Page 25 - Culture Technology Communication

10 Charles Ess

technologies versus the “high context/low content” character of
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communication in Arabic societies. Deborah Wheeler, in “New
Technologies, Old Culture: A Look at Women, Gender, and the In-
ternet in Kuwait,” takes up the familiar promise claimed by West-
ern proponents of CMC technologies—that they will promote
democracy, prosperity, and equality, including gender equality—
and tests this promise against a careful ethnographic study of
Kuwaiti women and their use of the Internet. Her case study is
valuable first of all as it sheds light on a little researched but crit-
ically important series of intersections: Islam and sharply-defined
gender roles vis-à-vis a communication technology hailed by West-
ern feminists for its promise of expanding gender equality. In addi-
tion, Kuwait is especially instructive insofar as it enjoys one of the
highest per capita incomes in the world. These and other charac-
teristics mean that if there is resistance to new CMC technologies,
such resistance is not obviously the result of infrastructure
deficits, an entrenched anti-technology culture, or extreme patri-
archal structures.
Wheeler’s analysis of how far the Internet and the Web serve
the cause of gender equality shows decidedly mixed results. On the
one hand, her interviews with younger women support the notion
that these new technologies do have a liberating impact. For exam-
ple, they allow women to converse “unescorted” with men in chat
rooms, and to meet and choose mates on their own (rather than
agree to the cultural norm of arranged marriages). At the same time,
however, she finds that the powerful restrictions against women
speaking openly in Kuwait are directly mirrored in differences be-
tween women’s and men’s characteristic use of CMC technologies. As
she observes, “The advent of new fora for communication does not
automatically liberate communicators from the cultural vestiges
which make every region particular and which hold society to-
gether.” While Wheeler concludes on a hopeful note, she reminds us
nonetheless that activism is always local and thus shaped by specific
institutional and cultural imperatives.

c. EAST-WEST/EAST

Contrary to the view that technologies are value and culturally neu-
tral, in “Preserving Communication Context: Virtual Workspace and
Interpersonal Space in Japanese CSCW,” Lorna Heaton presents
two case studies to show how cultural values and communication
styles specific to Japan are incorporated in the design of computer-