I believe that every aspect of any culture anywhere in the world can be boiled down to the one factor that progenated all of them:
survival, both personal and of the race itself
Can’t culture be traced back to that one thing? Are cultural similarities due to the existence of this common root? Variations in culture are merely reflections of the approaches to meeting these survival needs since this inception of mankind. It is how we choose, as a group, to meet this natural stimuli with the express purpose of survival. Everything stems from there.
However, it does seem that cultural variations are on the upward slope of merging with one another, as if we are returning to this common base, thousands of years after the inception of culture.
My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.