Page 12 - Culture Technology Communication

Acknowledgments

With the help of an international team of scholars in diverse disci-
plines, we co-chaired the first international conference on Cultural
Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication (CATaC’98),
with the goal of bringing together scholars and researchers whose
theoretical reflection and research reports “from the field” would
shed greater light on how culture shapes distinctive ways of appro-
priating and using new communication technologies. Some sixty
presenters and participants attended, representing eighteen coun-
tries. As we had hoped, the conference brought together both highly
theoretical reflections and numerous fine-grained reports on diverse
cultural attitudes towards communication as well as reports on
what happens in the sometime violent, often productive collisions
between the new technologies and distinctive cultures.
This volume is one of the outcomes of CATaC’98. Many of the pa-
pers collected in this volume were presented at the conference and
appeared in the conference proceedings (Ess and Sudweeks, 1998),
but have since been reworked, taking into account the discussions
and dialogue that were a significant feature of the conference. It is
difficult to do justice to the richness of the conference, with regard to
individual presentations and especially to the discussions fostered
by an unusually collaborative atmosphere. Respected “old hands”
and energetic newcomers minimized matters of academic status
while maximizing often passionate dialogue among one another as
partners in a shared enterprise. Among other things, we hope this
volume not only presents some of the best contributions, but also
conveys something of the remarkable spirit of dialogue we enjoyed at
CATaC’98.
We were fortunate to receive the support of the Science Museum,
London, which served as the venue for the conference. The Science
Museum was ideal for several reasons. To begin with, it provided us
with a conference venue outside the United States, thus helping us
offset the tendency for US-based scholarship to dominate the presen-
tations and discussion. In addition, the Science Museum houses a su-
perb exhibit on Charles Babbage’s “Difference Engines” and Lady Ada
Lovelace’s development of programming for these machines, arguably

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