![]() ![]() They also offer a level of protection to whistle blowers and political dissidents who would otherwise be putting themselves at risk when trying to act for the good of humanity. It should be noted that TOR and its contemporaries are NOT intrinsically bad. Accessing these sites is a lot harder than simply typing in a URL, and the chances that you or your children may accidentally stumble over them (or even find them if you’re looking) are pretty much zero. The Dark web is only a tiny portion of the deep web and consists mostly of heavily encrypted sites. It can only be accessed with the likes of TOR which makes all conduct and interactions untraceable and anonymous – and therefore a haven for unsavory stuff. The Dark Web is also technically “Deep web” because it is hidden, but is generally associated with illegal activity. ![]() The deep web should not be confused with the Dark Web. TOR is a complicated, multi-level VPN and virtual tunneling system which was originally commissioned by the US government. Unless you’re the owner of the content, the deep web can only be accessed by specialized software like TOR. Contrary to popular belief, the deep web mostly consists of simple things like your emails, social media profiles, subscription sites saved data (like your viewing history on Netflix) and other privately owned data (the cloud, your Google docs, etc.). So what is this content and data we can’t see? Mostly pretty innocuous stuff, actually. This 99.996% of data is called the deep web. Which means that 99.996% of the internet is inaccessible without permissions and passwords and is not indexed by standard search engines. This 0.004% of the internet is accessible to the public in the form of over 4.5 billion indexed websites. Of this five million terabytes only about 200 terabytes can be indexed by web search. That’s more than five trillion megabytes of data stored on countless servers, computers and drives. Today it’s estimated that the internet consists of around five million terabytes of data. When the internet first booted up in 1969 it was made up of a grand total of four computers. In fact, it’s substantially less than the tip of the iceberg – it’s more like the thin layer of snow lying on top of the tip of the iceberg. the Amazon) with tributaries flowing into it strikes me as being another paradigmatically confused metaphor, since it implies that cultural diversity (relativism) disappears into a transcendent unity (positivism).Did you know that the portion of the internet we can easily see and access is only the tip of the iceberg? The seemingly related idea of a river (e.g. While this gets at the “co-ontological” construction of boundary conditions, it doesn’t really capture the coordination of meaning idea. Let’s find a more appropriate one.įor many years I described culture metaphorically as a river that both carved and was constrained by its banks. In other words, we are shooting ourselves in the foot with this metaphor. The client is left with a simplistic understanding of culture that cannot support the complex operations vis a vis culture that we subsequently advocate. But then we introduce the topic with a distinctly positivist metaphor – the iceberg. These are laudable goals drawn from a constructivist paradigm. We want our students or clients to engage culture in a dynamic way, enabling them to understand complex cultural identity formation and generate mindful intercultural communication. This situation is a great example of paradigmatic confusion. So, while we ourselves may not romanticize or exotify foreign cultures, we inadvertently support those who do by teaching this metaphor. The metaphor does not in any way imply that culture is a process of coordinating meaning and action – rather, it implies that culture is an entity with mysterious unknown qualities. The 10% above the water is really visible to everyone who looks in that direction, and the 90% below the water is both real and dangerous, since it can sink the unwary sojourner. But many interculturalists actually do essentialize culture by using the objective metaphor of an iceberg.Ĭomparing culture to an iceberg floating in the sea implies that culture is an actual thing. We feel it is unfair when anthropologists and critical theorists accuse us of essentializing culture. Most people with any background in intercultural communication theory agree that culture is not a “thing” it is the process whereby groups of people coordinate meaning and action, yielding both institutional artifacts and patterns of behavior. With all due respect to theoreticians who continue to use the iceberg metaphor to describe culture, I think it’s time to retire the image altogether. ![]()
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