This issue’s co-editor’s column takes a personal tone in combining two of my life’s interests, technology and culture. Recently I have been expanding my view of multicultural counseling to include an understanding of counseling beyond the confines of what we see as culture in the United States to be inclusive of world cultures. Addressing “The Digital Divide” is about addressing the equity of access to technology by various cultures (primarily with an Americentric emphasis of under-represented groups in the United States). The issue of access and the Digital Divide is still a very valid one (U.S. Department of Commerce), but underlying technology and culture are fundamental questions about how different cultures incorporate technology into their lifestyle. Two experiences of global travel that I have had this year provoked me to consider the implications of personal technology adoption from a cultural framework.
One of my first cross-cultural revelations regarding the use of technology came during a trip to Istanbul. I was invited to Istanbul in November of 2002 in an exploratory exchange between Kent State University and Bahcesehir University and then again in March of 2003 to be a keynote speaker at the Ugur Career Services Center Career Fair to a group of Turkish school counselors. From my first trip there I noticed how contemporary Turkish citizens have adopted cell phones as a primary method of communication. This might not sound too revolutionary in itself, but what was striking to me was how the technology changed “Westernized” norms of communication patterns. It was not uncommon for me to be in formal, and informal, meetings where someone’s cell phone would ring. The meeting member would excuse themselves, stay with the group, and take the call in the middle of the meeting. Sometimes this would stop the process of the meeting, but more often the meeting would continue with some subgroup of members. This action occurred so commonly that I begun to get used to seeing this phone call as not an interruption but as a added member to whatever group I was a part of at the time. Stepping back from the experience and learning a bit about the adoption of cell technology in the country, I had a chance to put this into a cultural and technological perspective.
In the democratic development of the country beginning in 1923 with the reforms of Mustafa Kemal (Attatürk) to its present day, Turkey has been a progressive, industrious, fast-paced country. Given limited
resources, there is not the large competitive marketplace. In the U.S., for example, our technology adoption patterns are greatly affected by the size of the market and the number of competitive technologies in the market. In Turkey, with the advent of cellular phone systems, particularly GSM-based systems in the last five years, the people have reduced interest in extending the land line telephone infrastructure and are now fully adopting cellular phones. In the United States, the complexity of choices reduces the speed of our adoption by the sheer size of the market place. In Turkey, my impressions were that their current pace of economic development pushes them to adopt technology and incorporate it into society at a phenomenal rate. If there is an ‘evolution’ of technology in Turkish society it has rapid paradigm shifts compared to our small but steady steps in the West.
Another example of this rapid paradigm shift occurred when I was involved in the Ugur Career Services Center Career Fair. The week prior to the Career Fair, while working with the staff of the Career Center,
I made a high-bandwith videoconference (Polycom ©) with my Advanced Multicultural Counseling class at Kent State University and the staff of the center (Jencius and Kurter, in press). After that successfully connection, it was requested that we do the same connection for the Career Center at the Career Fair. My Turkish colleagues were able to immediately see the implications of the technology and take it, and my responsibility, to the next level. The end result was a live, global, videoconference projected to the career fair participants. The videoconference was a real time connection between representatives of Kent State University and the Minister of Education in Turkey. As I stood back from the process, I reflected on how they had adopted and transformed the use of this technology in less then one week. Before the week was finished there were discussions about purchasing high-bandwidth videoconferencing systems for use in connecting the Ugur Career Center’s five national offices for providing career services and also creating a closer linkage with Kent State University. If the videoconferencing technology adoption pattern parallels the culture’s adoption of cellular phone technology, I can only dream about where my Turkish colleagues will be in five years with videoconferencing.
My next experience in culture and technology came in October 2003 in a teaching assignment as part of the University of Buffalo’s Department of Counseling, School and Educational Psychology’s offshore School Counseling Masters program offered through the Center for American Education in Singapore. Singapore, the “Manhattan of Southeast Asia” provided me with opportunities to see how people adopt technology in one of the largest marketplaces in the world for technology. I observed technology adoption in a variety of settings. The students in my class on Family Counseling, although only a small sample, were by far more technology savvy then their counterparts in the U.S. Unique to this situation of course is that these students commute from differing parts of the country and in some cases even different countries. I was impressed with the development of the informal cohort network which actively used technology as a means to not only pass communication but to share efforts and many times be two steps ahead of me as the instructor. My nights teaching and my days out to see parts of the country let me see how other residents use technology. Culturally, there is an order and determined pattern to the society. I was impacted by how environmentally clean the city was for such a large metropolitan city. My resident students informed me that that the country has many strict rules enforced by expensive fines that impact public behavior. Whereas they relish in the beauty of the country, as it was expressed to me, that they realize overshadowing this is the penalties imposed for violations of the public trust.
The more time I spent there the more I became aware of the societal sense of order. Flat screen monitors on the subway systems indicating when the next train would be coming into the stop and projections of time to various future stops along the route. One of the rail routes is run without a conductor, completely automated. Arrow patterns on the ground before the doors to indicate flow patterns for those entering the subway cars and exiting the subway cars. In walking through the underground network of connecting tunnels and attempting to follow a path, the directional signs were placed at the precise moment when I needed to look for them, not at points before to add to my directional confusion. Intentionality was a pervasive pattern not only in the design of the subway but also in the architecture, landscaping and national gardens.
I could not find a person without a cell phone in Singapore. Children as young as 10 years old seemed to be included as cellular users. They were more than prevalent, they were a cultural signature. The most popular retailers, surrounded by crowds, were always cell phone dealers and those selling interchangeable covers for cell phones. In my travels, calls were always being taken or made. More commonly text messages were being communicated (I saw some of the fasted thumb typists I have ever seen.) The subway trips to and from class consisted of riders who were engaged in some way with connecting with others using technology, either through calls, text-messaging or interactive games.
Singapore is a central world market for technology and technology stores pervade the city. During my visit there I managed to make it to one of the country’s largest shopping centers dedicated fully to technology products, Sim Lim Square. Sim Lim Square is actually a seven story building that is filled with shops that focuses on various electronics and technologies, with computer technologies the brunt of the operation. Every conceivable technology at every conceivable price. After visiting Sim Lim I can see how the culture has embraced technology, it permeates the marketplace.
Both of these trips raised the issue for me that we still have a very narrow vision of technology and how people use it in the United States. The inclusion of technology into the mainstream of communication challenges us to think
in less “techno-ethnocentric” ways. Technology and diversity goes beyond the digital divide (The Digital Divide Network) and access to technology. Technology access for people in many cultures still remains an issue but underlying the access is how cultures integrate technology into their lifestyle and ways of thinking and communicating. There are cultural and global implications on how people react to, adopt, use and respond to technology implied from my limited travel experience. As we begin to integrate technology in the counseling field, I would encourage you to consider adding the culture-specific considerations of how people use technology.
Jencius, M and Kurter, M. F. (In Press, 2004). The use of videoconferencing networking as a global means to career counselor education. In C. W. Minor and M. Pope (eds.) Experiential Activities for Teaching Career Course and Leading Career Groups, Vol. 2. National Career Development Association/ACA: Alexandria, VA