Native American Culture And Consumerism Summary

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What can be taken from both of the texts, “Native people and the challenge of computers: Reservation schools, individualism, and consumerism” by C.A. Bowers et al., and "Confucian Social Media: An Oxymoron?" by Pak-hang Wong is that those who use computers must be aware of how computers are both encoded by culture and encoding culture. Neither work believes that computers are culturally neutral, meaning that we must be skeptical of their representation as culturally secular tools. The texts are separated by a decade, which is critical to their analysis because the type of human-computer interaction discussed in “Native people and the challenge of computers”, (written in 2000) had changed by the time "Confucian Social Media:

argue that computers in educational settings are presented as an aid to preserving culture (Bowers addresses computers used in Native American reservations’ schools). They offer an anti-essentialist reading of this presentation of computers, by instead encouraging the presentation of computers as a hegemonic technology that reinforces the growing influence of dominant western culture. They discuss the effect of “cultural amplification” that occurs when interacting with technology – how technology “amplifies” certain forms of knowledge and ideologies from dominant cultures and eliminates other cultures in the process (Bowers et al. 186). They argue that this amplification of culture allows for values that are associated with western culture, such as consumerism and autonomy, to undermine the values of aboriginal culture which places importance on community networks, the verbal passing of elder knowledge, and environmentally sustaining practices. The technology determinist nature of the article is made clearest when the authors discuss the transformation that occurs when interacting with computers (Bowers et al. 190). They argue that computers transform its users into autonomous individuals as they are unable to resist the transforming effects of computers due to the model of interaction they are framed within, i.e. an individualized experience abstract from contextualization. Consumerism in the article is similarly linked to the transforming effects of computers, where Bowers et al. exaggerate the ability of computers to transform people into consumers easily influenced by