Handing Down of Culture | Chapter 5 | Serge Proulx

Chapter 5 | Serge Proulx

(continued)

Let us now focus our remarks on the most recent innovation in communication: the interactive systems mediated by the computer and the “cyberculture” they generate (Jones, Ed., 1995; 1997). The Internet was initially an American invention which involved the armed forces, universities and then, more and more, the forces of the capitalist market. This “network of networks” is coloured by that birth, through the Anglo-American language which is heavily emphasized in the protocols of interconnection and in software languages. This is not said to minimize the efforts of other linguistic communities to assert themselves in the design of specific interfaces and protocols of the Internet. But the markup protocol is, no doubt, one of the most visible signs of the initial American predominance on the web — even taking into account the fact that some planners think the English language will not occupy more than one third of the territory on the information highway in 2002, because of the growing involvement of other countries in the network, such as China (Bélair, 1999). Or that, for example, in a chat on line between and among Francophones, it is still necessary to use English words like list, act or display.

But, as Internet use becomes more widespread throughout the world, the cultural models built around this technical invention are going to be plural, hybrid and heterogeneous; they will gradually distance themselves from their Anglo-Saxon culture of origin. Technical innovation is a process of dynamic creation: the outlines of the apparatus are constantly being modified. On the one hand, the balance of power goes up and down inside the sociotechnical networks where innovation occurs (Bijker and Law, Eds., 1992). On the other hand, the network takes on the influences of uses and reception, borrowing and re-invention (Perriault, 1989). We can easily anticipate that the wider the area of dissemination of innovations becomes, the easier it will be for the logic of these technical devices to differ significantly from their initial configurations.

2. québec identity and cultural globalization

As for networks of interactive communication and cyberculture, I have tried to show that the status of the human subject participating in the process of cultural creation is doomed to be radically changed. The foundations of the identity of the cultural receptor are shaken up. The plural identities of the human subject living in the interactive world will be perceived by him as unstable and floating (Baltz, 1984; Turkle, 1995). This question of the “floating identity” of the new communicating subject is worth some attention. Those interactors are working in new spaces of communication opened up by the convergence between the classic cultural industries and the new interactive systems, two domains largely under the influence of American knowhow.

It is necessary, it seems, to have second thoughts about the relationship between, on the one hand, what is called usually the Québec identity and, on the other hand, the ways of doing things imposed upon us by our southern neighbour through their design of software, and the technical configurations of systems and interfaces. One would be tempted here to refer to the metaphor of the technological Trojan horse — used by Yves Toussaint (1992) to describe the intrusion through new media, of public space into the private universe — to display clearly the fact that with an unconditional adoption of a technical device like the Internet, one is also importing its organization of communication and knowledge, and its values and ways of doing things. At the same time, it seems clear that the interactors are learning something new through use of the device — as much about the content they create or exchange as about it itself — and that the new knowledge isn’t necessarily linked with the technology through which it appeared. This is the way one could state that the network is transforming itself constantly and dynamically; but still, the technical configuration of the device is, in a way, a kind of “programming” of the possibilities of its uses (Woolgar, 1991). In the last resort, it is not because this new technical culture is American in origin that there is a danger that it could undermine the identity of the communicating subject. It is more because this technique introduces a new relationship to the world. The Americanicity of its creators is secondary when seen as a source of influence, in comparison with the cognitively structuring force of interactive communication networks taken as an intellectual technology.

Interactive communication networks, in generating their own culture, create the question of a new technological culture that may change the identity foundations of Québec Internet users. We face here a tension between two knittings of contradictory cultural forces. On the one hand, their active participation in the construction of a “planetary cyberspace” (Benedikt, 1991) could make them forget that, being part of a society which is demographically small (such as Québec or Canada), it is necessarily vital, for individuals and the groups they belong to, to vigorously assert their primary identity. On the other hand, the question of their basic identification is upset by the process of globalization and hybridization of cultures the world over. The openings set up by cyberculture could then allow for a renewed strengthening of Québec’s identity through the multiplication of new intercultural dialogues with countries far away from the usual geopolitical axis of the circulation of information.

Chapter 5, continued >