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Introduction:
What’s Culture Got to Do with It?
Cultural Collisions in the Electronic Global
Village, Creative Interferences, and the Rise
of Culturally-Mediated Computing

Charles Ess

Beyond McLuhan: Interdisciplinary Directions Towards an
Intercultural Global Village

In both popular and scholarly literature, the explosive growth of the
Internet and the World Wide Web occasions what communication
theorist James Carey (1989) identified over a decade ago as a
Manichean debate. On the one hand, the “digerati,” including such
well-known enthusiasts as Nicholas Negroponte (1995) and Bill
Gates (1996), promise the realization of Marshall McLuhan’s utopian
vision of an electronic global village—a theme reflecting earlier,
especially postmodernist celebrations of hypertext and computer-me-
diated communication, as marking out a cultural shift as revolution-
ary as the printing press, if not the invention of fire (e.g., Lyotard
1984; Bolter 1986, 1991; Landow 1992, 1994). On the other hand,
critics see these enthusiastic claims as, at best, resting on question-
able myths (Hamelink 1986; Balsamo 1998; Lievrouw 1998) and, at
worst, as an electronic utopianism and boosterism (Calabrese 1993;
Gaetan 1995; Stoll 1995). Such boosterism, and an unthinking cul-
tural migration into cyberspace, they suggest, may in fact result in
less democracy and freedom—and greater exploitation, alienation,
and disparities between the haves and the have-nots. 1
Carey cautions us, however, that this Manichean dilemma is
not especially novel. The dilemma reaches back, rather, to the
founding documents of the American experience—to the debates be-
tween Jefferson and Madison (see the Federalist Papers, numbers X

1