What is American Culture?

The Newest Family Member of the American Culture

It is about five o’clock when my husband enters into our living room after work; he is happy to be home, but quickly walks to the office where he has additional work to do. As I am preparing dinner with my eighteen-month-old daughter around, I receive a text message coming from his computer, asking when will dinner be ready. One could quickly imagine we probably live in a enormous house, but that is not the case; he just finds communicating electronically fast, it helps to keep him relatively focused on his work, and let’s face it, the limited back and forth messaging takes away from the conversation further questions and explanations.
Computers are intrinsically inserted in the American culture, as it became a reflection of perhaps the most popular, if not adequate, way of communication in the current times. As a society, we are just too busy, too focused, or just too lazy to physically interact with others. That device is, therefore, a cultural artifact that represents who we are as nation. As Michael Petracca and Madeleine Sorapure emphasize in Common Culture, “…pop culture is the shared knowledge and practices of a specific group at a specific time.” (4). That way, communicating via computers, and doing just about everything else using that device, has increasingly become part of our daily routine. From purchasing furniture, taking online college courses, to “seeing” someone who is thousands of miles away, it is almost unimaginable for someone who lives in this time and age to neglect the presence of that sudden new “family member”.
One could cogitate the idea that computers are mostly present in our private individual lives, however, as it has truly become a symbol that represents the American culture in its entirely. For example, in conversation with a friend who works as a Recruiting Manager for a bottling company, she mentioned that up to six years ago, one of the ways to evaluate a prospective candidate was to analyze his personality through graphology. According to her, it is unspeakable maintaining the same selection process when our culture has evolved from handwritten to typed words.
Perhaps when looking back at my quotidian family life, I shall also look at computers as a new way of communicating, keeping in touch with others or simply as a handy device that has evolved into an extension of our bodies immersed in a ongoing mutable environment.