Cultural Polysemy: Exploring Cultural Codes Through Digital and Non-Digital Practices

Culture is a coherent entity we use for describing our cooperative interests with others in political, social, and historical contexts. Culture is functional in that it is defined through individual and collective articulations in time and space. Its representations occur through macro categories of nations, race, habits, practices, and values as embodied in the following models: contexting (Hall, 1976); value orientation (Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, 1961); cultural dimension (Hofstede, 1996); Seven-Dimensions of culture (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1997); Seven Value Types (Schwartz, 1999). Culture also gets defined in terms of its situatedness based on specificity of contexts and practices: social constructionist approach (Dohney-Farina, 1986; Porter, 1993; Mirel, 1996); discourse approach (Scollon et al., 1995). In professional and technical communication, the practice of splitting culture into macro and micro categories is influenced by the American linguistic anthropologist Kenneth L. Pike (1954) who theorized cultural distinctions through a linguistic route of tagmemics that looks at the connection between language use and sociocultural behavior (Franklin, 1996) through emic and etic approaches. Emic accounts focus on individual and relative aspects of a culture, while etic elements provide descriptive universals to enable macro comparison between cultures