Abstract
Intercultural information ethics (IIE), a field which draws on the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information and communication technology, has been argued to lack an adequate theoretical understanding of culture. In this paper, we take a non-essentialist view of culture as a point of departure and discuss not what culture is, but what we (both in our everyday lives, and as researchers) do when we use the concept of culture. To do so, we look for inspiration in the concept of suture, a concept which means the thread which stitches, or the act of stitching, a wound, but has had a long and intricate journey within psychoanalysis and film studies concerning the issue of identification. Three understandings of the use of culture emerge: suture as cultural misidentification, the evil in the cultural suture, and multiple, repeated cultural sutures. We use these categories to diagnose the use of culture in IIE and beyond, and suggest that the use of culture as multiple, repeated sutures—in other words, a recognition that we constantly fail in describing culture or cultural differences, and that each suture is coloured by its conditions of production, and that we cannot but suture with culture anyway—might be a way forward for cross-cultural research.
Highlights
While much research about the ethics of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has not paid sufficient attention to the context into which ICT is introduced, treating ICT reception in all parts of the globe as more or less similar to how it would be received in a “Western” country, for the last decades there is a stream of research—intercultural information ethics (IIE)—that does take cultural and national differences into account, arguing that “culture matters” [10]
We have advanced an understanding of how culture is or could be used within IIE, inspired by three different readings of the concept of suture
Based on the first understanding of suture—namely suture as cultural misidentification—we have tried to explain the allure of essentialism, and why it is so such an easy recourse one might know that it is not an accurate understanding of culture
Summary
While much research about the ethics of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has not paid sufficient attention to the context into which ICT is introduced, treating ICT reception in all parts of the globe as more or less similar to how it would be received in a “Western” country, for the last decades there is a stream of research—intercultural information ethics (IIE)—that does take cultural and national differences into account, arguing that “culture matters” [10]. Hall and Geert Hofstede, which argue that people who belong to a certain country tend to share certain characteristics, as if they had a collective programming of the mind distinguishing them from other groups of people [20] Such frameworks could be seen as essentialist, since they hold that people belonging to a culture share some sort of essence—a way of being, thinking, and acting—that distinguishes them from others. Much more marginalised within IIE, there are non-essentialist frameworks that do not argue that culture is related to essences, but rather discuss how the concept of culture is used, how it is mobilized, how and why one identifies as a part of a culture [8, 28]. Before we turn to the concept of suture, we will give a brief description of the field of IIE, to which we tentatively suture this study
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