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Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 31

because it reinforces a Western stereotype of Islam as a warlike religion—
a stereotype that takes a very tiny number of “fundamentalists” to be rep-
resentative of all Muslims. Such a stereotype is false and misleading, and
runs counter to the spirit of dialogue intended here.
4. In this context, I use the term “American” as a convenient short-
hand to refer specifically to the cultural mixtures and discourses character-
istic of the United States.

5. Kulturwissenschaften—literally translated as “cultural sciences”—
is distinct, however, from Cultural Studies as defined in the Anglo-American
context. The German term refers specifically to the “contents and traditions
of cultural analysis and cultural theory in the German-speaking world, and
secondly to . . . comparable schools of thought in other academic cultures
and traditions.” (IFK news 1/99, 30).
6. The phrase “creative interferences” was introduced into our dis-
cussions at CATaC’98 by Willard McCarty. The analogy between the Silk
Road and the wires and fiber holding together the Internet was part of
David Kolb’s closing remarks. See below, p. 28.
7. As David Kolb (1996) has already eloquently argued, we are crea-
tures of finite time and space; as such, in the face of the exponentially in-
creasing amount of information available on the Net, we will turn increasingly
to centers and portals to help us navigate its oceans of information.
8. Indeed, several examples reported at CATaC’98 seem to exemplify
this notion of a partial public: this conception seems borne out in praxis by
the empirical examples of NGO’s in Uganda (McConnell 1998) and “Celtic
Men” (a men’s discussion group, Rutter and Smith 1998).
9. The distinction between “high context/low content” and “high
content/low context,” derived from Hall (1979), is widely used in commu-
nication theory and emerges as a central theoretical element in several of
our chapters. Briefly, the contrast—illustrated in this volume perhaps
most dramatically by Lorna Heaton’s description of CSCW systems in
Japan—draws attention to communication preferences that stress the di-
rect and efficient delivery of content, with relatively little attention to con-
text (including the gender and relative social status of sender and
recipient, their professional status vis-à-vis one another, and other so-
cially-defined aspects of identity having to do with “face”). A standard e-
mail message is a good example of high content/low context. The textual
component—the majority of the information of the message—is the cen-
terpiece; questions of gender, social status—indeed, in some cases, even
the identity—of the sender and recipient are not always an obvious com-
ponent of what is communicated. By contrast, “high context/low content”
reverses these emphases. As Heaton and others make clear, such “high
context/low content” communication is much more characteristic of Asian