The word culture is used to imply several related ideas, and is not generally used to precisely denote anything. But just as Isaac Newton could not have posited the laws of motion if he considered motion in every sense of that word as used by Aristotle, a meaningful discussion of culture, and its connotations of aesthetic training, musical, artistic, and culinary appreciation, and knowledge of literature is not possible without a good enough definition to begin with. If we accept that a culture of a certain kinds implies knowledge of certain subjects--be it American, Arab, British, Chinese, French, German, Indian , Italian, or Japanese cultures, we can work with a more operational cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge can be defined as the set of beliefs, conventions, and methods to deal with the circumstances of everyday life in a particular context.

Now, these contexts, and the beliefs that shape them, and the methods that work best in them continue to change. Indeed, there is no such thing as a static culture--culture is always changing. This change was gradual when the rate of diffusion of information was small, but it rapid in today's world of rapid dissemination of information. Indeed, the Nobel winning economist Thomas Schelling has attempted to formalize some of these notions in his famous book, The Strategy of Conflict. For a contrast, we can also consider the case where there is little or no culture--in this case, in the absence of very much of cultural knowledge, individuals revert to the guidance of their basic instincts of self preservation and procreation, common to all animals. And when a sufficient proportion of population is lacking in culture, this would result in anarchy, where is nasty, short and brutish. Hence the notion that civilization has to be learned and passed from generation to generation.

Now that we better understand the notion of culture, we can systematically determine how cultural products will change. There are several strong feedback mechanisms between the change of context, the accretion of knowledge, social conventions, and the beliefs guiding individual actions.

We can first begin with the contexts. The context determines the needs of individuals in society, and the specific functions they need to get performed--such as providing nutrition for the body, going from home to work, eradication of pests, or relaxation. As the world becomes more interconnected, the number of choices available to perform these functions increases. Indeed, the choices available are the cross product (in the set theoretic sense--the eskimo can now make reindeer meat with curry, and we do have the fusion of African, European and Indian dance) of the products available from each culture. Another effect of this connectedness is that individuals with similar functions to be performed can easily learn from each other, and greatly improve the performance of those functions. Many minds looking at a problem determine its essence quickly and find new avenues of performance improvement. This in turn changes the context of society--individuals have more leisure, can take more risks or experimenting, spend more on cultural products such as international arts, music, cuisine, theater, or other cultural products to come (a recent one is computer games played on the internet).