awkward, funny, beautiful moments that actually shape intercultural connections are not stored in apps. Google Maps will not remind me of the Southern Italian grandma who handed me a bag of lemons along with directions when I got lost in Sorrento. After living across five countries on four continents, I have learned that deep intercultural understanding is not just about access, it is embodying the present. It's showing up, making mistakes, mistakes and sometimes feeling awkward. Technology can help us meet, but it cannot do the deeper work with the real people in front of us. So what can we do as cultural rich people trying to stay sane in this fragmented global village? Get lost in Sorrento, ask for directions, mispronounce the local greeting, and then apologize. These small, messy human moments teach us more than any app ever will. [00:44:38] Speaker B: I love how she asks, what can we do as cultural bridge people? Get lost in Sorrento, mispronounce the local greetings, then apologize. And this is totally the opposite of this effort, effortless, disconnected interaction that we have virtually. [00:44:56] Speaker C: So navigating the realities of the global village is really about choosing to be uncomfortable, isn't it? Because if anyone understands the value of going out of our comfort zone, of stretching our minds to understand others, it should be cultural bridge people. [00:45:15] Speaker B: And on that note, that's about all we have time for today. But let's but let's share some of our sources. To learn more about Marshall McLuhan's idea of the global village, check out the first chapter of his book, Understanding the Extensions of Man. To learn about the echo chamber and online sorting, check out Peter Tornberg's paper How Digital Media Drive Effective Polarization through Partisan Sorting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You can also find a great video which explains this in simple terms. Look for the Internet Is Worse Than Ever. Now what? And for more about disinhibition, check out the Online Disinhibition Effect by John Suler, published in Cyberpsychology and Behavior. The Deep Culture Podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute, an NPO dedicated to intercultural education and research. I am the director of jii, so if you would like to hang out with with Ishita and me and learn more about culture in mind, then sign up for the Deep Culture Approach Masterclass series offered by the Japan Intercultural Institute. It is a blended learning course and online community. We dig deep into the psychology of intercultural understanding. [00:46:31] Speaker C: I will say one of the best things about the masterclass is the community that develops between the participants. Participants really dedicated cultural bridge people. [00:46:41] Speaker B: To find out more, just do a web search for the Japan Intercultural Institute and look for Masterclass. [00:46:47] Speaker C: This episode was put together by an incredible team, including new team members Yuto Aki, Skirmante Cairns, Vanessa Eisenberg, Hashini Madrasinge and Albert Mangami. And of course, thanks to co producers Sana Bozma, Torhild, Liana Harris Karnes and Emre Sevin. Thanks to our sound engineer Robinson Fritz, Ikumi Fritz and everyone at jii. [00:47:17] Speaker B: And thanks to you Ishita for sharing this time with me as we kick off Season six. [00:47:22] Speaker C: Thank you Joseph. It was great hanging out again and I really look forward to Season six. [00:47:29] Speaker B: SA.