With apologies for self-promotion... Fay Sudweeks and I have been collecting research on culture vis-a-vis technology and communication for nearly six years now. Several papers and related chapters from our conferences - "Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication" (CATaC), beginning in 1998 - have been published in a variety of places, including special issues of the Electronic Journal of Communication (on the www.cios.org website), AI and Society (1999), Javnost (1999), and new media and society (if memory serves: vol. 3, no. 3 - September, 2001) Our book, _Culture, Technology, Communication: Towards an Intercultural Global Village_ (with a foreword by Susan Herring), made up of CATaC'98 and related papers, was published by SUNY Press in 2001. We're just finishing the reviewing process for CATaC'02 - in Montreal this July 13-17. There are a large number of excellent papers from a range of cultural contexts that will be accepted for presentation. I'm sorry I can't give more precise details - including the URL for the CATaC'02 conference. The joke is - I'm in Thailand currently, relying on an Internet cafe for e-mail. Certainly good enough for most purposes - but all the appropriate data is in my (unconnected) laptop. The Thailand connection is worth mentioning as well: there is a conference here in a few days on "Information Technology and the Universities of Asia." I can tell you that in preparing for my talk - yes, indeed, there's more and more good research on the differences (and similarities) between cultures vis-a-vis IT. Indeed, in my own research, it was the conflicts between Western and Asian cultures that first began to pop up on the scholarly radar screens, suggesting that these cultural differences were significant - especially as obstacles to the more sanguine (if not imperialistic) visions of an "electronic global village" that at least North Americans happily swam in in the 1980s and (early-to-mid?) 1990s. Some of the earliest discussions of this that I have found are from around 1990. But there still was very little - no more than a handful of articles - so far as I could tell by 1998, when we held our first conference. Since then - though I do not any special claim credit for this - the literature has dramatically expanded and matured. Thailand is a particularly appropriate place to consider these things - the Thai language presents notorious problems for Western-based computer systems (beginning with the problem of no standardized system for transliteration into Roman characters). At the same time, my friend and colleague, Soraj Hongladarom (Chulalongkorn University) has presented what I still find to be one of the most helpful models for conjoining a global communication medium with uses of IT that preserve and enhance local cultural identities. Yes, you can find his chapter in our book (smile!). This interesting hybrid model may have something to do with Thai culture itself. It is, with Japan, a country that has never been militarily colonized, but represents the (relatively) peaceful amalgamation of a range of cultures and peoples - not only the various Thai peoples, more narrowly speaking, but also Chinese and (East) Indian peoples/cultures/religious traditions. The famous Chinese gods of prosperity, happiness, and longevity sit comfortably next to numerous Hindu gods and goddesses - and larger buildings, from luxury hotels to Police Headquarters are marked by spirit houses for propitiating what religion scholars categorize as animist entities. A Japanese worshipper offering incense to the Hindu elephant god can also calmly take a call on her cellphone: there seems to be no sense of lines crossed - if there is much of a Western sense of lines at all. (I realize that this comfortable pluralism is characteristic of many Asian societies: I can't say how far Thailand is distinctive in this. If I make any progress in this direction of research, I'll happily pass it along.) In any case, if you'd like more details, please e-mail me privately and I'll respond more fully as soon as I can. With all best wishes from Bangkok, Charles Ess Interdisciplinary Studies Center Drury University Springfield, Missouri 65802 USA -----Original Message----- From: Lokman Tsui To: air-l@aoir.org Sent: 30/3/45 6:47 Subject: [Air-l] intercultural communication Hello, I was wondering if anybody knows of any prior research / literature about intercultural communication mediated over the internet or other electronic media, in specific between the west and asia. i came across the following: Ma, Ringo, ??Computer-Mediated Conversations as a New Dimension of Intercultural Communication between East Asian and North American College Students,?? in Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1996. pp.173-185. regards, Lokman Tsui National Taiwan University / Leiden University _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l