Cultural identity is a very complex beast to tackle. As individuals in society, we define who we are by who we are not. That is, we establish our identity through our relations with others. In observing others, we can locate ourselves in the vast spectrum of all the possible ways of being human and living life. Until recently, due to spatial and temporal constraints, we had limited access to witnessing and observing all the different ways people choose to express their humanity. With all the technologies available today, these temporal and geographical barriers are being removed, and we’re gaining access to, well, the entire world! We are gaining LIVE access to entire life perspectives and forms of expressions we didn’t even know existed.
Technologies like Youtube, Peer-to-peer file sharing, Social Media platforms and so on are making it possible for diverse people from diverse cultural backgrounds to connect and share meaning with one another. These technologies have made possible a whole new set of conversations. As Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. These New Media are creating new ways of relating to others and, therefore, creating new ways of knowing ourselves and defining our identities. Now that we have a bigger window to the world, we have more and more cultural codes to choose from on our quest to find our authentic selves. We can create for ourselves a veritable cocktail of cultural signs and symbols that make up our cultural identity. (As if identity wasn’t complex enough!)What we see happening all around us now is a Remix Culture, unlike any we’ve ever seen before. The reality of this remixed culture dawned on me last weekend, when a good friend of mine convinced me to check out a live show at Les Bobards. I’m really glad I went, as it ended up being a unique experience! The artist, Max Pashm, created a live remix of Greek, Balkan, Jewish electro-tribal new wave punk. I'd never heard anything like it before in my life! It was a uniquely beautiful fusion, musically speaking, but also in terms of the cocktail of people who were there on the dance floor. There was a young Native American-looking guy with long black hair who was break dancing.... next to him, there was a girl dancing in eastern European fashion, her arms swaying gracefully in the air (very similar to Armenian folkloric dancing)... then there was this Asian girl in a sari, moving as though she was dancing the bhangra.... and many other types of very different people who came together to form a unique vibe. I couldn’t help but join in, drawn to the crowd like an olive to a Martini, adding my own unique ingredient to the existing cocktail. And as more and more people united on the dance floor, the overall expression we created together as a whole became its own living, breathing, evolving entity.
The experience really left a deep impression on me. This would not have been possible without the technologies that are available to us today. And it made me wonder just what this cultural shift means and how we are to define cultural identity in the future. It seems that we are remixing ourselves. Each of us are borrowing diverse cultural elements from across the globe, remixing them to form the unique individuals we are becoming, and then sharing our individual expressions with the world, thus contributing to the evolution of culture.
