Mind the cultural gap
Published: 31 Oct 2001 17:17 GMT
The real problem is one of cultural incomprehension. About four years ago, I sat in on meetings with senior managers from a large US company -- which, for the sake of argument, we'll call Microsoft -- and listened to their plans for the future of software distribution. Grandiose ideas were unveiled, including ones where people would have a phone line just for connecting to the company's computers and constantly downloading components as and when they needed them. "Sounds very expensive" we said. "Oh, no, we'll charge less than we do now", they said. "But the phone charges!" we squawked. In over a year of planning things the American Way, the idea that phone calls weren't free hadn't been considered, let alone that this may colour the way people considered online. Or take Intel, which sent an anthropologist to Europe to see what people were up to but didn't quite believe her when she said that, "they're all sending messages to each other over their mobile phones".
Cultural ignorance has much greater dangers than making companies look foolish -- it'll be years before we know just how many corpses are due to George W. Bush calling the fight against terrorism a crusade. The question is: can we use the new digital world to fight such blinkered views, when centuries of liberal thought and well-meaning education have so obviously failed?
The good news is that people genuinely want to know. We might see flag-encrusted hotheads on television calling for Afghanistan to be nuked into a car park, but it's the thoughtful books about the history of Islam that top the bestseller lists. Prospect, the terminally thoughtful magazine, has cover-mounted a CD-ROM with the Koran and an introduction to Islam, and online discussion areas are buzzing with people talking about Sunni and Shia. You can't find many people prepared to wholeheartedly endorse the diagnosis from the US Government, that the terrorism is due to jealousy of our freedoms and riches -- and we want to know what's really going on. Sadly, looking through the Media Lab's list of 300 projects, not one seeks to bridge cultures. The C word is almost never used. The one project that explicitly mentions anything other than Western urban life, "Learning for Rural Communities", proposes that computer technology can be used to "enhance student learning" and "infuse new meaning into rural educational settings". The idea that meaning from such places desperately needs to be infused into our own settings is as alien as Uranus.
Still, one can't expect too much from a place whose director -- yep, Nick N. again -- says that in the future, "you are going to see the UN becoming either irrelevant or much more important." Perhaps the real experiment in cultural communication is coming from all of us, with every Geocities Web site about Islam that goes up, every email conversation that sparks off from a discussion on Usenet. Next time you see an exercise in fatuous flatulence from a stuffed shirt -- or even a rambling hack -- online, give it a miss and spend the time looking at ideas from real people, further afield. It may be the only thing that saves us.
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