The burgeoning literature on CMC (represented by the Internet and the Web) often presents us with a stark choice between utopian and dystopian futures: Will the rapid expansion of the Internet inevitably bring about greater democracy, free speech, and individualism (the "electronic global village")? Or will these technologies turn on us, destroy our humanity, and allow totalitarian regimes greater control over individuals and peoples than ever before?

Stated so sharply, these extreme poles of the "Manichean" dilemma characteristic of much of our discourse concerning new technologies (Carey, 1989) invite critical analysis. Indeed, behind these visions lie a number of assumptions that require closer scrutiny.

The utopian perspective of the electronic global village rests on the following assumptions:

In addition, both the utopian and dystopian poles rest on a further assumption:

That is, proponents of the electronic global village often speak of the inevitable expansion of the Net and the Web, and the equally inevitable spread of democracy, free speech, and prosperity in its wake (see, for example, Negroponte, 1995). In the inverse dystopian image (say, of the Borg in Star Trek), technology is likewise an unstoppable force; once infected by the Borg implants, all humanity (meaning specifically such qualities as individual choice and compassion) is los t as one becomes a machine-like component of the Collective.

Uncovering and questioning such assumptions is a central function of philosophy. One approach to these issues, therefore, is through the discipline of philosophy and history of ideas. For example, someone familiar with the history of philosophy will recognize the assumption that there is a universal human nature - a human nature that will make a peaceful cosmopolis ("world city") possible - is Stoic in its origin. This ancient Greek philosophical school argued, over against the particular cultures and cultural ethnocentrisms of its day, that while other characteristics might be culturally shaped and thus culturally variant, human reason was both universally shared and capable of overcoming particular ethnocentrisms in order to make one a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world (not just a particular country). This Stoic assumption deeply influenced subsequent Western philosophies and religious thought; it is embedded, for example, in St. Paul and thus Western Christian traditions, as well as in the Enlightenment arguments for democracy, familiar to us in John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.

But this excursus through the history of Western ideas suggests a second approach to these questions. The excursus makes the point that, paradoxically, this belief in a universal human nature is a marker of (some) Western cultures, not all cultures. This observation forces the question:

In short, how far does culture play a role in shaping our acceptance or skepticism regarding these assumptions? And, if these assumptions are not universally shared, what are the prospects for the visions resting on these assumptions - visions ranging from the utopian global village to our transformation into the Borg?

When pointed out in this fashion, these assumptions seem both obvious and questionable. Despite the proliferation of scholarship on CMC, however, the literature contains very few analyses of the role that culture might play in shaping our fundamental assumptions and attitudes towards technology and communication. At the same time, the relatively small body of earlier work demonstrates that there are indeed deeply-rooted differences between such cultural attitudes. These differences are first apparent in the resistance of many Asian countries to the introduction of the Internet and the Web, precisely because they fear the inadvertent but perhaps unavoidable importation of Western values along with the technologies (Ess, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c).

Asian resistance thus calls into question the cultural neutrality of technologies that emerged in the West (Assumption 3), and thus encourages more broadly critical inquiry into the interactions between culture, technology, and communication. First results of such critical inquiry are collected here.

The diverse and interdisciplinary papers in this special issue could be organized in more than one way. We have chosen, however, to collect them under three headings:

1. Theoretical Approaches
2. Theory/Practice: Research and Field Reports
3. Cultural Studies in CMC

Steve Jones, Understanding Micropolis and Compunity, reviews a number of important communication theorists, including Ong and McLuhan, as he develops his own metaphors of "path" and "field" to discuss the influence and meaning of Internet messages. In particular, he takes up Carey's distinction between ritual and transportation models of communication to address "compunity", the merger of computers with communities and our sense of community - a merger that is strained between the traditions and rituals of real life and the kinds of communication as transportation facilitated through CMC. Jones analyses four areas - privacy, property, protection, and privilege - as central to possible on-line communities.

We begin with Jones' analysis first of all because it effectively portrays the postmodernist approaches that have fueled much of the initial enthusiasm for the utopian possibilities of CMC among Anglo-American scholars, including the specific hope of recapturing and/or creating new forms of human community online. But Jones further uncovers important ambiguities in such efforts towards online community; he points to recent work which shows that these efforts are only partially successful, and that they i ntroduce in their wake new difficulties distinctive to cyberspace. Indeed, such ambiguities were echoed and reinforced by several CATaC analyses and research projects. In this way, Jones may be read as limning the broad outlines of theory suggested by CATaC presentations taken as a whole. He points to a theoretical pluralism, one which modifies and supplements postmodern frames with additional theoretical contributions (e.g., from Habermas, hermeneutic philosophy, technological diffusion theory, and others) as necessary to our efforts to more fully understand culture, technology, and communication. Hence his paper provides a frame-setting introduction to the other papers in this special issue.

Barbara Becker and Josef Wehner, Electronic Media and Civil Society, provide an example of how to conjoin postmodernist with other sorts of theory, as they take up Nicolas Luhmann’s analysis of cyberspace as chaotic in postmodern ways (i.e., as fragmenting, decentering, etc.) along with Habermas' conception of Teilöffentlichkeiten ("partial publics"). These partial publics include professional organizations, non-governmental organizations, community pressure groups, local activities, special interest groups, etc., as the loci of discourses that contribute to a larger democratic process in modern societies. Becker and Wehner argue that, in contrast with mass media which established a kind of global public opinion, interactive media seem to support the development of partial publics; that is, discourses characterized by context-specific argumentation strategies and themes. While recognizing certain problems with how far such partial publics may be instantiated through CMC techno logies, they see Habermas' theoretical concept as articulating an important way in which CMC technologies may sustain (within limits) specific interest groups as part of a larger democratic process. Indeed, several examples reported at CATaC98 seem to exemplify this notion of a partial public, e.g., McConnell's (1998) report on NGO's in Uganda. Finally Becker and Wehner argue that interactive electronic media will not replace traditional mass media, but, in line with the hopes of Western enthusiasts, that e lectronic media will probably support movements of civil society. At the same time, however, given the limits they observe to partial publics, coupled with the chaotic effects described by Luhman, the question remains open for Becker and Wehner as to whether electronic media will contribute to a more global political consensus within a society by overcoming discourse-specific perspectives.

Carleen Maitland, Global Diffusion of Interactive Networks: the Impact of Culture, seeks to build on Hofstede's schema of cultural analysis in order to develop predictive hypotheses concerning network diffusion. Hofstede's schema, including a later modification, is described by Maitland. She presents a number of predictions about how interactive networks will be diffused given different types of cultures and variables such as status, gender and power. While Maitland is the first to acknowledge the tremendous range of difficulties in attempting to develop quantitative measures of national cultures, she nonetheless persuasively argues that such quantitative efforts should be undertaken, in conjunction with qualitative approaches. Her work, we will see, finds support in the studies by Stewart, Shields and Sen, as well as Heaton's work on Japanese CSCW.

Soraj Hongladarom, Global culture, local cultures, and the Internet: The Thai example, examines two threads of discussion developed in a Thai Usenet newsgroup, one dealing with critiques of the Thai political system and the other with the question of whether Thai should be a language, perhaps the only language, used on the newsgroup. In contrast with concerns that CMC technologies will erase local cultures and issue in a monolithic global cultures, Hongladarom argues that the Internet facilitates two different kinds of communication: (i) communication that helps reinforce local cultural identity and community (in part, as this communication fulfills what Carey calls the "ritual function"; that is, strengthening community ties); and (ii) communication that creates an "umbrella cosmopolitan culture" required for communication between people from different cultures.

Hongladarom further suggests that we distinguish between a Western culture, which endorses human rights, individualism, egalitarianism and other values of a liberal democratic culture (a "thick’ culture in Walzer’s terms), and the cosmopolitan culture of the Internet as neutral (a "thin’ culture). The Thai experience suggests that - contrary to initial Asian fears - the Internet does not force the importation of Western cultural values. Instead, Thai users are free to take up such issues and values if th ey wish, and they can do so while at the same time preserving their cultural identity. Indeed, local cultures may retain their "thickness" - their deeply rooted and complex systems of values and preferences - as these reshape CMC technologies to fit those values and preferences more closely. In fact, in the interaction between the global and the local, creative new mixtures emerge, such as the Thai electronic coffee house and the highly visual Japanese CSCW system described by Heaton.

Concetta Stewart, Stella F. Shields, Nandini Sen, Diversity in On-Line Discussions: a Study of Cultural and Gender Differences in Listservs, report on their study of listserv participation in an effort to determine how far participation in CMC environments is correlated with culture and gender. They begin with an exceptionally helpful overview of significant theoretical approaches to issues of cross-cultural communication, including specific attention to gender. In particular, their discussion of Hofstede's cultural categories and Ting-Toomey's face-negotiation theory provide additional theoretical background for Maitland's and Heaton's work.

Indeed, Stewart et al.'s analysis of listserv participation is consistent with patterns already suggested by earlier and current research on culture and gender as shaping communication styles and preferences (see, for example, Herring, forthcoming). In their study, while male users were slightly outnumbered by female users, men generated more than twice as many messages as women. By the same token, while white Americans constituted less than one third of the user population, they generated more than half of all messages. As well, white American males communicated in ways designed to preserve individual face, over against more collectivist styles used by other participants.

The number of participants in this listserv was relatively small (22) and it would be perilous to draw strong conclusions from just one study. Nonetheless, if Stewart et al.'s results are generalizable, they would suggest that gender and culture do indeed make a difference - a difference that currently works to reinforce unequal patterns of participation in CMC environments, rather than fostering equality.

Lorna Heaton, Preserving Communication Context: Virtual Workspace and Interpersonal Space in Japanese CSCW, identifies a number of culturally-grounded differences in communication preferences between US and Japanese users in her report on Japanese redesigns of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) systems. She addresses, for example, the commonly noted difference between a Japanese emphasis on the social self (i.e., as defined within a set of social hierarchies and patterns) and the Western focus on the individual self (i.e., as largely independent of a defined social context). Further, as with many traditional cultures, Japanese culture involves a greater emphasis on the context of communication - including cues regarding social position as conveyed through gaze and gesture - in contrast with Western cultures which emphasize the content of communication (cf. Zaharna, 1995). These communicative requirements led Japanese engineers' reworking CSCW systems to include an extensive visual "telepresence" of collaborators, so that communication elements conveyed through gesture and gaze were "naturally" presented and apparent among users. Heaton's report is an important documentation of how "other" cultures reshape CMC technologies so that they better suit the cultural values and preferences of the new host culture. Her work also reinforces Hongladarom's observations of Thai users appropriating "alien" CMC technologies in ways that reinforce rather than replace "local" communic ative preferences and cultural values; this makes clear that Hongladarom's larger model of CMC technologies involving both local, "thick" cultures and a global but "thin" culture rests on more than an isolated Thai experience.

Herbert Hrachovec, New Kids on the Net, reports on his pioneering efforts to exploit CMC technologies for philosophical purposes - the construction, as he puts it so delightfully, of an electronic space of Reason. Using the Bildungsroman as the genre most suited for his exposition (part narrative, part reflection, interwoven with important lessons drawn from experience and reflection), Hrachovec reviews the history of three German-language discussion lists as instructive episodes in this effort. In addition to several specific insights, he draws from his experience more general - and possibly generalizable - lessons regarding both the fits and misfits between CMC environments and the academic projects of teaching and learning philosophy. In particular, he notes the conflict between the "mildly hierarchical" structures of teaching and learning and the "inherent egalitarianism" of e-mail. He further observes that because electronic interactions dramatically alter our experience of time a nd space, the metaphor of the electronic classroom is only partially useful. He concludes that despite certain postmodern attractions of the new media (including non-linear argument as facilitated in multimedia environments) that we should not expect much philosophical content from exchanges via CMC.

He calls us rather to think more clearly regarding the presuppositions underlying a "hybrid" technology, as it promises a global, context-independent communication alongside very specific, context-dependent expectations. From the standpoint of this nuanced skepsis, he finds postmodern enthusiasms for the new media to be open to question, especially in light of his experience. But he also observes that similar questions must be raised regarding more cautious approaches to these new technologies.

Lucienne Rey, Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication across the Multiple Cultures of Switzerland, literally maps the political differences between the four major linguistic groups of Switzerland - German, French, Italian, and Romansch - and then seeks to determine whether these ethnic/linguistic differences also correlate with different attitudes towards technology. Her findings make clear that the German-speaking part of Switzerland, the most politically and economically dominant c omponent of the country, is the most conservative with regard to new technologies. German-speaking Swiss show less openness to, and interest in, new communications technologies than their Latin compatriots. Rey suggests that this cultural attitude may have two roots. First, she notes that German scepticism towards progress through technology is rooted in the German Romantic tradition - a tradition that reacted against the Enlightenment and the early stages of mechanization as brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Second, she observes a contrast between the playful characteristics of Swiss-French and the seriousness of the Swiss-Germans. Rey hypothesizes that, given the playful dimensions of interactions on the Net and the Web, it is likely to be more attractive to the French than the Germans.

These papers make clear that, indeed, diverse cultural values and distinctive communicative preferences play a central role in shaping individual and cultural responses to new communication technologies, especially as these technologies favor and embed culturally-specific values and communicative preferences (contra Assumption 3). At the same time, individuals and groups within specific cultures can both resist and reshape these technologies so that they more closely reflect local cultural values and communication preferences (contra Assumption 4). These findings suggest that clear communication among the world's peoples, as facilitated by CMC technologies, is by no means a straightforward matter of wiring the world with Western-based technologies. On the contrary, if there is to be a genuinely egalitarian (if not especially democratic) "electronic village" on a global scale, it would appear that such a village will require both a "thin" Internet culture (for communication on the large scale) and the use of CMC technologies to preserve and enhance the values and preferences of local cultures. In the intersections between these global and local layers of communication lies the promise of rich "cultural interferences" (McCarty, 1998); that is, creative new syntheses of local and more global elements. At the same time, attempting to cross these intersections - to communicate cross-culturally via technologies that themselves may favor specific cultural values and communicative preferences wh ile disfavoring others - will likely contribute as much to the opacity of communication as to its clarity. If clear communication is a necessary condition for peaceful co-existence (Assumption 2), then we can only be guardedly hopeful that CMC technologies may contribute to such communicative clarity.

These results leave unresolved the fundamental question: Is there a human nature sufficiently universal that a unified and democratic global society is both possible and desirable (Assumption 1)? This is in part because the question may be irresoluble (as especially some existentialist philosophers would argue). But we can say with somewhat more assurance that the Manichean choice before human beings between technologically-mediated utopia and dystopia is a false dilemma. The choice rests on several key assumptions (Assumptions 2, 3 and 4), which prove false in light of this more recent research. As these assumptions collapse, so the Manichean polarity evaporates. In its place stands the guardedly optimistic view - now informed by several successful examples documented here - that global uses of CMC technologies may stand comfortably alongside myriad local uses. This more complex model may seem less thrilling than the utopian vision of an electronic global village, and certainly less terrifying than the dy stopian vision of Big Brother - now become the Borg. But it is one whose complexity is more in keeping with the complexities of human behavior and history, and whose range of choices seem preferable to utopian or dystopian futures ostensibly imposed upon us by an "autonomous technology" that humans cannot control.

In particular, there is room in this complex middle ground for a guarded optimism that CMC technologies may contribute in important but limited ways to a communicative clarity on a global scale. This optimism differs importantly from the utopian presumption of an autonomous technology that will inevitably impose democratic values; such optimism, rather, is possibly only on the condition that both designers and users pay much more attention to the influences of culture and cultural differences in their de velopment and appropriation of CMC technologies. To echo our Preface, a proactive approach, resting on a rich understanding of diverse cultural values and communicative preferences, is required of all who seek to realize the Stoic dream of a global village via CMC. The technologies will not do this portion of our work for us.

This collection of papers is the genesis of new interdisciplinary research at the intersections of culture, communication and technology. There is much more to be done.

Ess, C.: 1998a, Cosmopolitan ideal or cybercentrism? A critical examination of the underlying assumptions of "The Electronic Global Village.’ American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Computers and Philosophy 97(2), 48-51, http://www.drury.edu/faculty/ess/papers/cybercentrism.html.