Week One: The Two Cultures

I truly enjoyed the readings for this week, “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” and “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.”. The concept of the two cultures that we analyzed this week composes my overall endeavors here at UCLA. I am a fourth year who will be completing a Bachelors degree in Applied Linguistics and a Bachelors degree in Spanish Community and Culture. However, I am also minoring in Digital Humanities and I am employed as a computer technician for UCLA’s IT Housing and Hospitality department. My minor and employment are constantly teaching me about new technological tools to improve the issues we encounter in our daily lives. However, my two majors, which are more on the humanities side, teach me to establish the basis of research on these different issues. However, before doing all of this, I felt suffocated by the idea of doing one thing for the rest of my life and ignoring my other passions and merely acknowledge them as hobbies. However, what allowed me to embrace these different subjects and decide to officially pursue them as I am now was hearing Emilie Wapnick’s TEDxBend’s talk on “multipotentialites.”

According to Wapnick, a multipotentialite is a person who uses three super powers to combine different ideas to create something unique. The super powers held by these multipotentialites are rapid learning, adaptability, and ideas synthesis. She states that one must embrace the desire to combine our different passions because only this way will we create things and come up with solutions that would not flourish otherwise. For example, Meshu shows the positive outcome in doing this. Meshu is a company that combines the passions of cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design to create custom geographically-inspired jewelry. 

Wapnick states that through these different backgrounds, one is able to access a lot of these points of intersection. This correlates to Snow’s ideology in which “the clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures… ought to create creative chances” (17). I can see such occurrence within my own different fields. For example, I’ve learned that in using technology I can fully study language through the analysis of spectrograms, or better understand Spanish historical landmarks through 3D visualizations. Due to the beautiful outcomes in bringing these two cultures together, I will personally continue to do so.

REFERENCES

Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo 34.2 (2001): 121-25. Web.

Emilie Wapnick TEDXBent Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJORi5VO1F8

Original Meshu Design: https://meshu.io/make/facet

Meshu Homepage Image: https://meshu.io