Mehdi Tuesday, May 11th 2010
SEFRIOUI

Essay on Cultural Differences

Today, thanks to the amazing evolution of new technologies, it is way easier to travel, communicate, share and so on, with people all around the world. Earth is becoming a “Global Village” where all its citizens are on the same level of equity. Everybody, or almost everybody, can access the Web and its social websites like Twitter or Facebook which are incredibly accelerating this phenomenon. You can, using those new ways of communication, for example trade or meet people living in another continent. Obeying certain rules depending on the way of communicating (business standards are different from an online chat for instance); people can quickly face some problems due to their different cultures.
Indeed, despite these artificial points all the Earth “villagers” can have in common, a lot of differences do persist between the inhabitants of our planet. History and the current conflicts (economical and/or political) are the main reasons to these differences.
But before we start talking about the differences between cultures, we must explain and define what we mean by “culture” and then choosing a culture I will oppose to mine to extract the cultural gaps.
Culture like we mean it concerns all the habits, languages, social codes, values, social references, etc members of a same group can have (group here will be considered as a country).
Stemming from the Moroccan and French cultures, I will opposite myself to Americans.
Morocco and France share a lot of similarities and this makes the link between those two cultures easier. Just to give an example, both cultures do have a high context communication. Similarities are mainly the fruit of two things: * The geographical location of Morocco and France. Indeed the Mediterranean countries do have a lot in common in spite of the Anglo-Saxon influence on France. * The decades of French