Page 324 - Culture Technology Communication

Global Culture, Local Cultures,
and the Internet:
The Thai Example

Soraj Hongladarom

Introduction

The growth of the Internet is a world-wide phenomenon. From a rela-
tively obscure academic tool, the Internet has become a household fix-
ture and now it is hard to find anyone without an e-mail address or a
personal home page. Cyberatlas (<http://www.cyberatlas.com/
geographics.html>) reports by pinging 1% of all the Internet hosts
that in January 1996 there were 9,472,000 distinct hosts, and
16,146,000 in January 1997, an increase of 170%. As more and more
people are becoming wired, the Internet itself is fast becoming as per-
vasive as televisions and radios. However, its ability to generate
many-to-many communication sets it apart from these traditional
mass media. This gives the Internet a strong potential in forming com-
munities, and where there are communities, there are cultures unique
to each community. The potential of the Internet in forming “virtual”
communities incurs a number of problems, chief among which is the
relation between the community formed by the Internet itself and the
existing communities bound by locality and cultural tradition.
The Internet at the moment is still predominantly American, but
it is increasingly global, with more and more countries adding more
and more host machines, expanding the network at a breathtaking
speed. Network Wizard (<http://www.nw.com/>) reports that the
growth of Internet hosts in 1994 was 15% in Asia alone, and in Thai-
land the growth rate was as much as 53%. This expansion has cre-
ated a problem of how local cultures adapt themselves to this novelty.
As a quintessentially Western product, there is clearly bound to be a
contrast, if not necessarily a conflict, between non-Western cultures

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