Page 48 - Culture Technology Communication

Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 33

These fears are not groundless: there is evidence that the new media
do shape new, more individualized conceptions of self-identity, conceptions
directly in conflict with traditional Asian worldviews (Goonasekera 1990).
Singapore’s effort to carefully control the information conveyed through In-
ternet connections so as to preserve Asian cultural values against Western
permissiveness, etc., is especially well documented (Low 1996; Wong 1994;
Sussman 1991; on Malaysia, cf. Ang 1990). Indeed, the attitudinal differ-
ences noted by Wang (1991) are mirrored in practice; Tan et al (1998) found
that CMC technologies reduced status effect in both the US and Singapore,
but Singapore groups, as more conscious of status, were still able to sustain
status influence. At the same time, however, a recent report on websites lo-
cated in Singapore—including sites for a sex club, gay and lesbian rights,
etc.—demonstrates that governmental efforts to “swat the flies” have not
been entirely successful (Ho 2000). Such results, on first glance, are consis-
tent with Deborah Wheeler’s findings reported here: while CMC technolo-
gies may have a liberating effect, especially among the younger generation,
the use of such technologies also mirrors prevailing cultural values. More
broadly, these findings mesh with Ihde’s notion of soft determinism (see note
14, below), a philosophical understanding of technologies’ impact that fur-
ther coheres with Keniston and Hongladarom’s notions of “dual citizenship”
in both “thick” local culture(s) and a global but “thin” (and thus not hege-
monic) Internet culture.
12. Hongladarom (2000) helpfully summarizes Walzer’s distinction
by observing that “thick” morality is locally based, and is expressed in part
through specific histories, narratives, and myths that help constitute a
given culture’s sense of identity. A “thin” culture, by contrast, can be widely
shared across specific cultures because its content—including key terms
such as “justice” and “truth”—is open to a wide range of interpretation and
thus application in diverse contexts.
13. As Caroline Reeves (1999) points out, Robertson (1992) developed
the term “glocalization” to describe the sort of synthesis and hybrid that
Hongladarom develops here. See also Hongladarom (2000).
14. Several philosophers of technology, especially those concerned
with the relationships between technology and democracy, have criticized
technological determinism on numerous grounds. In addition to Habermas
and his predecessors in the Frankfurt School (especially Marcuse 1968), the
most notable include Jacques Ellul (1964), Albert Borgmann (1984), Lang-
don Winner (1986), Andrew Feenberg (1991), and Don Ihde (1975, 1993).
Ihde (1975) is particularly helpful here as he distinguishes between a
hard and soft determinism. Using the example of the typewriter, he argues
that phenomenologically, the machine cannot fully determine (hard deter-
minism) the use of one style and the abandonment of another, “. . . but it
can, through its speed, ‘incline’ the user away from the [belles lettres] style
by making that style more difficult to produce” (197). On Ihde’s showing,