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The Concept of Culture: A Short and Guided Overview

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Cultures in Human-Computer Interaction

Part of the book series: Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics ((SLHCI))

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Abstract

This chapter presents a short and guided overview of the concept of culture. This chapter offers some background on the origin and development of the term culture. It also outlines some of its key traits and ingredients and summarizes three main perspectives of culture across disciplines.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It might be worth noting that the term group is used rather than, say, crowd to stress the fact that not every collection of people develops a culture (Schein, 2004). A fairly stable membership and a history of shared learning are deemed key to the formation of some degree of culture.

  2. 2.

    The segment with arrow heads pointing outwards appears longer than the segment with arrow heads pointing inwards—see https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-muelue/index.html (Accessed 11 January, 2023).

  3. 3.

    A recent large-scale study (Srinivasan & Martinez, 2021) of the production and visual perception of facial expressions of emotion in the wild (7.2 million images, 10 K hours of video) found that of the 16 K possible facial configurations that people can produce only 35 are successfully used to transmit affect information across cultures, and only 8 within a smaller number of cultures. This study also found that the degree of successful visual interpretation of these 43 expressions varies significantly, and the number of expressions used to communicate each emotion is also different, i.e., 17 expressions transmit happiness, but only 1 is used to convey disgust. This means that computer vision algorithms may be useful in some applications (searching for pictures in a digital photo album) but not in others (in the courts).

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  1. University of Lleida (Campus Igualada), Igualada, Spain

    Sergio Sayago

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Sayago, S. (2023). The Concept of Culture: A Short and Guided Overview. In: Cultures in Human-Computer Interaction. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30243-5_2

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