How Cultures Adopt Technologies
The shrill jangle of the brass bell sliced through the cacophony of typewriters, shuffling paper and murmuring of voices in the sea of desks in the main office room. A few heads poked out of the side offices surrounding the clerks area. A young man stood up, stiff in his suit and approached the table at the front of the room, keeping his back to the thirty or so clerks. He reached out his hand, grabbed a trumpet-like device hanging off a long stem with another trumpet like piece. In an attempt to sound bold, but still shaky, he answered, “This is Harrowgate 45987, to whom am I speaking?”
This was the turn of the 20th century. We hadn’t quite figured out where the telephone fit at work or at home. Nor even how to really hold a conversation on the phone. Even today, we will often answer our mobile with a questioning “Hello?” even though we can often see just who is calling. That’s a cultural behaviour that’s survived for over a century.
Today, we often ignore, subconsciously, the telephone in the computer that we carry around in our pocket or purse. That follows us into the bathroom, bedroom, car, work, subway.
Societies around the world use cultural elements such as norms, behaviours, religion and economics to decide how, when and where a technology will be adopted. Over the past hundred years of Western European technologies being distributed around the world, many technologies have come into conflict with societies. Some have been adopted easily and quickly. The mobile phone is one that moved swiftly around the world.
Several years ago, when I was working on a netnography research project with a Canadian NGO, I was shown a demonstration of how a woman in a remote part of Kenya used the text version of Twitter to locate her cow that had wandered off. Losing a cow was the equivalent of losing ones job. It was highly stressful. In less than an hour her cow had been located.
Also in Kenya, the government allowed the use of M-Pesa, a mobile phone based money transfer service developed by Vodafone and Safaricom. It allowed for micro-loans as well as people transferring money and buying goods and services. So successful has it been that it has expanded to Tanzania, Ghana, Egypt and others. It was also rejected in India, Romania and Albania due to low uptake.
The adoption of any technologies is very much moral, social and political. Especially when it comes to many of today’s digital technologies, from smartphones to social media, genetic engineering, drones and Artificial Intelligence. Western tech giants have often just assumed that other societies in Africa, China, India, Latin America, would simple accept their technology solutions and immediately see the benefits. It has not quite worked out that way. This will be even more important as the world becomes more connected. Especially in terms of knowledge and power dynamic in a culture.
Facebook has a huge market in India. But it isn’t the Facebook platform itself that is most used, it is WhatsApp. This is a cultural selection. Kinship systems, or how we see relationship networks between family, friends, co-workers, is different in India from America. India is made up of a wide range of religions and has a strict caste system. Religious leaders play a key role in the behavioural norms and daily rules of life. In my research interviews with various Indian social groups, most preferred WhatsApp because they felt they could better manage their social groups, what in anthropology we would call kinship systems of relationships. Facebook itself, was seen as too open. It is similar in Brazil.
Russians largely rejected Facebook in favour of home-grown Vkontakte and it’s been similar in China with Weixin / WeChat. These of source, are social media platforms, so they have very deep implications for how they’re adopted into a sociocultural system. Factors that Western tech giants don’t take into account.
Many Western technologies have been top-down pushes into cultures, from social media to smartphones, tablets, drones, robots, genetic engineering and more. But true adoption or rejection of technologies happens at a grass-roots, bottom-up level. Western technology companies often see technology products in the scientific or engineering framework of solving problems. They see these problems from a Western cultural perspective. As the West is highly industrialised and the home of modern capitalism, this is natural. Nothing at all wrong with it, except when it comes to trying to introduce highly impactful technologies in non-Western societies.
Cultures adopt technologies in different ways. But all consider, in various degrees, cultural norms and behaviours, the context of how knowledge is used within a culture, politics, kinship systems and systems of reciprocity (economics.) M-Pesa was so quickly adopted in Kenya because the inventors understood the systems of reciprocity in Kenyan culture. It failed in Romania because of cultural differences in how money is viewed and moves.
Politics plays a role as well. A foreign technology may be seen as threatening to political power and systems, both locally and nationally. China has benefitted significantly from the Western transfer of technology, but China views technologies from societal and ideological perspectives. Not only must the technology benefit society as a whole, the political system must also be able to control it. This is far less so in Western societies.
Cultural adoption of technologies is and always has been very messy. We often have this view that technological adoption and change happens very suddenly. It does not. Many digital technologies today do get adopted faster, but not everywhere and it varies by culture. Agriculture is a great example. We now know that attempts at agriculture were made by many societies at various times, even during the hunter-gatherer periods. Some hunter-gatherer societies saw agriculture more in terms of gardening. It was small and seasonal. Many cultures tried it and rejected it.
By understanding the role culture plays in technology adoption, the better a technology will serve a society. This includes attempting to understand predict to some small degree, unintended consequences along with other cultural elements. As our world becomes increasingly connected and driven by digital technologies, there will be increased turbulence in the years ahead. From how to regulate technologies to how to protect aspects of culture such as art, music and literature and the role of technology in the workplace and economic systems.
