Page 17 - Culture Technology Communication

2 Charles Ess

and XIV) concerning the role of the new federal government in sub-
sidizing canals and roads. Since democratic polity requires debate
and exchange among citizens, it had been argued since Plato that
such polities were “naturally” limited—in effect, by the prevailing
communication technologies of direct speech and travel by foot or
animal. The concern of Jefferson and Madison was how to overcome
these natural limits—a necessity if the new republic of thirteen
colonies were to be democratic in any meaningful sense. In a con-
ceptual and philosophical maneuver that Carey believes has be-
come definitive of American attitudes regarding technology,
Jefferson and Madison turn to communication technologies—in
their day, canals and roads—which could overcome the otherwise
natural limits to democratic polity. 2
In this way, Carey suggests that American culture is shaped
from the founding of the Republic with a belief that technology, espe-
cially communication technologies, can facilitate the spread of de-
mocracy and democratic values. Our tendency to debate new
technologies in Manichean terms thus falls out of what amounts to a
larger cultural assumption that such technologies may overcome oth-
erwise intractable barriers to democratic polity and, should they fail
to do so, only the worst anti-democratic possibilities will be realized.
This Manichean debate, moreover, manifests itself on a global
scale in the duality identified by political scientist Benjamin Barber
as “Jihad vs. McWorld” (1992, 1995). Barber observes that globaliza-
tion—brought about in part precisely through contemporary tech-
nologies which transfer goods and information with ever greater
speed and efficiency—tends towards a homogenous “McWorld” in
which all significant cultural and linguistic differences are collapsed
into a global consumer culture whose lingua franca is English and
whose primary cultural activity is trade. In the face of this powerful
threat to cultural identity, Barber argues, we thus see “Jihad,” the
rise of local autonomy movements that can become notoriously vio-
lent in the name of cultural survival. 3
If these Manichean dualities represent prevailing presumptions
and debates concerning the exponential expansion of computer-
mediated communication (CMC) technologies, these oppositions may
not be as intractible as they seem. Indeed, we may question these
dualities on several levels, beginning with just the point raised by
Carey’s analysis of this Manichean debate as distinctively American
4
in character. That is, Carey thereby brings to the foreground the
role of culture in shaping our discourse and assumptions about com-
munication technologies and their ostensibly crucial role in sustain-