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“Culture,” Computer Literacy, and the
Media in Creating Public Attitudes
toward CMC in Japan and Korea

Robert J. Fouser

Introduction

Two views of computer-mediated communication (CMC) have pre-
vailed since it first attracted public attention in the early nineties.
To optimists, CMC frees people from the physical constraints of time
and space and the social constraints of race, gender, and class. The
computer screen allows people to presented a liberated version of the
self to a virtual community of other liberated selves. The optimists
(e.g., Rheingold 1993; Connery 1997) extend this view to argue that
CMC creates new virtual communities that help expand democracy
and level the playing field for participants in the global economy.
The pessimists (e.g., Stoll 1996; Turkle 1996), on the other hand,
view CMC as the final stage in the dehumanization of society. They
argue that anonymity of CMC encourages aggressive communicative
behavior—flaming, vulgar language, hacking, and Web pornogra-
phy—to a greater degree than face-to-face communication. Popular-
ized by journalistic writers such as Rheingold, Stoll, and Turkle,
these views have become part of contemporary cultural folklore as
the media appeals to images of a “cybertopia” or the fear of a “cyber-
hell” to stimulate the public imagination.
As Internet use and CMC have spread around the world, these
views have a number of “mirror sites” around the world. Two techno-
logically advanced Asian societies, Japan and Korea, offer an inter-
esting look at the reception of CMC as a social phenomenon in
industrialized non-Western societies where electronically mediated
communication interacts with traditional communication patterns.
Both have a large number of computer users and subscribers to

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