Culture

DJs Online House > Culture

Cultural threads surround us today, from the past & into the future… While my views may differ from yours, what matters are those datum of interest !!

Culture today encompasses art (like Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa), buildings (the Saudi Arabian Centre for World culture), operatic events and classic cars as well as “religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and a million other things” (by Ms. Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist with the Barnet & Southgate College in London), and is that which we each perceive it to be.

Things that are visible in today’s skies have guided our cultures for millennia… Ancient ancestors would have started their days with the sunrise (with no clue as to why), where the darkness departed (even in cloudy, rain-filled mornings), ending their fright-filled nights… this was far, far before the 24-hour days were named & the ideas of a week (history / still fuzzy!) and of a month (a Sumerian calendar) were created.

There have been birds up in the skies (along with insects, bats & flying squirrels, etc) ever since that particularly unhappy day when the Dinosaurs were destroyed… Early humans would have seen & wondered how they flew, and how to catch & eat them! The birds became culturally significant over time and still are today.

The Sun & Moon were seen regularly, and were eventually named by our ancestors. Later, nighttime watchers of the skies observed the stars (our planets) that moved in odd ways, and were able to detect patterns like the Big Dipper (known as “The Plough” in the UK and with differing names around the world) with many, many others… the regular comets, moving like nothing else, would often portend disasters.

So, to the past… things that are particularly old (for our “ancient peoples” vs. the culture-free Silurian events and the like) may cause us to stop & consider what they might mean or have meant… Many are stunningly visible, like the things we can see in our skies. and places like Stonehenge (just a few miles away from my childhood home), the Pyramids in Egypt, the remains of the Mayan culture, the statues on Easter Island and others. There are also things that have been hidden from our sight for thousands of years, like the stone warriors, found by a lucky farmer in China, things found by archaeologists (who study human activity through the recovery & analysis of material culture) on a dig somewhere, or a painting deep in a cave in France. Discoveries like these will continue to astonish us…
The future of each & every thread of today’s culture is evolving, some in good ways, some not. Imagination is literally unbounded here, so let me pick on a couple…
  • Oceanic farming is an upcoming culture change. As we’ll need to be feeding 10+ billion people shortly, where nature just can’t keep up, today’s farms are going towards ocean farming, not just for fish
  • The concept of Singularity (pioneered by Ray Kurzweil) is actually quite close, allowing us to experience cultures electronically
  • Computers (high-end machines, not your everyday desktop) already make culturally related art, and are bound to improve
  • The people in the State of California are likely going to experience a secession to become a different county in the near future, changing their culture in some amazing ways. This will of course be before it actually breaks away from the US, due to the San Andreas Fault…
  • Our deserts across the planet need to be able to grow trees & things as the world warms up and as people propagate the species
  • Just one more future cultural thought: daily weather is worsening around the world from today’s “Greenhouse effect“, the cumulative excessive emission of Carbon Dioxide (including all of the frozen methane that’s melting right now as things get warmer), and things just aren’t going to get better over the next century… 🙁
As you’ve actually read this far down the cultural page, let me thank you (!) and share in closing that free beverages *will* be available if you can come and visit me in person!