In this globalized and highly interconnected world of the 21st century, culture shock is more frequent than ever. Almost all of us have been exposed to other cultures, thanks to globalization and the Internet. These days, many of us reading this article have been virtually connected, related and worked with various people from different cultures using advanced telecommunications tools or, at least, have been friends with them on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. In short, we have crossed cultures. We were exposed to, visited, or lived in cultures other than our own.
What do we all have in common when we cross a culture for the first time? We have experienced culture shock, especially during the initial stage, before we become familiar with the new culture. At this stage, you may be wondering, what is culture shock? According to Wikipedia, culture shock is the anxiety, feelings of frustration, alienation, and anger that can occur when a person is placed in a new culture.
Why do we feel these symptoms? This is because we have not prepared ourselves for it. We have been nurtured and shaped by our culture in a certain way and when we are exposed to a culture that is different from our own, we do not know how to communicate, behave and do things in that particular culture. And therefore, we show the aforementioned signs of frustration.
Of course, the magnitude of the impact can vary. For some of us, it might be a Richter scale of 1 or 2, while for some of us it might be even higher, like a Richter scale of 7, 8, or 9. I had that experience when I was exposed to the cultures of some African countries in West and South Africa. I traveled to some African countries when I was a student leader at Addis Ababa University in 1997/98. I had a similar culture shock, more than six years ago, in the first days of my stay in the United States.
The question is what should we do to mitigate the culture shock? I said mitigate because we can’t totally escape some level of culture shock. For now, I have three suggestions. First, we must understand the great cultural divide in the world. Many cultural experts agree that the world’s cultures can hypothetically be divided into individual-based and community-based cultures. Most Western countries like the US, Canada, and Europe can be classified as individual-based cultures, while cultures in continents like Africa, Asia, and South America can be classified as community-based cultures. Of course, we have subcultures within these broader categories. There are also exceptional people who may not display all the characteristics of the culture in which they live.
We can compare and contrast these two broad cultures using three familiar parameters suggested by cultural experts: context, time, and space. Let me take one of these indicators and do a comparison. The culture that we Ethiopians grew up, as a high context culture, most people express themselves and their ideas covertly, implicitly and non-verbally. Most people reserve to express themselves and are internal. When I came to the United States, I observed the opposite. As a low-context culture, most Americans expressed themselves and their ideas openly, explicitly, and verbally.
Secondly, we must also take the time to study and research the main characteristics of a given culture before crossing it. Third, we should also take some advice from individual adherents who lived in that particular culture we intend to visit. In this way, we can at least avoid committing lethal cultural offenses and mitigate the magnitude of culture shock we may experience.
In conclusion, culture matters. It determines who we would become at the end of the day. It makes us or breaks us. It frees us or binds us. Therefore, we must understand the impact of the culture in which we live and get rid of those cultural elements that prevent us from progressing and succeeding. We must also embrace multiculturalism and develop cross-cultural communication skills so that we can mitigate culture shock, communicate, network and work effectively with diverse people from different cultures.