Turkle's Essay

Turkle's Essay

According to Coleman (2005) culture is one of the basic theoretical terms in the social sciences. In its most general sense within the social sciences, culture refers to the socially inherited body of learning characteristic of human societies. This contrasts with the ordinary meaning of the term, which refers to a special part of the social heritage having to do with manners and the arts. In the social sciences the term culture takes much of its meaning from its position within a model of the world which depicts the relations between society, culture and the individual.

Turkle's essay in the book highlights that much, but not all, of the social heritage or culture has a normative character; that is, the individuals of a community typically feel that their social heritage—their ways of doing things, their understandings of the world, their symbolic expressions—are proper, true and beautiful, and they sanction positively those who conform to the social heritage and punish those who do not.

Individuals perform the activities and hold the beliefs of their social heritage or culture not just because of sanctions from others, and not just because they find these activities and beliefs proper and true, but because they also find at least some cultural activities and beliefs to be motivationally and emotionally satisfying.

Turkle further says that in this formulation of the model the terms social heritage and culture have been equated. The model ascribes to culture or social heritage the properties of being socially and individually adaptive, learned, persistent, normative, and motivated. Empirical consideration of the content of the social heritage leads directly to an omnibus definition of culture, like that given by Tylor: 'Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society; that is, to an enumeration of the kinds of things that can be observed to make up the social heritage.

However, many social scientists restrict the definition of culture to only certain aspects of the social heritage. Most frequently, culture is restricted to the non-physical, or mental part of the social heritage. The physical activities that people perform and the physical artefacts they use are then treated as consequences of the fact that people learn, as part of their social heritage, how to perform these activities and how to make these artefacts. Treating actions and artefacts as the result of ...