How Different Cultures View Technology

The fascinating ways different cultures are navigating the digital age.

Photo by Luis Desiro on Unsplash

Your grandmother has learned how to text, teenagers speak fluent TikTok, and somewhere in Tokyo, a robot is serving tea with perfect ceremonial grace to customers who bow respectfully in return. In Saudi Arabia, they are using AI tools to enhance hospitality and service, while navigating religious and traditional considerations.

Cultures around the world have a wide variety of ways in which they see technologies. This impacts how fast and the ways in which, any given technology will be adopted. It’s been this way since we created speech and stone tools (or was that the Neanderthals?) and then writing.

So are cultures adopting newer technologies faster? Are we coming together as a species as a result, or, counterintuitively, are we seeing the emergence of distinct digital cultures?

The Japanese embrace robots as spiritual beings, Scandinavians treat their digital wellness like a sacred practice and Chinese people have evolved WeChat into a reflection of it’s complex social structures.

How Different Cultures See Technologies

Scandinavians tend to see technology’s role as tools for human flourishing. That there…