Page 51 - Culture Technology Communication

36 Charles Ess

In his study of ideology and technology transfer in the Philippines,
Tagura argues, to the contrary, that technology—specifically communication
technology—is not culturally neutral; he finds, instead, that technology is
“the simultaneous bearer and destroyer of values” (Tagura 1997, 21, refer-
ring to Goulet 1977, 17–24).
Tagura’s study is an excellent example of an interdisciplinary ap-
proach to questions of technology, culture, and communication. It is useful for
its bibliographic resources on the core concept of “culture” as well as philoso-
phies of technology. Tagura draws on rich philosophical (including Haber-
mas, Winner, and Borgman) and religious (including Buddhism and Gandhi)
traditions to argue for ways of encouraging economic and political develop-
ment in the Philippines that flow from the values of “justice, equity, efficiency
for all, cultural and ecological integrity, and the elimination of large scale sys-
tematic violence from human life.” (171). Given his extensive analysis of the
Philippine case, Tagura argues that this Philippine version of democratic de-
velopment will require basic structural changes, beginning with changes in
property ownership and relations (land reform), the development of decen-
tralized “People’s Organizations” (similar to the “base communities” of Latin
America, including explicit ties to liberation theology), and greater Philip-
pino (rather than multi-national) control over technology transfer. He ac-
knowledges the importance of the sorts of localization of CMC technologies
highlighted in this volume by Keniston: but such localization is literally a
footnote in his lengthy concluding chapter (see Tagura, ftns. 49, 50, p. 205).
The point here is not simply that Tagura’s study, while exemplary
and useful, remains limited for our purposes insofar as his consideration of
communication technology pays virtually no attention to CMC technologies
and computer networks (as appears to be appropriate, given the Philippine
case). At the same time, Tagura thus offers us another counterexample to
the general (Western) emphases on CMC technologies as central to global
democratization and economic prosperity.

20. For example, Adrie Stander (1998) helpfully documented the var-
ious cultural barriers encountered in attempting to teach computer use
among students representing South Africa’s many indigenous peoples, be-
ginning with interface icons utterly meaningless outside Western cultural
contexts (cf. Evers 1998). Similarly, Turk and Trees (1998) examined the
conflicts between especially the epistemological assumptions built into
Western information technologies and those characteristic of three indige-
nous peoples in Australia: see also Turk and Trees (1999).
21. Interestingly, these absences may be in part explained by some
of the theoretical and practical insights garnered at CATaC’98 itself and
represented in this volume. In particular, several CATaC’98 presenters re-
ferred to Hall’s distinction between high content/low context (e.g., US cul-
ture and, arguably, extant CMC technologies) vis-à-vis high context/low
content (e.g., Lorna Heaton’s account for Japan; cf. Gill 1998). It is already