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Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 25

horts, and to encourage her cohorts likewise to achieve a more com-
plete understanding of what lies beyond the boundaries of their own
ethnos, beyond their ordinary experience of the everyday. Similarly,
in the religious stories of many cultures, this task—the discovery of
realities beyond ordinary experience, and the integration of these in-
sights and noumenous powers into the everyday—is central to the
process of growing up. 29
On the academic level—and in a more homely metaphor—the
scholars and researchers who presented and discussed at CATaC’98
described themselves as intellectual mutts, as hybrids and cross-
breeds who could not be categorized within a single discipline. And
so the essays collected here likewise cross boundaries. As they docu-
ment cultural collisions and collusion from interdisciplinary and in-
tercultural perspectives, they may contribute to our readers’ own
discovery of new cultural and communicative views and beliefs and
thereby contribute to their own boundary crossings (academic and
beyond) and resulting constructions of more complete, multicultural
worldviews.
Indeed, becoming such multicultural persons in these ways is
not simply a project of individual significance, reserved only for the
few (as Plato’s allegory suggests). Rather, these essays argue in at
least two ways that our becoming multicultural is a necessary com-
ponent of an electronic global village that aims towards an inter-
cultural synthesis of the global and the local. Most apparently:
Keniston’s model of dual citizenship in what Hongladarom de-
scribes as a thin global culture and thick local cultures requires
that such citizens themselves become cultural hybrids—precisely
the multicultural persons who can integrate and live in multiple
worlds. Secondly, and at a still more philosophical level: these es-
says undermine both technological instrumentalism and (hard)
technological determinism. This means especially that an elec-
tronic global village marked by specific human values—including
respect for cultural diversity—will not emerge automatically on its
own as an inevitable consequence of CMC technologies (so techno-
logical determinism). Rather, the goal of an intercultural global vil-
lage will require us to attend not simply to the technologies
involved, but, more fundamentally, to the social context of the use
of these technologies. In particular, a new form of cosmopolitanism
developed among the users of these technologies—the cosmopoli-
tanism of dual citizens in both thick local cultures and a thin
global culture—would appear critical to the development of a
global democracy.