Intercultural Communication, Identity, and Social Movements in the Digital Age

Margaret U. D'Silva, Ahmet Atay, Margaret U. D'Silva, Ahmet Atay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032400914
  9781138303256
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351399500
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the complex and multidimensional relationship between culture and social media, and its specific impact on issues of identity and social movements, in a globalized world.

Contemporary cyber culture involves communication among people who are culturally, nationally, and linguistically similar or radically different. Social media becomes a space for mediated cultural information transfer which can either facilitate a vibrant public sphere or create cultural and social cleavages. Contributors of the book come from diverse cultural backgrounds to provide a comprehensive analysis of how these social media exchanges allow members of traditionally oppressed groups find their voices, cultivate communities, and construct their cultural identities in multiple ways.

This book will be of great relevance to scholars and students working in the field of media and new media studies, intercultural communication, especially critical intercultural communication, and academics studying social identity and social movements.

Part I
Intercultural Communication, Online Community, and Identity

1
From Pen Pals to ePals

Mediated Intercultural Exchange in a Historical Perspective

Katie Day Good

Introduction

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, a flurry of electronic exchanges took place between schoolchildren in the United States and the dissolving Soviet Union. Logging onto bulletin board systems from computers in classrooms and public libraries, students in California, New York, and West Virginia posted friendly greetings and, as one educator put it, “reached across an ocean, a continent, and the remnants of an Iron Curtain to communicate with their peers in Moscow” (Watson, 1990, p. 109). Their Russian counterparts, many relying on computers and modems donated by Western technology companies or private foundations, answered back with their own greetings and, in one reported case, urgent questions about cars and blue jeans. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a grassroots movement in peace education and a “computer-age Glasnost,” these youthful experiments in electronic goodwill symbolized both the openness of American society and the educational and democratizing promise of its globalizing telecommunications presence in personal computers and the emergent Internet (Melvin, 1988; Reppert, 1990). In the celebratory accounts of the Internet that proliferated during its subsequent commercialization phase in the mid-1990s, no single image more aptly conveyed the revolutionary promise of the technology than that of schoolchildren clustered around desktop computers, connecting with peers in faraway places, exchanging ideas, and becoming the “global citizens” who would one day lead the global information economy (Anonymous, 1993; Frazier, 1996).

I argue that these computer-mediated intercultural exchanges, which have become a mainstay of education in the 21st century, were not so much signs of an unprecedented digital revolution as they were a culmination of nearly a century of organized efforts, many initiated in the United States, to harness networked communication technologies to promote cross-cultural dialogue and American political ideology among youth. Tracing the roots of pen pal correspondences—the Progressive-era, paper-based precursor to contemporary intercultural exchanges that take place online—I show how an ideal that I call mediated intercultural exchange both emerged and endured within educational and popular discourse from the Machine Age to the Digital Age. These grassroots, international exchanges of media texts among children have constituted an influential and overlooked form of global communication in the last century. They have also offered American educationalists, policymakers, and industry leaders a durable trope for imagining the benefits of a world increasingly interconnected by technology.

Mediated intercultural exchange refers to the transfer of media and/or material objects between citizens of different nations and cultures for the stated purpose of making contact across geographic and cultural barriers, exchanging cultural knowledge, and conveying messages of international amity or goodwill. While conducted in the name of education, cosmopolitanism, and international peacebuilding, such cultural practices have historically also served governments and corporations as mechanisms for promoting particular communication technologies and political ideologies. The ways in which American students engaged in this practice in the early 20th century spanned multiple networks and devices, including writing letters to pen pals overseas through the postal system, broadcasting messages of goodwill over the radio, and exchanging cultural tokens of friendship—such as scrapbooks, school supplies, or dolls—with schoolchildren overseas through transoceanic shipping routes (Dowling, 1928, pp. 174–180; Fletcher, 1937).¹ In the digital age, these sorts of multi-mediated exchange practices continue to thrive in both physical and virtual form, and they remain as diverse as the technologies available and the participants involved. Popular programs include ePals, or pen pal exchanges conducted over email; telecollaboration, or the use of web technologies to complete shared projects online between classrooms in different countries; and coordinated swaps of symbolic objects, such as handmade paper dolls called “Flat Stanleys,” through the postal system or in the suitcases of travelers. In many cases, students virtually track and chronicle the journeys of these physical objects with digital tools such as blogs, email, and social media (Good, 2016; Guth & Helm, 2010; O’Dowd, 2007).

The thread uniting these diverse cultural exchange practices across eras, technologies, and modalities is their shared emphasis on engaging youth through networks of international communication to foster intercultural dialogue and understanding. In ways that resonate strikingly with millennial discourses about the digital age, the first decades of the 20th century were hailed by social observers as a new era defined by rapid technological advancement, ubiquitous communication, and global connectivity—an “age of super-contact” and a “shrinking world” (Dowling, 1928, p. 102; Popp, 2011, p. 459). Commentators variously celebrated and fretted over the global proliferation of new technologies of communication and transport, including motion pictures, newspapers and magazines, radio, telephones, airplanes, and automobiles. These technologies enabled ordinary people to not only consume unprecedented amounts of information about the world but also to directly contact and communicate with others in new ways and across vast distances (Czitrom, 1982; Fischer, 1994).

For educators and policymakers, the influx of immigration and the outbreak of the First World War heightened concerns about preparing young people to become not only patriotic citizens of the nation with shared American values but also informed and internationally aware “world citizens” who could defend democracy and free-market capitalism in an increasingly multicultural society and tumultuous international landscape (Carr, 1928; Center, 1933; Stratton, 2016). As former President William Howard Taft wrote in the introduction to A Course in Citizenship and Patriotism, a wartime curricular guide for teachers created by the peace education organization the American School Peace League, the war presented American schools with a dual obligation to not only transform the nation’s immigrants into “law-abiding, patriotic citizens [who will contribute…] prudential virtues, and civic activity, to the general welfare,” but also to “impress upon the youth […] the idea that we are not the only people in the world; that we should earnestly cultivate friendship and sympathy with other peoples” (Cabot, Andrews, Coe, Hill, & McSkimmon, 1918, pp. xiii–xiv).

In this climate, pen pal exchanges emerged as a popular teaching tool and symbol of the utopian potentials of a more interconnected world. Through “this friendly intercourse,” wrote Josephine Doniat (1904), an Illinois high school teacher, on the rise of international correspondences between students in the United States and Europe at the turn of the century,

the student gains a fund of information about the manners and customs of the foreign nation, and as he grows to respect and even love his partner, he realizes that foreign modes of life, while they may be different, are not, on that account, inferior to his own.

(p. 77)

As the prominent peace educator Florence Brewer Boeckel observed over two decades later, the surge of global connectivity brought about by modern technologies of communication and transport was felt not only in the high-level domains of geopolitics and commerce but also in the everyday lives of ordinary youth:

With the coming of steamboats and locomotives fast mails were built up, and now, by telegraph, cable, and by radio it is possible to send a message all the way around the earth in a few moments. It is not only grown people who send messages back and forth on business, but from children too letters are being sent in all directions, asking questions about what it is like to live in other countries.

(Boeckel, 1928, p. 92)

Boeckel (1928) was one of many educators to highlight both the technological modernity and grassroots accessibility of pen pal exchanges, marking them as an emerging form of communication that could bring peace and stability to the “closely related world” of the new century (p. 1). For years before the media theorist Marshall McLuhan would make his famous proclamations in the early 1960s about the advent of a “global village” of nations intimately interconnected through new electronic media, educators were already praising the exchange of letters and other cultural materials through the mail for “cultivating good international relations at the John-Doe level,” or creating democratic pathways and practices of global interaction beyond the gated domains of mass media, international trade, or diplomacy (de Zafra, Jr., 1953, p. 305; Hawk, 1936; MacDonald, 1939; McLuhan, 2001).

Recovering the history of international pen pals and other mediated intercultural exchanges enriches our understanding of the techno-utopian discourses and assumptions that have historically underpinned the expansion of communication networks and practices from the industrializing West to the non-Western world. Traditionally, histories of long-distance international communication have focused on communicators who were predominantly male and professional, and messages related to matters of colonial administration, commerce, mass media, or geopolitics (Mattelart, 1994; Thussu, 2006; Winseck & Pike, 2007). According to Carolyn Marvin (1990), these dominant figures in the telegraph era envisioned the value of a networked planet in terms of its capacity not for genuine cross-cultural dialogue but rather for Anglo-Saxon values and notions of progress to travel more efficiently from the civilized center of the West to the “less-fortunate periphery” (Marvin, 1990, pp. 192–193). It is only recently, with the advent of the Internet, that amateur media users—particularly women and youth—and multilateral media flows are gaining scholarly attention for their role in fostering more democratic, participatory, and dialogic forms of international communication (Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010; Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, Kligler-Vilenchik, & Zimmerman, 2016).

Turning toward neglected historical practices of mediated intercultural exchange in early 20th-century schools reveals that efforts to associate emerging technologies with ideals of global citizenship and intercultural goodwill are not unique to the Internet age, nor are they politically neutral. Teaching young Americans to engage in personalized, youthful, and authentic communication across borders has long aligned with the nation’s interests in expansionism and empire, even as these practices have also been touted by educators as uniquely progressive teaching devices for eradicating prejudice and promoting peace. The historically fraught nature of these exchanges can thus help to illuminate some of the contradictions underpinning the World Wide Web and contemporary virtual exchange practices in education, which are both hailed for their participatory and global nature and criticized as yet another tool of American hegemony and electronic imperialism (Ess, 2002; Fabos & Young, 1999; Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2005).

Origins of Pen Pals

Contemporary exchanges of media between schools have roots in the international correspondence movement, a turn-of-the-century effort led by European educators to coordinate educational letter writing between university and secondary school pupils in England, France, Germany, and the United States (Doniat, 1904; Magill, 1902; Stoker, 1933). As early as the 1890s, educators praised international correspondence for enlivening the study of foreign languages and geography and promoting an unprecedented sense of mutual awareness, neighborliness, and friendship among students in different nations. As one German schoolmaster wrote in 1899,

Since so many thousands are corresponding with each other, we may say that the different countries which, up to this date, were used to consider each other as mortal enemies, only thirsting for each other’s blood,… are linked together by new ideas, by peaceful thoughts, by mutual respect and love.

(Thiergen, 1899, p. 7)

International letter writing between strangers gained visibility in American culture during the First World War, as churches and voluntary organizations sent relief supplies to allied countries in Europe and received letters of thanks in return. Some of these correspondences continued for years (Roehm, 1928, p. 57; Wells, 1935). But American participation in the school correspondence movement remained limited until after war’s end, when teaching international understanding and “world friendship” emerged as a new priority for progressive educationalists (Carr, 1928; Dowling, 1928; Stoker, 1933).

The first large-scale effort to promote international correspondence between students in the United States and abroad began in 1919, when the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, established the Peabody National Bureau of Educational Correspondence. The initial aim of the Peabody program was to facilitate letter exchanges between students in the United States and France to commemorate and build on the wartime alliance between the two nations. Within its first year, the bureau matched an estimated 18,000 pairs of American and French students, taking care to ensure that there would be an even geographic distribution of letter-writers so that a single class of French students would receive letters from various parts of the United States and vice versa (Anonymous, 1920; Oliver, 1919). The program grew quickly with the endorsement of a number of leading educational agencies and associations, including the National Education Association (NEA) and the US Bureau of Education. By the mid-1920s it expanded to coordinate correspondences between students in the United States and China, Japan, Germany, Spain, and parts of Latin America.

Promotional literature for the Peabody program emphasized the importance ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Contributor Biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cultural Identity and Activism in Digital Spaces
• PART I Intercultural Communication, Online Community, and Identity
• PART II Intercultural Communication and Online Social Movements
• Index