[Air-l] cultural history of the Internet

[Charles Ess]

Colleagues:
It would be shameless self-promotion - except that I'm really putting
forward here the work of many different researchers, whose writing I and Fay
Sudweeks have had the honor of editing...

1. While it is a different sort of cultural history -
the various chapters collected in the recent volume issuing from our
Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication conferences
illuminate the culturally-embedded values and communication preferences of
the Internet as initially a North American - indeed, arguably a
middle-to-upper class white male - medium of communication.  They do so in
part by documenting the _conflicts_ between these embedded values and
preferences and those of other cultural groups within the U.S. (Asian
American and African American),  several European cultures (German and
German-speaking, and the French-  and Italian-speaking cultures of
Switzerland), and those of Kuwait (with a focus on women in this Muslim
country),India, Japan, Korea, and Thailand.  These conflicts emerge, simply,
as Western-designed CMC technologies are imported and deployed within these
diverse cultural contexts.
Title: Culture, Technology, and Communication: Towards an Intercultural
Global Village.  Edited by Charles Ess, with Fay Sudweeks.  Foreword by
Susan Herring.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.

2.  Similarly, three articles collected in the most recent issue of New
Media and Society (September, 2001 - Vol. 3, No. 3) likewise uncover and
document such conflicts as they emerge especially among indigenous cultures
(the Kelabit people of the Borneo Highlands and numerous African tribes now
part of South Africa) and the distinctive culture of the Philippines.
Again, both individually and taken together, these articles help highlight
the cultural values and communicative preferences embedded in CMC
technologies that originate in the West - as well as various ways in which
diverse peoples and cultures avoid a form of "computer-mediated
colonization" by taking up CMC technologies in ways consciously intended to
avoid inadvertent importation of Western values and preferences - but rather
to preserve and enhance their own distinctive values and preferences.
(New Media and Society - co-edited by aoir's very own Nicholas Jankowski -
has much more to recommend it to aoir folk as well!)

I hope this helps.  And anyone interested in contributing to this sort of
cultural anthropology of the Net and other CMC technologies is encouraged to
consider CATaC'02, which will be held next July in the lovely city of
Montréal, Canada - our first venue on the North American continent.  See the
conference website, URL below.

Cheers and all best wishes,

Charles Ess
Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center
Drury University
900 N. Benton Ave.                          Voice: 417-873-7230
Springfield, MO  65802  USA            FAX: 417-873-7435
Home page:  http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
Co-chair, CATaC 2002: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac02/
"...to be non-violent, we must not wish for anything on this earth which the
meanest and lowest of human beings cannot have." -- Gandhi