Page 28 - Culture Technology Communication

Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 13

like English, uses an alphabet system rather than the highly com-
plex character systems of Japanese and Chinese, is much easier to
enter through a keyboard than Japanese or Chinese. Fouser finds
that the notion of “culture” is too broad to account for a Japanese
lack of enthusiasm for CMC in particular, over against their more
positive attitudes towards other new technologies (including mobile
phones). Instead, he argues that more pragmatic elements, includ-
ing political leadership in encouraging the use of new technologies,
are better predictors of technology diffusion.
First of all, then, Fouser’s work—especially as read together
with Yoon—helps us develop a more nuanced understanding of how
CMC technologies are taken up in two distinctive Asian societies.
Secondly, his work illustrates the limits of cultural approaches to
questions of technology diffusion and helpfully demonstrates that
such cultural approaches must be complemented with pragmatic
considerations of political leadership, etc. In this second direction,
his work should be taken together with the several other contribu-
tions gathered here, including Maitland and Bauer’s quantitative
analysis of culture, that both individually and collectively help us
better understand the difficulties of developing meaningful defini-
tions of “culture”—and the necessity of complementing even the best
definitions with additional conceptual frameworks if we are to de-
velop a more complete understanding of the interactions between
technology and culture.

Part III. Cultural Collisions and Creative Interferences on the
(Silk) Road to the Global Village: India and Thailand
Some of the first indications that Western-based CMC technologies
did indeed implicate culturally-distinctive values that would clash
with the values and preferences of other cultures were documented
11
in Asia. Two final studies in this collection—the first on localized
software in India, the second on an “electronic Thai coffee house”—
document how local cultural values indeed collide with the values
apparently shaping Western CMC technologies.
But these two chapters further demonstrate that cultural colli-
sions [and with them, the danger of imperialism and “cultural
steamrolling” (Steve Jones 1998)] are not the whole story. Rather,
Kenneth Keniston argues for ways to overcome the otherwise daunt-
ing obstacles to “localizing” software. Yoon and Fouser amply demon-
strate the power of English as the lingua franca of the Web:
localization seeks to counter this power on a first level, as Keniston