Culture, Technology, Communication

Towards an Intercultural Global Village

Fay Sudweeks, Charles Ess

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780791450161, 9780791450154
• eBook ISBN: 9780791490488
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Stability and success in our electronic global village increasingly depends on the complex interactions of culture, communication, and technology. This book offers both theoretical approaches and case studies of these interactions from diverse cultural domains, including Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. This global perspective helps to counteract the Anglo-American presumptions that have dominated discussion and literature on computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies. The contributors uncover and challenge the culture-bound values and communicative preferences inherent in CMC technologies—including values and preferences related to gender—and also document non-Western examples of implementing these technologies in ways that catalyze global communication while preserving and enhancing local cultures. Taken together, these essays articulate the interdisciplinary foundations and practical models necessary to design and use CMC technologies in ways that help us to avoid the choice between a global but culturally homogenous "McWorld" and fragmented local cultures whose identities are preserved only in their opposition to globalization.

Table of contents

• Culture, Technology, Communication
• Contents
• Foreword by Susan Herring
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What’s Culture Got to Do with It? Cultural Collisions in the Electronic Global Village, Creative Interferences, and the Rise of Culturally-Mediated Computing by Charles Ess
• I. Theoretical Approaches: Postmodernism, Habermas, Luhmann, Hofstede
• II. Theory/Praxis
• III. Cultural Collisions and Creative Interferences on the (Silk) Road to the Global Village: India and Thailand
• Contributors
• Index