An Overview of Accommodation in Relation with Identity and Identity Crisis: In the Current Ethiopian Situation

Dessalegn Yeshambel,Eyilachew Tamir

doi:10.12973/ojcmt/3954

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to bring various elements that result to the complexity of our identity today. More specifically, the paper is intended to overview the situation and type of accommodation that we are practicing and its impact on our identity this time. In the globalization era, technology has a greater role in connecting people around the globe and can create relationships among the people. Therefore, we have accommodated different cultures, languages and other values from the other world especially from the Western World. There is no clear understanding of identity and self-determination and there is only transformation adoption of culture and language via technology. This engages scholars to correlate theoretical inquiries like accommodation (divergence, convergence) with the questions of how the young people are making the new communication and information world and the media to possess their cultural identity. Accordingly, for this study, youths from three different universities and personal observations have been taken as a source of data. Consequently, the findings of the result indicated that majority of the respondents are in a dilemma to accept others’ value or to preserve their own. Observations of different media outlets in Ethiopia also revealed that starting from their naming to the content of the programs, they took others’ language code and reflect others’ culture. According to the result of our data and our participant observation, as a community we have accommodated and have encountered sensory over accommodation that led to motivational identity crisis.

Highlights

Identity has no commonly agreed definition and different scholars give their own definition even if they share some common sense
Though technology is a lately developed phenomenon in Ethiopia, most youths including children are highly addicted in using internet as a source of information and acquired lots of values from others through it
Even though accommodation is a common practice in the virtual world especially this time, it is not the only cause for identity crisis

Summary

Introduction

Identity has no commonly agreed definition and different scholars give their own definition even if they share some common sense. Some of them consider identity as a sense or attitude and belief about one self. Another way of construing identity: as a selfstructure - an internal self-constructed dynamic organization of drives abilities beliefs, and individual history Marcia (1980). As we can see from this definition, identity is. Still there are scholars who consider identity as static phenomena

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