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