Page 49 - Culture Technology Communication

34 Charles Ess

this soft determinism involves impacts of greater subtlety than impacts we
would anticipate from a relationship of hard determinism between machine
and user (197, 200). But we can observe here that while soft determinism
thus preserves some room for individual and cultural choice in the face of
new technologies, the very subtlety of technologies’ impacts makes it all the
more difficult to discern and anticipate these impacts, and thus to exercise
choice in an informed way.
Of additional interest here, Street (1992) synthesizes many of these
critiques in what he calls a “cultural approach” to technology, precisely in
order to address the problem of democratic control of new technologies, con-
trol both promised and potentially frustrated by the new communications
technologies (cf. Volti 1995). Both Street and Ihde (1993), moreover, counter
the claims of technological determinism in part precisely by documenting
how different cultures respond in different ways to technology and techno-
logical innovations. Most recently, Borgmann (1999) offers an especially
powerful appreciation of the differences between natural and artificial forms
of reality and information.
In the literature of communication theory, critiques of technological
determinism are also developed by Ang (1990), Calabrese (1993), Venturelli
(1993), Wong (1994), and Tremblay (1995). In particular, deterministic/
materialist frameworks ignore the ability of individual persons to respond
to and mediate larger cultural and technological influences in various ways
(cf. Hall 1992, Lee et al. 1995). This ability is documented especially in
Gudykunst et al. (1996), who found that individual communication prefer-
ences are not only the behavioral result of larger cultural preferences
(along a spectrum of collectivist societies/low-content messages to individ-
ualist societies/high-content messages), but also correlate with individual
self-construals and preferences.
As we are beginning to see (cf. notes 10, 11, above), these critiques of
technological determinism in the literatures of both philosophy and commu-
nication theory are consistent with the empirical findings presented in this
volume.
15. But not impossible. Beyond the efforts at such control we have al-
ready seen, it is worth noting that Saudi Arabia currently seeks to control
and monitor information by relying on a single Internet node through which
all communication into and out of the country must pass. This contrasts, in-
terestingly enough, with China and other countries which, while seeking to
monitor and control Internet traffic in some measure, are developing more
decentralized and arguably more open infrastructures (Winship 1999).
16. See note 14 above.

17. Such middle grounds, in my view, realize the best promises of CMC
technologies. As a much more modest but related example, see Ess and Cava-
lier (1997). Here we document our efforts at the Center for the Advancement
of Applied Ethics (Carnegie Mellon University) to exploit familiar commu-