Page 22 - Culture Technology Communication

Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 7

7
participants, there is less and less time to listen.” Nonetheless,
Becker and Wehner draw on Habermas’s conception of Teilöf-
fentlichkeiten (“partial publics,” including professional organizations,
university clubs, special interest groups, etc.) as loci of discourses
that contribute to a larger democratic process in modern societies.
Over against the anti-democratic impacts of CMC, they see this
Habermasian notion as describing an important component of how
CMC technologies may sustain (within limits) a “civil society” as part
of a larger democratic process. 8
Carleen F. Maitland and Johannes M. Bauer, in “National
Level Culture and Global Diffusion: The Case of the Internet,”
start with a careful inventory of the theoretical and practical ob-
stacles to undertaking especially quantitative research into the
impact of culture on the diffusion of technology. In the face of these
difficulties, Maitland and Bauer first modify and enhance diffusion
theory so that it may take up extant quantitative data to explain
and predict technology diffusion on a global level. They then move
from theory to praxis by providing a case study of such analysis as
applied to Internet growth. Previous research has tended to focus
on matters of economy and infrastructure with relatively little
work in the area of culture, in part because earlier work has shown
that economic factors are the stronger predictors of technology
adoption. In order to test these findings and their own enhance-
ments of earlier diffusion theory, Maitland and Bauer build espe-
cially on the work of Hofstede and Herbig to include three cultural
factors in their study: uncertainty avoidance, gender equality, and
English language ability.
Their extensive statistical study draws on a considerable range
of data sources, as available for 185 countries during the time period
between 1991 and 1997. In examining Internet growth between
countries, they find that cultural variables are less significant in ex-
plaining adoption than economic or infrastructure variables: of
these, teledensity, international call cost, and school enrollment
emerge as the strongest predictors, the last finding supporting the
importance of education in development. For that, the cultural fac-
tor of English language ability also plays a significant role. In ana-
lyzing growth within countries, their data likewise uncovers a
comparatively stronger role for economic factors—in this case, the
number of PCs per capita. But cultural factors—namely, uncertainty
avoidance and gender empowerment—also play a significant role.
Maitland and Bauer’s work is significant because it refines diffu-
sion theory so as to more adequately take into account specifically