Page 47 - Culture Technology Communication

32 Charles Ess

and traditional societies. And in her analysis, the greatest part of the com-
munication bandwidth of a CSCW system in Japan is devoted to conveying
precisely the non-verbal modes of communication—body posture and dis-
tance, hand gesture, and gaze—that help establish the context (including
relative social and professional status, etc.).
Zaharna (1995) documents the high context/low content character of
communication preferences in Arabic societies. [Westerners in particular
should be careful not to follow media practices of collapsing “Islam” (a reli-
gion encompassing two major traditions, Shi’i and Sunni, along with a rich
and complex heritage of mysticism, poetry, architecture, etc.) and “Arabic”
(a linguistic/cultural category) into other categories better attached to spe-
cific nation-states. What I refer to here as the Islamic world extends from
Africa through the Middle and Far East (including Malaysia and Indone-
sia) to the United States, where Islam is one of the fastest growing reli-
gions today.]
10. This concept of habitus—at work, Lorna Heaton reminds us (in
this volume), in Hofstede’s analyses of cultural patterns and technology dif-
fusion—thus seems consistent with Ihde’s notion of “soft determinism” (see
note 14, below).

11. To begin with, Wang (1991) found in her seven-nation survey of
college students marked differences in cultural attitudes towards the ability
of technology to resolve important social problems: consistent with Carey’s
analysis, she found that Americans were more optimistic than Asians con-
cerning the contribution of technology to democratization. An early indica-
tion that CMC technologies themselves were not culturally neutral was
provided by the reaction of several Asian countries to the possibility of in-
troducing Internet and Web access within their boundaries. Proponents of
the global village, in cosmopolitan fashion, take the values of democratic
governance, individualism, and affiliated notions of human rights (including
the right to free speech) as normative and legitimate for all people; indeed,
a characteristic theme of especially postmodern analyses of CMC technolo-
gies is that they will inevitably extend these values as somehow intrinsic to
their very design (e.g., as the distributed nature of the Internet makes cen-
sorship problematic, etc.). But these values are neither universally shared
nor universally desired, as especially Asian responses to the rise of the In-
ternet demonstrate. Singapore’s reaction was characteristic: “Open the win-
dows, but swat the flies” (Brigadier-General George Yeo, The Straits Times,
18 March 1995, quoted in Low 1996, 12). While the economic advantages of
rapid and extensive information transfer are clearly attractive, Singapore
and other Asian countries, reflecting their own deep cultural traditions,
have mobilized against inadvertently importing other values seemingly
characteristic of CMC technologies, including sexual permissiveness,
pornography, individualism, materialism/hedonism, as well as the values of
democratic polity itself.