Page 27 - Culture Technology Communication

12 Charles Ess

interviews with young Koreans (“Gen-Xers”). While she is careful to
recognize that the results of her small sample cannot be generalized,
her interviews demonstrate that the Internet exercises symbolic or
positive power—including symbolic violence in Bourdieu’s sense—as
it shapes educational rules and linguistic habits. In particular, Ko-
rean students accept the on-line dominance and importance of En-
glish without question. Language thereby becomes a cultural capital
that exercises “. . . symbolic power over the cultural have-nots in the
virtual world system,” a cultural capital that induces a “voluntary
subjugation.” At the same time, however, Yoon documents how indi-
viduals take up the Internet, not because of its promise of greater
equality and democracy, or even utility, but, rather to the contrary,
because it increases their status, and thereby their distance from
and power over others. As well, the comparative expertise of young
people gives them considerable power over their elders because
teachers, principals, and parents rely more and more on the younger
generation to help them learn how to use computers, design institu-
tional documents and web pages, etc. Contrary to the presumption
that the Internet only democratizes, Yoon demonstrates that the In-
ternet, by shaping habitus in these ways, can lead either to resist-
ance or subjugation, to democratic communication, or (cultural)
capitalist dominance. Consequently, she argues, we must better un-
derstand the concrete processes of how the Internet functions as the
habitus of people in their everyday lives before attempting to decide
which of these two directions the Internet might take us.
Robert Fouser, in “Culture, Computer Literacy, and the Media
in Creating Public Attitudes toward CMC in Japan and Korea,”
brings together a wide range of information (a review of web sites
vis-à-vis print media, attitudinal survey data, comparative studies
of GNP and CMC infrastructure, recent scholarship, and personal
interviews) to develop a clear picture of the striking differences
between Japan and Korea with regard to attitudes towards and uti-
lization of new communications technologies, including CMC tech-
nologies. It may come as a surprise to Westerners to learn that while
Japan is materially wealthier than Korea, and perhaps better
known in the West for its prowess in developing and marketing new
technologies, Koreans show a greater interest in and usage of CMC
technologies than the Japanese. Fouser reviews two theories that
might explain these differences. The first is a “culture” theory which
focuses on a shared set of values and attitudes; the second is a “com-
puter literacy” theory that looks instead to the pragmatic elements
of cost, and ease of use. For example, Korean, as a language which,