Culture has a branding problem.

Say the word and many people immediately picture festivals, traditional clothing, drumming, chiefs and perhaps an elderly person speaking a language the younger generation only partly understands. Culture is treated like something we bring out for special occasions, applaud for an afternoon and pack away when it is time to return to “real life.”

I have noticed an even stranger contradiction. Some people regard deep attachment to one’s language or traditions as a sign of being uneducated or insufficiently modern. Yet those same people can spend hours on TikTok absorbing somebody else’s slang, humour, beauty standards, relationship rules and ideas of success.

That is still culture. It simply arrived through an algorithm, so we mistook it for entertainment.

Culture is not the opposite of education

We often speak about culture as though it belongs to the village, to older people or to those who somehow failed to escape into modernity. That idea is not only wrong; it is class prejudice wearing a graduation gown.

UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity describes culture broadly: it includes our ways of living together, value systems, traditions, beliefs and lifestyles, not only art and literature. In plain English, culture is not just what we perform. It is how we interpret the world.

An educated person does not become cultureless. Education simply gives that person more tools with which to understand, question and reshape culture. A professor has culture. A software developer has culture. A TikTok creator has culture. The corporate worker who cannot speak their mother tongue but can quote every trending phrase from Los Angeles has culture too. The only question is where that culture came from and whether they chose it consciously.

Modernity does not remove culture. It hides its sources.

Your following list is a cultural curriculum

Who you follow online affects what begins to feel normal.

Follow enough luxury creators and an ordinary life can start to feel like failure. Follow enough relationship commentators and you may begin speaking about affection as if every conversation were a negotiation. Follow creators who mock certain accents, bodies, jobs or communities, and contempt can slowly begin to sound like common sense. Follow thoughtful historians, language teachers, craftspeople and local storytellers, and the same phone becomes a doorway into worlds you may never have encountered otherwise.

This is not mystical. TikTok openly explains that its For You recommendation system learns from signals such as the videos you watch, like, share, comment on and search for. Every pause is a tiny vote. Every follow is a lesson plan.

The feed then returns a personalised version of the world to you. After a while, repeated exposure can make a niche opinion look universal, a foreign habit look inevitable and a commercial trend look like a personal desire you invented yourself.

Your feed does not merely discover your taste. It helps manufacture it.

That is why “it is just TikTok” is no longer a serious defence. We use these platforms to learn how to dress, speak, date, work, travel, spend money and even describe ourselves. Those are cultural functions.

The algorithm is powerful, but it is not destiny

I do not think the answer is to panic about foreign influence or pretend culture must remain untouched. Cultures have always met, borrowed, argued and changed. Ghanaian culture itself is not a sealed box, and it never was. Exchange can make us more inventive and more open-minded.

The real danger is not that we encounter other cultures. It is that the exchange becomes one-way.

If young people can name ten American internet personalities but cannot name the people documenting their own community’s language, something is off. If local creators must abandon their language to appear intelligent, marketable or sophisticated online, then the digital world is not neutral. It is rewarding some forms of identity while making others harder to see.

We also have agency. TikTok provides tools such as “Not Interested,” feed refresh and topic controls, and deliberate searches can teach the system new preferences. More importantly, we can choose to follow people who widen rather than shrink our world. The algorithm influences the menu; we still decide what we keep eating.

Language loss is not a sentimental issue

Language is one of the most fragile containers of culture because it carries far more than vocabulary. It holds humour, ecological knowledge, social relationships, names, proverbs and distinctions that may not transfer neatly into another language.

UNESCO estimates that at least 40% of roughly 7,000 languages are endangered. When a language disappears, humanity does not merely lose another way to say “hello.” We lose a way of noticing.

This matters in Ghana too. We are proud of being multilingual, but pride alone does not guarantee digital survival. A language can be alive in homes and still become nearly invisible in search engines, apps, educational tools and creator platforms. Young people increasingly live part of their lives online. If a language cannot travel with them, its future becomes more precarious.

Why the world needs Indigen World now

This is the problem that makes Indigen World urgent to me.

We are starting with Kasem, the language of the Kasena people, and building tools for language learning, a dictionary, community contributions and a creator workspace called TribeStudio. The ambition is not to freeze culture inside a digital museum. A preserved language that nobody can comfortably use, create with or pass on is only half-preserved.

The aim is to give culture somewhere to live online: somewhere a learner can find a word, a speaker can contribute knowledge, and a creator can produce material rooted in their own community without treating their identity as an obstacle to relevance.

A UNESCO and Global Voices toolkit on digital initiatives for Indigenous languages makes a similar case: using Indigenous languages in digital communication, education and virtual communities can push back against the historical exclusion that has made many of those languages precarious.

Indigen World will not save culture by itself. No app can replace parents speaking with children, elders sharing knowledge, teachers taking local languages seriously or communities deciding what should and should not be recorded. Technology can also extract culture, flatten sacred knowledge into “content” and reward performance over truth. That is why community ownership, consent, accurate attribution and respect for cultural protocols have to be part of the architecture, not added later as decoration.

But refusing technology is not protection either. If algorithms are becoming places where culture is learned, then our languages and communities need more than nostalgia. They need infrastructure.

We need to curate our cultural diet

Look at your following list as if it were a school timetable.

Who is teaching you what beauty looks like? Who is teaching you which accent sounds intelligent? Who is defining success, romance, masculinity, femininity, faith, family or freedom for you? How many of those teachers know anything about the place you come from?

The goal is not to purge your feed of everything foreign and retreat into a small cultural room. That would be its own kind of poverty. The goal is to become harder to programme accidentally. Follow beyond your comfort zone. Seek out creators who speak local languages. Reward people documenting community knowledge. Ask who benefits when an identity is presented as modern and another as backward.

Culture is not for the uneducated. Culture is what educates all of us, often before we realise a lesson has begun.

The question is no longer whether TikTok will affect our culture. It already does. The question is whether Kasem and thousands of other underrepresented languages will be present in the digital future when the next generation goes looking for itself.