Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited

"Xenes Glosses: Literacy and Cultural Implications of the Web for Greece"
  by Aliki Dragona and Carolyn Handa

As with many of these chapters, Dragona and Handa state their organization:

We will analyze Greek reaction to and use of the Web in terms of these points [. . .]: (a) the cultural imperialism of imposed foreign rhetorical and visual structures; (b) technological pressures causing English to emerge as the dominant foreign language; and (c) the relationship between the Web and the Greek cultural web. (63-64)
Dragona and Handa describe the linguistic and cultural imperialism conveyed through the Web. They explain that “when the language under discussion combines graphic elements, multimedia, and one primary language, all in the form of a hypertextual medium” it may be “less obviously” a mode of cultural imperialism than a more direct form, but it is a kind of linguistic imperialism all the same (53). For instance, “hypertext may not reflect a universal mode of cognition: it may, instead, be a mode of thinking that reflects cognitive constructs and connections that are particularly English” (53). As such, the grammar of the Web encodes English linguistic and semantic structures. The Greek response to this linguistic and cultural imperialism is influenced by its rich culture and history. Greece has “Hellenized” other conquering cultures, and Dragona and Handa's studies of online correspondence and Greek Web sites uncovered a Hellenizing of the Web:
[Greeks] are beginning to employ the Web as an economic tool and a mask offering the world the "Greek face" it expects while manipulating the Web in a way that preserves Greek privacy from being overrun by yet another in a long series of conquerors, albeit a technological instead of an armed one. (63)
In the process of discussing the linguistic cultural imperialism of the Web, Dragona and Handa delineate seven “literary and cultural presumptions of the Web” that are echoed elsewhere in the text (56).
  1. "Many of us assume that people own computers that can access the Web in color and sound. We also assume that people can purchase and continually update technological equipment."

  2. "Many of us assume that dial-in charges and phone bills are similar everywhere to the relatively inexpensive rates common in the US."

  3. "Many of us also assume that people have an interest in the Web and can benefit from it as a literacy tool."

  4. "Many of us assume that today practically any kind of information we want might be found on the Web."

  5. "Many of us assume that people see the Web in a positive light, as something good and useful."

  6. "Many of us also assume that the commercial aspects of the Web are more or less culturally neutral or that the ideology imparted by advertising and mass consumerism can easily be ignored."

  7. "Those of us who are familiar with the Web assume that people will go to a machine for information and entertainment instead of to other people, or other means of information and entertainment." (56-60, numbers mine)
This list is both subtly familiar and uncomfortably imperialistic, and Dragona and Handa use it to organize their discussion of the literacy practices of Greeks on the Web. Just as some Greeks are developing their online literacy practices as a means to Hellenize the Web, many more Greeks are relying on their own cultural Web – their own communities and families – to continue to provide the entertainment and information that the Web – a series of machines – provides (64). For the Greeks, the Web's penetration of the culture is limited by an active resistance to its colonization and by a cultural practice that relies more on humans than on machines for interaction.