Tacit Culture
Definition
Tacit culture refers to the parts of culture that are not explicit or directly observable — the rules, expectations and competences that members of a culture follow without having been taught them and generally without being able to state them. Social scientists have argued that it is at points of conflict that tacit culture becomes visible.
Note: the definition previously on this page, quoted from an answers site, read "parts of culture that are explicit or directly observable." That is a transcription error which reverses the meaning of the concept — tacit culture is by definition the part that is not explicit. The correction is made here.
Description
For example, think of a checkout queue at a store. There is no signage that explicitly tells you to wait behind the people already standing in line, or any information on how close you should stand to the person in front of you. However, you have probably learned these rules via observation in your day-to-day life.
When someone doesn't follow tacit cultural rules there is normally some form of sanctioning. This can be things like glaring at people who cut in line, or moving away from someone who stands too close to you.
Tacit culture goes beyond rules. It includes language use (ever heard an older person misuse slang) and object use (how we use cultural artifacts), and the whole repertoire of timing, distance, tone and gesture through which competence is demonstrated.
Sources of the Concept
The idea has several independent lineages, which is part of why it has no single settled name.
- Michael Polanyi gave the term its philosophical form in The Tacit Dimension (1966), with the formulation "we can know more than we can tell." His examples are skills — riding a bicycle, recognising a face — which are performed reliably and cannot be reduced to statable rules.
- Edward Hall discusses the concept in The Silent Language (1959) and The Hidden Dimension (1966), and supplies the most usable apparatus for it: proxemics, monochronic and polychronic time, and high- and low-context communication. Hall's central claim is that culture is transmitted primarily through what is never taught explicitly, and is therefore invisible to its own members until it is violated.
- Émile Durkheim's social facts — ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to the individual and exercise constraint over them — name the same phenomenon from the sociological side.
- Pierre Bourdieu's habitus is the most developed theoretical treatment: durable dispositions, acquired through upbringing, that generate appropriate conduct without conscious rule-following, and that reproduce class position while appearing to be personal taste.
- Harold Garfinkel's breaching experiments are the standard method for making it visible. Garfinkel had students deliberately violate unstated rules — behaving as lodgers in their own homes, demanding clarification of ordinary pleasantries — and documented the speed and strength of the resulting sanction.
Tacit Culture Online
Every sustained online community develops one, and does so unusually fast — weeks rather than years — because the whole record is written and newcomers can observe the entire history of correct behaviour.
The rules are the familiar kind: what may be posted where, how much self-promotion is acceptable, what tone a disagreement may take, whether a question has been asked before, how long a reply may take before the delay itself becomes a message. None of this is in the terms of service. Members generally cannot state the rules on request, and can identify a violation instantly.
The newcomer is therefore the diagnostic instrument, in the same way Garfinkel's students were. A person arriving in a new community runs an unintentional breaching experiment simply by not knowing, and the community's response — correction, mockery, downvoting, silence — is the tacit culture becoming briefly visible. See internalization of moral code for what happens next, and social dialect for the linguistic half of the same process.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Tacit culture is what a platform's written rules are floating on, and it is where nearly all of the actual governing happens. It is also what does not transfer: a user moving between platforms carries their competence with them and finds it wrong, which is why experienced internet users are repeatedly newcomers.
