Culturally Appropriate This
Are we ready to embrace technology to spread Caribbean culture?
Have you ever thought about emigrating?
em·i·grate
verb
leave one’s own country in order to settle permanently in another.
I have. Not only have I thought about it but back in 1998, I left Trinidad for over a decade. If you also answered yes, then we are not alone. The CIA’s World Factbook (wow autocorrect really tried to change that to Facebook, how appropriate) says that every year there is a net of 6 out of every 1,000 people that migrate from Trinidad to some other country. This means that when you subtract the people that leave Trinidad from the people that enter we have more people going out of Trinidad than coming in. That’s over 8,000 people migrating from Trinidad every year.
Why is this important? Well, it’s how I met the best man at my wedding, one of my closest friends, Abay. Hell, we’re practically married if you consider the fact that we started a company together based on our mutual experience while living in the US.
When you live outside of Home, often you’re constantly seeking something familiar to keep you anchored while you’re out there in the wilderness. I call this unforced cultural displacement.
What is cultural displacement?
Cultural displacement is the physical dislocation from one’s native culture or the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture.
It’s unforced because Abay and I weren’t refugees, we were in America voluntarily to further our education like so many other Caribbean people.
And wow oh wow did we miss Home. We would fill that gap by liming with other Caribbean, Indian and African people. We’d DJ at parties both on and off campus just so we could hear that familiar tone, “Whoa…wuz de scene?”; see that red, white and black of the Trini flag; yell, “bup bup bup” when a big song came on in the club; head to a Caribbean restaurant to smell that pelau or roti while it was being cooked; get a bess flex in a Caribbean house party. The struggle was real!
And there are over 6 million people who have left the Caribbean to head to the US for either education or better jobs who were part of that same struggle. This struggle that I used to call homesickness, it was only after speaking to enough people abroad, I realised they weren’t really homesick, they were ready to embrace this new country and what it had to offer but they wanted to dip in and out of their culture regularly.
Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.
The Caribbean’s culture has historically been influenced by that of African, European, and Amerindian, and Asian traditions. It has also been strongly influenced by that of its linguistic, economic, and cultural neighbor, the United States.
In our first attempts at trying to connect Caribbean people to their culture because of who we were (DJ, producer, pianist) we thought culture was music. Wrong!
When we spoke to people, the things they wanted to have access to were not music alone.
Caribbean people wanted to be able to walk past someone and say, “Good Morning” and not get a weird stare back at them — morals and values. They cared about being able to cook the dishes their parents cooked — cuisine. They did not undervalue the act of walking down the sidewalk and hearing a familiar accent or seeing a recognizable mannerism — language and social habits.
The question that follows is, “Does technology solve this problem while you live abroad away from your Home country?” With a mixture of products like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, EventBrite, Yelp, Google Search and some Caribbean websites, you could cobble together THE experience.
Let’s take this a few steps further though. The internet has obliterated geographical borders for several industries. This now allows culture to permeate to all corners of the internet. We are at the beginning of a wave of culture riding on the backs of technologies like Augmented Reality, Video, Virtual Reality, Blockchain, Machine Learning.
In a series of posts, with your help, I will dive deeper into specific aspects of Caribbean culture and what effects new technologies will have on them. Are the people involved in Caribbean music, events (limes, Carnival, parties) and culinary experiences ready to take these steps forward and embrace the technological revolution?
Why isn’t carnival a full VR experience for the outsider?
Why don’t we use the Blockchain to make our music industry more accountable?
When do we start collecting the data that will help improve the culinary experience for all ‘our’ people inside and outside of the Caribbean?
Let’s do a thought exercise, put your mind to it, can you think of applications of these technologies to help spread culture and thus increase empathy throughout the world? Feel free to message me your thoughts, I am @dre7413 on Twitter. Can you imagine people understanding Caribbean culture to never, ever call us ‘Caribbeans’? It could be the beginning of the end of rabs. Google it!
