Page 10 - Culture Technology Communication

Foreword ix

designed, often at the cost of making it slower or more prone to error.
As Yates (1996: 114) puts it, “English-speaking countries may thus al-
ways maintain a competitive edge: they have more advanced and
more reliable computer software.” How effectively individual cultures
and subcultures are able to adapt computer network technology to
their own values and uses constitutes a major theme of this book.
The book’s perspective is both interdisciplinary and cross-
cultural. It is interdisciplinary in that the authors bring diverse
disciplinary perspectives to bear on the relationship of CMC tech-
nology to culture, ranging from philosophy to cultural studies to
communication to systems design. It is cross-cultural in that the
authors themselves are based in nine countries in North America,
Europe, and Asia. The first three articles introduce theoretical con-
cepts and models pertaining to CMC and culture, followed by nine
contributions based on ethnographic praxis which describe the cur-
rent status and use of CMC in Germany, Switzerland, the US,
Kuwait, Japan, Korea, India, and Thailand. Most of these are
countries about which little scholarly research on Internet use has
previously been published; I found these chapters especially in-
formative and thought-provoking.
Among the many timely topics that the essays in this book ad-
dress, three seem to me to be especially important:

1. The nature of CMC. What are the social and psychologi-
cal effects of computer-mediated communication, and
how do they contribute to (or detract from) the potential
for an “electronic global village”? Does CMC promote
community? Does it support democratic processes?
2. Technology diffusion. What factors determine the speed
and manner in which CMC technology spreads to and is
adopted by (or resisted by) different cultural groups?
3. System design. What components of CMC systems are
subject to cultural bias? How can culturally-appropriate
systems be designed and implemented? Here, “cultural
groups” includes gender and ethnic groups within a sin-
gle nation, as well as the citizens of different nations
states.

The answers to these questions are important regardless of whether
one considers the globalization of CMC to be desirable or problem-
atic, since in order to bring about positive outcomes from the use of