There is a serious argument that all of this is dissolving anyway.

Recent work supports the idea that a universal social media presence has driven significant cultural convergence among global youth — shared platforms, the global reach of influencers, and a market-oriented individualistic value system. As humans, we have to remain honest with ourselves: yes, the internet, globalization and social media have tremendous power over us. They are strong forces that influence our attention and push our behaviour to follow what others are doing, especially online. And we know that what we see on social media is heavily influenced by global and cultural powers trying to shape the world according to their own agenda.

But we still need to have faith in our own cultures and in what makes us who we are. What we have been building through thousands of years cannot be erased just because of some influential platforms.

Yes, we live in an age where our cultures can be put on hold because we are too busy being influenced by brands and influencers. But culture is a very powerful force. Although it may not be our centre of attention today, and although we challenge it by focusing on other things, using other languages and dressing like other people, when it comes to making big decisions, and when it comes to finding value and meaning and what unconsciously moves us, culture remains a powerful and reliable force that we still rely on. We cannot erase all those years that are ingrained in our systems and passed from one generation to the next just because one platform looks good or one influencer seems interesting enough for our brain. That has an impact. But it carries far less weight than culture itself.

So frameworks like Hofstede’s are still relevant. Hofstede’s organization is still operating, and large organizations across the world still rely heavily on understanding culture when they hire employees across regions and when they appoint managers in new markets. They understand the value of culture. When a company builds a website or a university recruits students from other countries, they make sure cultural background is taken into account.

And instead of attacking young people as the ones giving up their traditions and their cultural backgrounds, we need to have more faith in them. They are using social media as a tool to maintain ties with their cultural backgrounds, improve them, and bring them out to the world so that people can learn about those cultures, respect them, and learn from them. They are exploring other cultures while they do it. But living in an age where we have access to other cultures does not mean our own cultures are irrelevant and should be ignored. It is the complete opposite. We live in a world where we need more and more to understand other cultures. That is a world worth living in, rather than a world where we merge all cultures together and create a meaningless global village where everybody just looks like everybody else.

Deep-seated cultural values among Arabs are very relevant, specifically when they immigrate to a new country like Canada. They use social media and digital platforms to learn more about the new culture they are living in. They use it as a bridge to connect with their Canadian counterparts and with immigrants from other countries. But the existence of those platforms does not erase their cultures. Trending topics, viral videos and social media language are nice talking points, nice ideas to share, nice activities to spend time on. They change nothing about one’s culture. It is the opposite. We stay connected, we stay relevant, and we appreciate our culture more and more.

Fourteen people told me how they work. They told me about a guest who is on our head, about a manager’s request that takes precedence before thought, about the relief of four simple words when a customer is angry, about a word given up and a name given up, about the fifth or sixth month when a country stops feeling strange.

None of them described their culture as something they were carrying in spite of the work. They described it as the thing that made them good at it.

I dedicate this work to every immigrant who has ever been told to change who they are in order to fit in. The evidence in these pages says otherwise. The warmth, the respect, the generosity, and the deep sense of hospitality that Arab culture instils in its people are not things to be corrected. They are things to be recognised, valued, and protected — whether the evaluation comes from a manager, a customer, or an algorithm.