Page 19 - Culture Technology Communication

4 Charles Ess

as Western CMC technologies are taken up in Europe, the Middle
East and Asia. Finally, Part III, “Cultural Collisions and Creative In-
terferences on the (Silk) Road to the Global Village: India and Thai-
6
land,” consists of two papers. These echo the patterns of collision and
the emergence of new cultural hybrids out of those collisions docu-
mented in Part II. But they also provide both suggestions for soft-
ware localization (Keniston) and a specific model (Hongladarom) for
understanding how CMC technologies may be used to catalyze global
communication while preserving and enhancing local cultures.
Taken together, these essays demonstrate three key points:

1. While each theory represented here (including postmod-
ernisms, a Habermasian counter to postmodernism, com-
munication theories, and contemporary efforts to predict
network diffusion based on identifiable cultural variables
(Hofstede/Maitland, Bauer) is partially successful in im-
portant ways, no single current theory satisfactorily ac-
counts for or predicts what happens as CMC technologies
are taken up in diverse cultural contexts.
2. Culture and gender indeed play a dramatic role in deter-
mining how CMC technologies are taken up, whether in
the example of listservs and conferencing in an American
classroom (Stewart et al.), or in the multiple cultural col-
lisions documented here in the European context (Rey,
Hrachovec), the Islamic world (Wheeler), India (Kenis-
ton), and the Asian countries of Japan (Heaton), Korea
(Yoon, Fouser), and Thailand (Hongladarom).
3. A middle ground between the polarities that otherwise
dominate American discourse in particular can, in fact, be
theoretically described and implemented in praxis. There
is an alternative to either Jihad or McWorld, to either
postmodern fragmentation or cultural imperialism in the
name of putative universals.

Collectively, then, these essays constitute a distinctive conjunc-
tion of theory and praxis—one that articulates interdisciplinary
foundations and practical models for designing and using CMC tech-
nologies in ways that avoid the Manichean dualism of Jihad or Mc-
World, and mark out instead a trajectory towards a genuinely
intercultural global village. Especially as these essays illuminate the
role of cultural values and communication preferences in the imple-