Page 50 - Culture Technology Communication

Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? 35

nicative advantages of CMC technologies, coupled with rules of discourse de-
rived from Rawls and Habermas, in online dialogues that brought together
participants from widely diverging points of view. Most dramatically, our on-
line dialogue on abortion included a prominent “pro-life” Catholic spokes-
woman, an active “pro-choice” Protestant minister, feminists and other
ethicists. The dialogue exceeded our wildest expectations—and the common
experience of face-to-face dialogues—as it indeed resulted in a remarkable
consensus among the participants, including Protestant and Catholic repre-
sentatives. Participants agreed, namely, that (a) abortion is not a positive
good, and that our society would be improved if the demand for abortions were
reduced, and (b) education could play a prominent role in helping reduce the
demand for abortion. This consensus, finally, preserved irreducible differ-
ences, including those religiously-grounded differences defining Catholic and
Protestant. Each acknowledged that the education programs of his or her own
faith community, while aiming at the same goal of reducing abortion, would
also remain distinctive as these programs would reflect, of course, the basic
values and assumptions of their respective faith communities.
Michael Dahan (1998) is currently seeking to exploit CMC technolo-
gies in a similar but much more ambitious way—namely, in service to the
goal of bringing together Arabs and Israelis.
18. In still other terms, as Ihde’s notion of soft determinism suggests
(see note 14, above), these technologies are intrinsically ambiguous with re-
gard to their social and cultural impacts. As an additional example of such
ambiguity with regard to the political dimension, Voiskounsky (1999) invokes
Adorno’s distinction between democratic and authoritarian personalities. He
then argues that the authoritarian personality will prefer a defined path
through a series of hypertext links, whereas the democratic personality will
prefer maximum choice and control of what links s/he will pursue. Once
again, the same technology—the hypertextual linking that is the essential
structure of the web—can be taken up in two rather distinctive fashions.
This ambiguity and soft determinism thus makes possible precisely
the middle grounds articulated in this volume especially by Keniston and
Hongladarom between a homogenizing globalization and local identities
preserved only through Jihad.
19. In addition to Ihde (1993), see Shrader-Frechette and Westra
(1997) for an overview of these and other basic philosophies of technology.
From a more explicitly Buddhist perspective, Herschock (1999) provides
both an extensive critique of Western information technologies as not only
embedding specific Western values (individuality, freedom, etc.), but also as
thereby colonializing the consciousness of its users in ways that threaten
both their genuine enlightenment and cultural diversity.
As well, Tagura (1997) points out that McLuhan explicitly en-
dorsed technological instrumentalism (McLuhan 1965, 11; in Tagura
1997 ftn. 4, pp. 2f.)