Global Technologies & Cultural Adoption
Frank, living in Austin Texas, just couldn’t wait to get his hands on the new smartphone. The camera would up his food videos, the new software fir editing meant more videos, faster too. Better game play too and AI built-in? He saw so many ways his life might get easier.
Karthaki, living in Mumbai was excited for the new smartphone too. She realized she could make better videos of the children’s help centre she volunteered at. She’d be able to video with her sister studying in Canada and connect the whole family for weekly video calls.
The same smartphone, two different cultural views. This impacts not just the hardware, but most importantly, how the technology is perceived and used and how it might succeed or fail economically within a given culture or country.
In the opening example, Frank lives in the United States, a highly individualistic country where people tend to view a technology from how it benefits them first, then family and friends, then community and then onwards to their country. Or cultural group.
Our second example is India, a highly communal society, where one considers family and friends, then community and often, their class or social status and their place in greater society. So technologies, from farming equipment to smartphones, are viewed very differently.
Some cultures will adopt new technologies quite quickly, while others will take much longer. Those that take longer are usually cultures that have very strong traditions and customs and well entrenched social norms and behaviours. Where even a seemingly small thing like changing a dance routine for a traditional cultural event can cause significant social anxieties.
It took hundreds of years to transition from bronze to iron tools. In part due to technical processes, but largely because cultures resisted the transition. The same happened with the transition to agriculture. That took thousands of years. Some societies even tried, then rejected agriculture and went back to hunter-gatherer living.
Another limitation on the transfer and adoption of new technologies, was, of course, the distance between societies. Once we reached the advancement of sailing ships, new technology like the printing press, could spread much faster.
Fast forward to today, and while the advancement of transportation technologies in terms of speed has largely plateaued, the transmission of information has has reached astonishing speeds and continues to evolve.
Where it took books around a hundred years to spread around the world and be broadly accepted by multiple cultures, it took the smartphone around a decade. This is a profoundly rapid adoption of a new technology that has had deep cultural impacts.
This too, has created cultural pressures in terms of adopting new technologies. We have entered a new era of a digital race, where most dominant cultures in regions around the world, see the survival of their sociocultural systems predicated upon technology adoption and advancement.
Digital technologies play a part in almost every aspect of our sociocultural systems today, from the use of tablets and PCs in elementary schools through to our cars, ovens and well, even toothbrushes.
Since digital technologies have become cheaper to manufacture and ship around the world, this has exerted pressure on almost all societies. Some call this digital colonialism since most digital technologies come from the Global North and few from the Global South, which are developing nations who struggle to build the infrastructure and education systems needed to compete.
Digital technologies have taken on new meaning in terms of geopolitics, national politics, economic systems, social norms and behaviours. So many changes in fact, that both governments and civil society are facing challenges such as shifting social norms to creating regulations and forming new economic policies.
Yet even though the smartphone was adopted so quickly, what’s different is how they’re used within a cultural context. In China, for example, WeChat is more than a chat service. It offers banking, product buying, access to government services and more. An all-in-one platform.
There is no similar all-in-one platform in Western countries. While the platform “X”, formerly Twitter, has expressed a plan to create such an all-in-one platform, it is likely to fail because this is not how Western cultures use smartphones. Western cultures prefer switching between apps.
This mostly goes to the individualistic views of Western societies and how they see trust. Few trust a platform with such deep reach into their lives. More communal societies, like China see privacy differently and so platforms like WeChat tend to be adopted more easily.
Adoption of new technologies is very nuanced and one could go down so many rabbit holes on this topic! But that would be a book or two.
It will become more interesting in the future as we see more human migrations due to the pressures of climate change and conflicts around the world. As Western countries become increasingly multicultural, new technologies will need to be adaptable to changing sociocultural systems.
These sociocultural pressures may actually be a key force for how we make even better technologies that truly benefit humanity. We may see some very interesting new digital technologies emerging in the coming decades.
