65 “breakneck speeds” on poorly maintained roads. Culture shock can also occur within your own country. When someone raised in a small town visits a big city for the fi rst time, or when a person who is not religious spends time in the home of a devoutly religious family, the visitor may suddenly feel out of place. Cultural knowledge is essential for survival. People from the United States who are traveling in Australia had better know that motorists in that society drive on the left side of the road—otherwise, they are in for an abrupt case of culture shock! Of course, most cultural knowledge is subtler, involving how to act in order to get something done. When you entered college, you probably had to learn about what makes the culture of higher education different from that of high school. NORMS: WHAT IS APPROPRIATE? Norms are a culture’s rules and expectations for “appropriate” behavior. (Behavior that violates the norms of a culture is often labeled as deviant, a topic we explore in Chapter 8.) In a sense, norms serve as a bridge between a culture’s ideas and its practices since they suggest which practices are appropriate. Norms can tell people what they should do as well as what they should not do. However, norms are not fi xed or rigid. For example, smoking in public places—once a practice taken for granted in our culture—now increasingly violates informal norms and local laws. People are now expected (or required) to buckle their seat belts when they are driving or riding in an automobile. As recently as the 1960s, however, many automobiles did not even have seat belts. As society changes, culture evolves to address new situations. Nowhere is this process more apparent today than in cyberspace. Norms for those who participate in its various venues—sometimes referred to as “netiquette”—developed rapidly, contributing to an emergent culture among Internet users. Different parts of the Internet each have their own norms. E-mail users learn to use “bcc” (blind carbon copy) when they send out a group e-mail so that they do not reveal the e-mail addresses of their friends or colleagues. At online discussion groups, new users learn to read the FAQs (“frequently asked questions”) page before asking questions. Social networking sites such as Facebook strongly discourage “fl aming”—posts that attack, insult, or ridicule other users. If you are a regular Internet user, such norms may seem obvious to you now, but they had to be created over time. Like all new users, you had to learn them at some point. Social norms do not always keep up with technological change, however. In the 1920s, sociologist William Ogburn (1922) coined the term cultural lag to describe the ways that new technological developments often outpace the norms that govern our collective experiences with these new technologies. For instance, recent developments in digital photography and the proliferation of high-speed Internet access have made it extremely easy for many people to post photos and videos online for wide public viewing. However, the norms that defi ne what is appropriate to make public, how to distribute such images, and what privacy means in this context are still FAST- FORWARD Social Change and Norms Through most of the twentieth century, cigarette smoking was a widespread and socially respectable activity, well within acceptable norms. Tobacco companies marketed their product aggressively, associating it, as in the Camels ad above, with both sex appeal and, ironically, health. Since confirmation of the health dangers of smoking, an antismoking movement, using public service ads like the one here that parodies cigarette ads, has gradually but effectively succeeded in changing the norms regarding smoking, making it an activity that now receives widespread social disapproval. catching up to the technology. Perhaps this concept helps explain the posting of photos of alcohol-fueled high school parties on Facebook or the “sexting” of nude photos among teenagers. As these examples suggest, cultural defi nitions of what is—or should be—public and private information are
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