Deborah Elizabeth Finn was writing about podcasting recently, saying that what she finds difficult about it is getting close enough to an interviewee so that the microphone picks up both voices.
The space between people is a highly culturally charged concept. Actually, it is part of our animal nature as well. Lion tamers use critical distance to work with the big cats. My introduction to the idea of culturally charged space came from the pioneer in the field, Edward T. Hall. I had to read The Hidden Dimension in a college psych class.
The most important lesson is that there are wide and deep components of culture that are simply invisible to most of the people who live in a given culture. We blythely talk on about "American society," or "the culture teaches us" this or that, but until you have experienced the disorientation and discomfort of immersing yourself in a different culture, experienced for yourself the spacial and temporal differences that nobody's EVER told you about, our culture is just plain impossible to understand.
We don't know that much of how we see the world is culturally conditioned. We think we are able to look reality in the face and see it for what it is, but we are utterly wrong. Any work on the international scene, any attempt to make a difference in the world, has got to take cultural difference into account. We are ill-served by our American (and culturally defined) notions about how we are all alike, how we are all human, etc.
Until we can begin to SEE the hidden dimensions that Hall describes so well, we are controlled invisibly by them. For all our humanistic talk, we lose our perspective overseas. Our dearly-held beliefs start to conflict with our deeply ingrained and invisible cultural notions and we get depressed, cranky and ineffectual.
One third of those who go overseas to work or study return home before their time is up, says Craig Sorti in The Art of Crossing Cultures. They can't stand the cultural difference they once claimed didn't exist.
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