Page 36 - Culture Technology Communication

Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 21

provide a helpful overview of possible definitions, beginning with
Clifford Geertz’s widely used account; they further note that culture
includes norms and values that are not necessarily isomorphic with
linguistic and national boundaries and thereby indicate the limits of
operational definitions that identify “culture” solely with language.
In doing this, Maitland and Bauer further make explicit one of
the central intersections between communication theory, cultural
studies, and philosophy: if culture explicitly includes norms and
values, it thereby involves what philosophers and anthropologists
study as “worldview.” Lacroix and Tremblay (1997) point out that as
the term “culture” refers to norms and values, it thereby refers to
the non-material, and thus to the province of philosophy, including
22
epistemology. Since Aristotle, philosophers have recognized that
the non-material character of values and norms means in part that
they can be known with less precision and agreement on their
meaning than, in Aristotle’s example, the axioms of mathematics
(Nichomachean Ethics 1094b13–27). To develop a satisfactory ac-
count of what “culture” means, then, seems to require just the in-
terdisciplinary efforts of philosophers, cultural scientists, and
communication theorists (among others): to develop such an ac-
count remains a central theoretical challenge. 23
But in addition, while no single theory may be complete, the di-
verse range of theories invoked in this work allow for one theory to
complement the deficits of others. For example, at CATaC’98,
Cameron Richards echoed a common critique of the postmodern ap-
proaches otherwise fruitfully represented here by Jones, Becker and
Wehner, and Yoon. Richards pointed out that postmodern frames,
while useful, cannot justify any normative judgment that distin-
guishes between the use and abuse of CMC technologies, i.e., be-
tween precisely the utopian futures (because more democratic,
egalitarian, etc.) they characteristically endorse and the dystopian
possibilities they shun (because more totalitarian, hierarchical, etc.).
This critique meshes with more broadly philosophical critiques of
postmodernism as relativistic and thus incapable of grounding its
endorsement of democracy over fascism, of equality over privilege,
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etc. To offset this deficit, Richards (1998) turns to Paul Ricoeur’s
hermeneutical approach as providing ways of more coherently justi-
fying our preferences for the utopian possibilities of CMC technolo-
gies. Similarly, in this volume, Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner
take up Habermas’s notion of Teilöffentlichkeiten (partial publics) as
a way of countering postmodern emphases of fragmentation, decen-
tering, chaos, etc. In this way, both contributions present a model of