On Culture
At various points in history, technology has been referred to as the complete annihilation of space and time. If anything, our current time proves this to be true. With social media, generative AI, algorithmic influence, and global networks, our daily interactions have begun to feel immediately global. It is easy, then to believe that this is the lowest common denominator in terms of culture– that our universal cultural behaviors, rituals, values, and systems are defined by trends and technologies. I’m not so sure this is the case.
Culture Is Not Flattened but Layered
What we are witnessing is not the disappearance of culture but its reframing. Arjun Appadurai’s work on cultural flows shows how ideas and practices do not simply spread unchanged. They are interpreted, adapted, and grounded in specific contexts. The appearance of global sameness is only one layer. Beneath it, distinct traditions, values, and practices continue to shape how people give meaning to what circulates.
A viral dance online, for example, is not just a digital performance but part of a lineage of embodied traditions. Its structure relies on repetition, communal authorship, and storytelling through movement. Memes, too, follow patterns that anthropologists recognize in folklore. Technology accelerates their spread, but the cultural logics remain deeply human.
The Enduring Role of the Local and the Embodied
Research in media studies, such as Sherry Turkle’s examinations of digital life, reminds us that technology mediated experience is not less real. It is differently real. A café gathering, a religious ceremony, or a local festival may now be shared through digital platforms, but their cultural meaning is made in the room, in the body, in the shared ritual.
What looks like the annihilation of space and time is, in practice, a layering of scales. The global and the local, the digital and the physical, the instantaneous and the historical now coexist. Technology is not the end of culture. It is another medium through which culture is practiced, interpreted, and renewed.
Implications for Design and Leadership
This shift has important implications for leaders, designers, and technologists. Culture is not simply defined by what trends on global platforms. Communities negotiate meaning through their own rituals, symbols, and values even within highly connected networks. Research in design and sociology shows that cultural specificity persists in subtle but powerful ways.
For organizations and policymakers, the risk lies in treating culture as flattened or interchangeable. Doing so overlooks the very dynamics that make communities resilient. The opportunity is to design infrastructures that allow cultural richness to thrive. This can mean building platforms that support local storytelling, creating physical spaces where digital communities can meet, or developing AI systems that are sensitive to cultural diversity rather than reinforcing uniformity.
The Stakes of Cultural Stewardship
Manuel Castells, in his work on network society, reminds us that infrastructures of connection are never neutral. The systems we build now will shape the possibilities of cultural expression in the future. If we fail to take this seriously, we risk producing environments that are efficient but shallow, connected but not meaningful.
The alternative is cultural stewardship: intentionally designing for spaces, both digital and physical, that sustain depth, resilience, and diversity. The annihilation of space and time has not erased culture. It has made our responsibility to sustain it greater.
Panels, podcasts, and public dialogues are essential for exploring this frontier. Designers, anthropologists, technologists, and leaders need to come together to ask not only how culture survives in a networked world, but how it flourishes. This is the conversation that will define the next chapter of cultural and technological development.
