Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters

How culture shapes the design and use of technology--and how we can resist the one-size-fits-all approach to technology design

Robots that encroach on your personal space, baffling emojis, a chatbot that gives you an answer that seems terribly rude--does any of this sound familiar? If so, you may know what it feels like to experience a clash of cultures, or even culture shock, in technology. Culture--shared values, norms, and behaviors--influences both the design of technology and its use. An encounter with new technology can teach us to embrace the unfamiliar, but a mismatch between design and user can create misunderstanding and loss of trust, and can even become a tool of digital imperialism. In Digital Culture Shock, computer scientist Katharina Reinecke travels through countries and cultures around the world to show the many fascinating ways that technology design and use can differ.

Reinecke argues that technology is inherently cultural because developers apply their own knowledge and experiences when creating it. And this can make the technology fail in other settings. For example, robotaxis trained on driver behavior on a California highway are paralyzed when confronted with the more complicated traffic flows of Egypt. Western online social networks, designed to convey one’s individuality, violate the need to preserve the image of a family in more group-oriented cultures. Likewise, the visual complexity common in many East Asian websites can be overwhelming to North Americans and European users, who tend to prefer simpler designs. Making it clear what’s at stake, Reinecke urges us to resist generalizing our own cultural peccadillos in technology design.

Katharina Reinecke is a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is the cofounder of LabintheWild, a virtual lab that studies how people around the globe interact with technology.