Personal Cultural Identity Drives Technology Reach

You would be right in naming your native city or any city in the world in response to my question “Can you tell me where the following scenes are unfolding: a jogger with the white tell-tale wires hanging from her ears; a suit leaning over a laptop in an airport lounge; a harried businessman talking loudly on a cell phone while pacing outside a downtown skyscraper; a user thumbing the blackberry keypad while waiting to enter a theater; a family laughing loudly watching a show on TV?” You are right because personal technologies do penetrate societies and cultures like nothing else can.

You would also be right in your answers to the follow-up questions: “What music is she listening to; what language are they speaking; what clothes are they wearing; what’s the color of their skin, how unrestrained are their emotional expressions?” You are right because these personal technologies have penetrated different societies and cultures while reinforcing the differences in identity of the world’s people.

This push for identity is even seen when technology seems to force language conformance and cultural similarity. An example is the widespread use of the ubiquitous QWERTY English language keyboard in favor of local language keyboards. The solution that individuals have devised is to use phonetics of the English language to sound the words of their preferred tongue in written communications like emails and scripts. The cultural acronyms and emoticons (for laughter, sarcasm and astonishment) so beloved by inhabitants of the net and phone messaging worlds are only the latest example of this preference for identity.

It’s easier for purveyors of consumer products like Apple, Adidas, Intel and Toyota to navigate on the merits of their technology offering alone. It’s quite a different endeavor for content owners like Disney and Sony who must choose what, if any, and how much cultural localization and reflection their technology offerings will contain and then arrange the rest of their enterprise to capitalize from these technologies.