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This concluding chapter suggests future directions for the research and practice of cross-cultural technology in a glocalization age. Centering on a dialogical approach, it analyzes what the cross-cultural design community could learn from the user localization efforts to design for, invoke, nurture, encourage, support, and sustain culturally localized user experience —the consummate experience—for emerging technologies. It studies the characteristics and value as well as the role and functions of user localization in a technology’s whole design, production, and use cycle and discusses how to route those user efforts into the design process to better address user needs and expectations in this rising participatory culture. Real-world examples are supplemented to further the discussion beyond the case study when needed.

This chapter further develops the framework of CLUE with a consolidated discussion of five use cases presented earlier. It situates those cases on a broader horizon and reviews the trends of user localization across the sites. Thereby it illuminates how a holistic view of user experience is both situated and constructed in local contexts: To explore the “situatedness,” the first section of the chapter looks at how a local use of mobile messaging technology is situated in the surrounding contexts as the outcome of the interactions of various cultural influences; to investigate the “constructiveness,” the second section demonstrates how user localization functions as cultural consumption and how “genius loci” is achieved. Based on this holistic view of user experience, the third section examines affordances as dialogic relation through a dual mediation process of messaging use and suggests designing beyond operational affordances and cultivating social affordances for local use.

In the year 1956, as youth riots were shaking both Germanies, the West German paper Hamburger Anzeiger illustrated an article about the psychology of German adolescent rebels who they call Halbstarke, with stills from the American movie Rebel Without a Cause. Shifting and contested evaluations of Halbstarke were part of important East and West German transformations in the second half of the 1950s. In 1955 and 1956, the West Germans strongly believed in the unfavorable effects of American cultural influences. They found themselves on the defensive against the two kinds of East German attacks.

This chapter studies the impact of artistic legitimation processes on cultural producers and their communities. It also explores the dynamic debates around cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation that animate the process of artistic legitimation. The propensity for cross-cultural engagement, which typifies many efforts at artistic inclusion, can both reproduce and disrupt stereotypes—that is, sometimes when one celebrates “difference” or novelty, one just ends up reinforcing the fact that something is atypical. The admission of diverse work within the fine arts marks both a tribute to, and a dismantling of, their context of production. The chapter then seeks to understand how the engagement of other people through cultural consumption is viewed as political and ethical action.

This chapter looks at Black middle class consumption of ‘Black cultural capital’ – forms of dominant cultural capital mediated through a way that promotes ethnoracial affinity and resistance. I argue that participants often decode certain cultural forms as ‘Black cultural capital’ when they fulfil a politics of representation, both challenging the Whiteness of the art world and controlling images of Blackness more generally. Such participants often construe themselves as having the most symbolic mastery over these cultural forms in virtue of being racialised as Black. However, those towards strategic assimilation attempt to use Black cultural capital to foster inter-racial solidarity, while those towards the ethnoracial autonomous identity prefer to keep Black cultural spaces ethnoracially closed.

This chapter considers how Black middle class people use cultural consumption to contest the polarisation of Blackness and Britishness. It sketches out a brief history of this polarisation, looking at how the present replicates the past. I then analyse Black middle class cultural consumption through the lens of double consciousness. Firstly, I look at how those towards strategic assimilation often construe Black Britishness as two identities needing to be reconciled. Such participants therefore consume cultural forms bringing together what they see as traditional British cultural forms with traditional Black diasporic cultural forms. Those towards the ethnoracial autonomous identity mode display Black British double consciousness through the notion of a gifted ‘second sight’, therefore using cultural forms as a means to specifically critique British post-racialism.

This chapter presents an overview of recent work on cultural intermediaries and the ‘creative class’ in relation to social inequality. The chapter looks at Britain’s ‘creative class’ in relation to workforce patterns, tastes, social attitudes, and their faith in the transformative power of culture. Ultimately the chapter suggests we need caution when thinking about the impact of cultural intermediaries on social inequality.

This chapter discusses in more detail the extent to which the congregational culture at Downtown Church is predicated on a sense of fashion and connects with those who are comfortable with cultural consumption. The core of Downtown Church is a “matrix of authenticity” triangulated by middle-class consumption of city spaces, urban nightlife and entertainment, and the visible presence of racial and ethnic minorities thought to characterize the diversity that marks a city. The emphasis on a particular type of congregant, and the image of what makes a church authentically urban, combine to form a “designer church.” The gendered nature of many of these expectations is clear and appears in several church-sponsored events. Another example of this aspect of the congregation’s culture is a dress code for those involved in being a public presence for the church (such as the greeters); the code itself is not focused on modesty or more conservative notions of propriety, but rather emphasizes contemporary fashion.

This chapter focuses on audiences and their theater practices. Theater spectators, including the elites and the ways they acted and interacted offer a unique perspective on urban societies in the midst of economic growth and cultural change. As dedicated public playhouses opened their doors in more than seventy cities across metropolitan France, urban consumers claimed their places within these new institutions. This chapter shows how spectators in cities across France became savvy cultural consumers, confidently asserting their “right” to comment on performances and demanding an ever greater say in casting and repertory decisions. It also considers authorities' persistent attempts to order and discipline theater audiences, especially when spectators embraced commercial tactics such as consumer pressure—including full-fledged theater boycotts—to make their voices heard. Theaters not only provided opportunities for cultural consumption and a new kind of public sociability but also promoted cultural criticism.

This introductory chapter focuses on the progressive potential of empathetic feeling to redress a scholarly bias against compassion, empathy, and sympathy, particularly in American studies. Rather than viewing empathy as a “passive ideal” and an impediment to political change, the chapter argues that it is an active cognitive process that can play an important role in changing attitudes and self-perception or even catalyzing action. Tying in with this volume's overall response to critics who believe that the forces of commodification render cultural consumption a tainted vehicle for cross-racial understanding, the chapter argues against a too-hasty dismissal of white consumption of black cultural texts as a potential conduit for social change. In addition, the chapter also discusses multiplex subjectivity and the insider–outsider debate as part of the book's broader ethnographic study.

This chapter presents a fuller history of Downtown Church and its organizational structure. Intertwined with this is a more in-depth exploration of the congregation’s goals, its marketing plans and target members, and the implicit conception used by the leadership to understand “the city.” The extent to which these are aligned with popular culture and a culture of affluent consumption is presented and analyzed. Along with cultural consumption, the association between the city and ethno-racial and cultural diversity is also explored—specifically, the efforts by church leaders to distinguish themselves as a downtown church and not an inner-city church in their efforts to become an authentic member of the Chicago urban scene.

One of the key ideas that this concluding chapter highlights is that during its peak, the story of the ringtone represented a moment of capture of consumers, capital, and the media by a phenomenon that was inextricable from the broader, overlapping histories of global cultural consumption. The ringtone was an event situated in the dynamics of fads. The chapter discusses the possible future direction of “mobile music” and entertainment. It also addresses “cloud computing” and brings together the book's conclusions.

The economic basis of colonialism is export to the metropolis; in the case of the French Caribbean the exported products, historically, have mainly been types of food. More recently, however, they have included novels; and this chapter argues that these are marketed as food, and that this is internalized in the texts of the novels themselves - not only their typical themes (e.g., ‘fruity’ female sexuality in Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes rêves) but also the language in which they are written: the reader is invited to ‘eat their words’. The special ‘saveur’ of Creole and creolized French is heavily promoted as a crucial element of the value of these texts as commodities. This chapter uses Bakhtin's ‘objectified discourse’ to analyse this language whose meaning is less important than its exotic ‘taste’, and Althusser's concept of ideological interpellation to outline a historical shift from France's need to control and assimilate its colonial subjects to its desire to consume their difference as a ‘tasty’ exotic commodity.

This chapter examines how professional expertise is produced and consumed by members of the foreign policy community in Southeast Asia. Foreign policymakers in Southeast Asia explain their beliefs about American power by drawing on their professional expertise as a source of evidence and interpretive schema. Professional expertise can thus be interpreted as a set of cues that influence beliefs. Foreign policy professionals have good reasons to attend to such cues, reasons that go beyond self-interest or political expedience. This chapter argues that foreign policy expertise, although rooted in the political interests of powerholders, is not reproduced in obviously political or coercive ways. It shows that members of the foreign policy community rarely engage in probabilistic reasoning or effortful knowledge-testing strategies. It also discusses the affective biases prevailing in foreign policy circles, particularly in terms of the social relations and diffuse cultural consumption that can be expected to make positive beliefs about the United States more likely.

This chapter shows how discourse theory can be used to manage brands in a multicultural context with ethnic subcultures where a common language such as English is used. Multicultural brand strategy relies on semiotics to “translate” brand values from one cultural context to another. The chapter explains the theory of cross-cultural consumption, showing how ethnic consumers change mass consumer culture to fit their own worldview. As an example, the makers of the Ford F-150 truck redesigned it and produced a different advertisement that appealed to African-American drivers. The product was “re-positioned” by employing African-American language and symbols without changing the essential brand message. This kind of approach can extend the primary brand to accommodate smaller and more defined ethnic markets.

Focussed on the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham, this chapter explores the specific ways in which individuals are situated by intermediation practices, policy imperatives, discourses and imaginaries as cultural consumers, participants and sometimes producers. In tandem with the attention afforded its demographic diversity, levels of deprivation Balsall Heath has been an object of cultural policy initiatives seeking to engage disadvantaged and ‘hard-to-reach’ communities. The chapter first outlines the particular socio-economic character of the area and discusses the method of walking interviews that was employed to engage with residents. The method does not offer am exhaustive picture of cultural engagement, conceived instead as a means of ‘thinking with’ participants within a local landscape of social, material and religious relations that shape individual agency.