Page 14 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

INTRODUCTION

Internet, for example, is widely used in extremely creative, even revolutionary
ways that defy supervision and control, and has even begun to democratize
‘routine’ global communication in some respects. The Internet has evolved
to become less a technological form and more a communications medium, which
opens up limitless cultural possibilities. Rather than just reinforcing traditional
structures of political-economic-cultural authority, information technology,
the Internet, and mass media make those structures all the more porous (Lull
2000).
The profound diversification of symbolic forms and the attendant growing
number and variety of occasions for asserting symbolic power (Thompson 1995;
Lull 2000) in cultural contexts are inevitable consequences of mediated
communication and globalization, a development that in many ways disturbs
the hegemony of political, economic, and cultural influence that dominant
institutions and ideologies hold over individual persons. The global availability
of ever more diverse and mobile symbolic forms emanating from the culture
and information industries, when combined with increased access by indi-
viduals to micro-communication technologies, uniquely empowers many
people. To conceptualize power in symbolic and cultural terms harmonizes
theoretically with the indeterminate character of human communication
processes overall.

The digital divide
The other side of the rosy optimism often expressed about life in the Com-
munication Age is the undeniable fact that the tangible benefits brought about
by present-day technology and connectivity accrue very unevenly across social
categories inside individual nations and between nations in the global context.
Just as the Communication Age is a global phenomenon, so too is the digital
divide. Large areas of the world including North American inner cities, African
shanty towns, Brazilian favelas, and the deprived rural areas of China or India
are almost completely ‘switched off’ from information technology and the
global ‘network society’ (Castells 1996: 33–4).
By now home computers with an Internet hookup have become more a
necessity than a luxury in many parts of the relatively developed world. Still, in
the United States – where more than half the homes were hooked up to the
Internet by 2000 – extreme differences between economic and racial groups
continue to divide the society into computer/Internet ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.
In Europe, Internet hookups in 2000 were far less pervasive overall than in the
USA – some 12 per cent of total homes. Internal social and technological
differences in the European nations are least severe in the Scandinavian
countries and the rest of the northern part of the continent. By comparison
southern European nations are far less connected overall and reveal the widest
internal gaps. While social and technological gaps in Japan are not as extreme as
they are in many other nations, the internal digital divide is growing there too

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