Page 35 - Culture Technology Communication

20 Charles Ess

insights into network diffusion in the Islamic world, especially with
a view towards the role of gender.

Theoretical Limitation: Religion
“Religion” is ordinarily recognized as a major source (either directly
or indirectly) of the worldview of perhaps all people. Nonetheless, re-
ligion is striking for its absence in these papers—again, with the ex-
ception of Deborah Wheeler’s study of women in Kuwait.
This absence raises several questions. American academic cul-
ture, for example, seems uniformly hostile to raising questions of re-
ligion, at least outside of religious studies and some sociology circles.
This disciplined silence, no doubt, has several roots, ranging from
the influence of positivism (which simply discarded all religious
claims as nonsense while re-explaining them in materialist terms) in
the academy to a characteristically American notion that “religion”
is a matter of private concern only, one not to be brought up in polite
society.
Such silence is a sensible strategy in the face of the power of
religious issues to (literally) explode the fabric of civil society, as
they have done throughout much of Western history, including
early American colonial experience, contemporary UK experience,
etc. But it seems clear (as Wheeler’s chapter demonstrates) that
any adequate account of “culture” and CMC must squarely face the
religiously-shaped components of culture and worldview, or demon-
strate that religion is fully reducible to the components of culture
identified by Hofstede, Hall, etc.
Theoretical Issues and Questions: Culture and Worldview;
Postmodernism, Habermas, and Hermeneutics
As noted in the opening paragraphs, no single theory yet adequate
accounts for all the complex interactions between culture, technol-
ogy, and communication. First of all, as Rey points out, one of the
central conceptual challenges for any theory—and thereby, any em-
pirical study—is to provide a satisfactory account of what “culture”
means. By operationalizing her definition of culture in terms of lin-
guistic boundaries, Rey is able to provide her most intriguing empir-
ical analysis of the contrasts between German- and Latin-speaking
Swiss. Heaton’s use of Hofstede and others also shows the power of
developing operational definitions (see also Smith et al. 1996). And
both Heaton and Yoon add to this operational approach in part as
they take up Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Maitland and Bauer also