Invisible culture

Reconsidering Lara Ducate and Nike Arnold's "Technology, CALL, and the Net Generation: Where are We Headed from Here?" (2011) following our discussion about transcultural literacies with Grace Kim, I am struck by the extent to which we are dealing with more cultures than we typically acknowledge when discussing the C2 learning. In fact, I think there are always at least three, and probably four, cultures in play: the C1, the C2, the IC1 (internet-culture 1), and perhaps the IC2 (internet-culture 2). As Ducate and Arnold point out, the culture of educational technology and its intended users is a "foundational but invisible culture" with its own practices, norms, and values. Assuming that internet mediated communication is an interaction between C1 and C2 can erase the IC1 and the IC2 with which participants also interact.

Although it was not an explicit goal of her talk, one of Grace Kim's activities for our class demonstrated this point clearly. Showing screenshots of profile avatars and their accompanying captions, tags, and flair from her research on online discussion forums about Korean dramas, Kim asked us to say what we noticed about these online "artifacts." Quickly, it became apparent that what we were exploring was not just a C2 - in fact, Kim reported that there were probably no Koreans on the site - but an highly specific internet subculture operating in the brackish of Asian and Western contact, all for the glory of fandom. Hence, there are C's and IC's. In our Cultura-stye exchange with our University of Crakow counterparts, two cultures are interacting indirectly, mediated by two internet cultures.

One of the key aspects of any discussion of C's and IC's will be the recognition that there is no such thing as a unified "internet culture." There are certainly mainstreams, and norms from internet subcultures sometimes trickle into them in surprising ways, but in general, IRL cultures tend to create their own ICs rather than borrowing whole cloth from somewhere else. Where there is not yet a strong internet culture (in Papua New Guinea, only 2.3 percent of the population has net access, for example), new users may tend to assimilate to the internet culture most commonly reflected by the language in which they navigate. But, in time, I imagine that PNG internet culture will acquire a distinctive identity as well, probably incubated in spaces devoted to discussions in Tok Pisin. I leave open the possibility of a C1 and C2 mediated by common practices from an IC1 because of the increasing cosmopolitanism of the internet, capable of hosting semi-permanent intercultural communities as well as any international city. Large communities like Reddit and Tumblr, which do not have a separate domains for different geographical locations will be key to the construction of these cosmopolitan spaces. I hope to expand further on this idea of L's, C's, and IC's during the coming weeks of our Tech & SLA course.