1.5 The Digital Revolution

During the time between when this text is written and when you actually read it, thousands of digital advancements and transformations will take place around the world. Some we might foresee; others are impossible for us to predict. These changes will in some way all be part of the digital revolution, which began with telegraphs and transistors, moved on to computers and the internet, and continues with social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. As of 2020, roughly 62 percent of the world used the internet1 and 49.03 percent tapped into social media.2 (One estimate forecasts that 90 percent of the world will be on the internet by 2030).3 More than half the adult population had smartphones, and 72 percent are expected to have smartphone access by 2025.4

“Digital technology is so broad today as to encompass almost everything. No product is made today, no person moves today, nothing is collected, analyzed or communicated without some ‘digital technology’ being an integral part of it,” Louis Rossetto, founder and former editor in chief of Wired magazine, told the Pew Research Center in 2018.5

The early cultural anthropologists were not familiar with Tik Tok, Gmail, or LinkedIn when they studied intercultural communication, but they were already addressing messaging through television, radio, and telephone. Still, today’s extensive intercultural communication with strangers, friends, and potential adversaries over the internet adds a new layer of complexity to our lives.

Sometimes it’s the tiniest of anecdotes that shed light on global trends. A leading Czech investor in tech start-ups once noted privately that she had no idea emojis were considered ridiculous by her American partners. “They actually told me to stop using them in emails,” the businesswoman confided to the author. And email language is rife for misinterpretation. For instance, it is common for British magazine editors to ask contributors, “How are you?” in emails, but they typically do not expect an answer. They also often sign off with xx, which to an American means kisses and might seem quite odd in a business email.6 These are minor issues, but they hint at cultural differences that the digital revolution has created, provoked, or illuminated.

So how has the digital revolution made intercultural communication more urgent?

Thanks to online communication, we are “talking” to exponentially more people than we did 30 years ago. Whether through Slack, Facebook, or other channels, we now have instant access to millions of voices around the planet that we previously would not have encountered. Understanding how to interact with these voices professionally, commercially, and civically is going to be key to our individual and collective success. (We will look more closely at the opportunities and risks of social media and intercultural communication in Topic 11).

Thanks to the increasing capabilities of online translation, we no longer need to speak the same language as those we seek to interact with in real time. The demand for such services will certainly fuel the growth of new intercultural employment opportunities over the next decade.

How technology will strengthen, or weaken, the use of English as an international language or provide access to those who seek to learn it will be an issue for public debate. In countries where there are concerns about a decreased use of the national or regional language, will digital tools help stem the decline of usage or support the domination of more widely spoken languages? At least one expert is pessimistic: The Hungarian mathematical linguist András Kornai warns that the internet will kill off languages with fewer speakers and less representation online.7

Another pressing question for interculturalists is whether social media solidifies existing cultural bubbles or fosters more diversity. We will look at both possibilities as we explore intercultural communication, identity, and conflict. How has the digital revolution fueled both positive and negative intercultural trends?

Three possibilities include (1) an increased understanding of others, (2) the creation of multinational groups for social and political change, and (3) disinformation, hate groups, and fake accounts.

Increased Understanding of Others

Using a search engine, you can look up “favorite dinner recipes in Zambia” and get 2.12 million choices. But that is not the same as understanding the cultural roots of Zambian cooking or the popularity of ifinkubala, fried caterpillars.

As we learn more about those who are different than us, we still filter this information through our own cultural perspective. A sudden awareness of facts does not necessarily generate greater empathy. There are, however, some promising signs that people do use social media to understand—and communicate with—those from another culture.

A 2020 Pew report found that 23 percent of adult social media users in the US changed their views about a political or social issue because of something they saw on social media. This is up from 14 percent in 2018.8 The Black Lives Matter movement was cited in the report as the top issue that respondents changed their minds about, seeing it more favorably after gaining insights on social media. Is 23 percent too little? How can social media prompt an even greater opinion sway? These are crucial questions for those seeking to use social media to encourage (or discourage) certain behavior during a crisis, such as the aforementioned mask wearing.

The jury is not out on whether social media distills or breaks down monocultural bubbles. In emerging economies, a Pew sampling showed how social media users in 10 countries are more likely to interact with people different from them in categories such as income. A median of 66 percent said they frequently or occasionally interact with people of other income levels. A median of around half or fewer regularly interact with people of different racial, religious, or political backgrounds.9 Interaction is neither positive nor negative, but the ability to understand the perspectives of these online “strangers” is invaluable for the prevention and solution of problems ranging from armed conflict to racism and income inequality.

Multinational Groups for Social and Political Change

In the previous section on climate change, we discussed the intercultural issues revolving around reactions to global warming. There is no question that social media has played a huge role in the spreading of international social movements, from revolutions to environmental awareness.

Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, the face of climate activism, owes the success of her global message to the digital revolution.

Wired puts it: “She’s evidence of a changing culture of digital activism, one that’s skewing younger and younger every time adult-run institutions get stuck in political gridlock.”10

And she is inspiring others. That a teen’s Twitter clap backs at world leaders get millions of likes from admirers around the world shows the need for, and power of, digital literacy for intercultural communication.

Social media offers the chance for “large-scale mobilization and the organization and implementation of social movements,” a scholarly article on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution explains. “Egyptian protesters were able to disseminate a continuous stream of text, videos, and images from the streets of the revolution directly to millions via social media technologies, and indirectly through the republication of these messages on news networks such as Al Jazeera and CNN.”11 In this case, the protesters used intercultural communication as a form of promotion, persuasion, and also protection.

During turbulent times, people rely on digital tools for vital information. Social media allows for communication between families that may be torn apart by war or disaster. (As of March 2019, Facebook’s Safety Check had been used nine million times by people marking themselves as safe or checking someone’s safety during hurricanes in the US alone.) And social media can cross cultures to bring about fundraising in a spectacular way. After the 2019 earthquake in Lombok, Indonesia, the head of the British diving school there, who had previously spent time in conflict zones, said the global donations in response to photo posts on Instagram and other platforms resulted in “the most direct form of aid I have ever witnessed.”12

Social media also helps people maintain ties with their home culture when assuming new identities. Those who work and study abroad or who emigrate long-term can keep in touch with their ethnic and national diaspora. Social networking sites “have been used for several purposes during the intercultural adaptation process such as (1) to remain in contact with their family members and friends in their home countries, (2) to obtain social capital, and (3) to socially adjust in educational settings. The pedagogical implications derived from the literature are manifested in threefold: connections and relationships, community, and acculturation.”13

But of course, like all tools going back to the Stone Age, the digital revolution has also been a boon for villains. Terrorist groups also use social media to recruit globally. They particularly use video platforms to upload their own atrocities, such as beheadings. These could be viewed as a diabolical form of intercultural communication that requires an equally powerful and effective intercultural preventive strategy.

Disinformation, Hate Groups, and Fake Accounts

Following the CIA and FBI report that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential election via bots and fake media accounts promoting conflict, journalists and analysts have paid a lot more attention to intercultural communication threats. But Russia was not the only country under the spotlight. Macedonian teens from the city of Veles were one of the main sources for fictional news accounts about US politics that year. “Veles attained a weird infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news,” Wired reported in 2016.

There has been a great crackdown on these types of sites by social media firms, but in 2019, an Oxford Internet Institute report revealed that organized social media disinformation campaigns had spread to 70 countries, up from 48 in 2018 and 28 in 2017.14 The campaigns used disinformation to discredit political opponents, counter opposition, and meddle in foreign affairs. This type of intercultural communication impacts our trust in reality—how can we discern the truth?—and in other cultures. The same can be said of intercultural hate groups spawned by the tech advancements, with deadly consequences. As the US-based Council of Foreign Relations notes: “In Myanmar, military leaders and Buddhist nationalists used social media to slur and demonize the Rohingya Muslim minority ahead of and during a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”15 The result? Mass rapes, infanticide, up to 23,000 Rohingya people killed, and more than a million forced to flee their homes to other countries where they mostly live as impoverished refugees.16 The digital revolution has amplified hate speech, often with the aim of eliminating multiculturalism. Can intercultural communication also combat digital hate? There is no cure for evil, but the technology that supports so much good in people’s lives can also be harnessed to defragment internet swarms that attract hate. As one academic argues, “Technology companies and government need to consider how to increase the barriers that digital hate cultures face in capturing the attention of audiences rather than simply deactivating accounts or censoring content.”17