Page 18 - Culture Technology Communication

Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 3

ing the American values of democracy, equality, free speech, etc. But
this suggests in turn two central points. First, the assumptions and
values shaping our discourse about CMC technologies may be cul-
turally limited: if we explore cultures outside the American orbit, we
may find quite different and distinctive assumptions and values.
Second, in doing so, we may find alternative ways of understanding
the potentials of CMC technologies that allow us to escape, in par-
ticular, the Manichean opposition between computer-mediated
utopias and dystopias.
The papers gathered here represent precisely an interdiscipli-
nary effort to explore the role culture plays in forming our funda-
mental beliefs and values—not only with regard to communication
and technology, but still more fundamentally towards such basic val-
ues as those that cluster about our preferences for democratic polity,
individual autonomy, etc. They do so through the lenses of especially
three disciplines:

philosophy—as, among other things, an effort to articulate
and critically evaluate fundamental assumptions, including
the assumptions regarding values (ethics and politics), real-
ity (as restricted to the material or not), knowledge (what
counts as legitimate knowledge and how legitimate knowl-
edge(s) may be acquired), and identity (including assump-
tions about human nature, gender, etc.) that define the
worldviews definitive of diverse cultures;

cultural studies—including, but not restricted to, anthro-
pology, sociology, as well as the “sciences of culture” (Kultur-
5
wissenschaften) supported in European institutions, and so
forth; and
communication theory—including intercultural
communication.

The papers in Part I, “Theoretical Approaches: Postmodernism,
Habermas, Luhmann, Hofstede,” introduce us to the major theoreti-
cal frameworks shaping contemporary analysis and discourse: post-
modernism (Jones), Habermas and Luhmann (Becker and Wehner),
and Hofstede (Maitland and Bauer). Part II, “Theory/Praxis,” consists
of case studies and research projects from diverse cultural domains
that foreground specific cultural values and preferences, and how
these interact with CMC technologies developed in the West. These
papers document both cultural collisions and creative interferences