The Problems of Global Cultural Homogenisation in a Technologically Dependant World Global cultural homogenisation has signif- icant consequences for our responsibility for others in distant parts of the globe. ICT gives a powerful impetus to this cul- tural homogenisation. There are a number of distinct elements that contribute to this. SOFTWARE A very large part of the cost of software is the cost of development and testing. The largest remaining element is support costs (if those can be passed on to others, or soft- ware achieves prominence in a mass-mar- ket without the software house providing significant non-automated support, the point is magnified). Thus the marginal cost for each additional sale of mass-market software is very low. Given this, within each market there will be a natural tendency towards monopoly for each application. This does not, however, mean that there is a similar natural monopoly across software sectors (Microsoft’s ability to move from dominance in PC operating systems to dominance in application software has rest- ed on other factors that have been, and will be, debated by others). Why does the trend towards monopoly in each market propel us towards cultural homogenisation? After all, the Chinese market is very different from the Brazilian market. The crucial factor here is that the costs of ‘localisation’ of mass-market soft- ware for different national and language markets is often small compared to the overall cost of development and testing, meaning that the mass software market is usually essentially global. Some may ask at this point why of the three most spoken languages in the world: Spanish, Chinese and English, there is vastly more software in English. There are a number of factors at work. Of these three, the English lan- guage software market has always (hither- to) been the largest, meaning that soft- ware has tended to be developed for that market first. Secondly, ‘localisation’ of some software originally written for English language markets takes a suffi- cient market share in the Chinese lan- guage and Spanish language markets to inhibit the growth of native language soft- ware industries. Thirdly, the costs of local- isation are sufficiently high to mean that much software released in English is not localised. A further impetus towards cultural homogenisation through the software market comes from imperfect localisation, through which (usually) United States usage is still evident in some aspects of the software (for example, whether the date has the month first or not), but where there has been enough localisation to mean that the imperfectly localised software still takes a highly significant portion of the market in a country where differences from US usage have hitherto been stable. Info, Comm & Ethics in Society (2003) 1: 7–12 © 2003 Troubador Publishing Ltd. KEYWORDS Culture Homogenisation Globalization Internet, Morals Social Responsibility N Ben Fairweather and Simon Rogerson Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK Email: ccsr@dmu.ac.uk COVERAGE    