i.      Theories of culture

Are we any closer to identifying perspectives on culture that might offer more illuminating analysis of the complexities of digital cultures and digital communities, or that might more usefully guide technology and interface design for use by diverse global populations?

As we noted in the introduction to our 2004 review¸ addressing issues of culture in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous technology is to deal with one of the most complicated words in the English language, representing distinct and important concepts across various intellectual disciplines and systems of thought (Williams, 2015). We suggest that this is in fact a reality not limited to the English language. Moreover, as time progresses and we experience continuing cultural, social, political, and technological evolution, culture is harder to define than ever before, though the need is no less pressing. As Ess (2017) argues, discussions of culture in relation to communication and technology have moved far beyond academic conversations of interest only to scholars in an obscure field of research. Instead, such conversations have gone mainstream, driven by “the inescapable confrontations with cultural differences brought about by internet-based communications themselves, most especially as a result of the dramatic expansion of internet access via mobile devices in developing countries” (p. 44).

We previously found that work published before 2004 made heavy use of theories or models of culture put forward by writers such as Hall (1976), Hofstede (1991), and Walzer (1994), even as critics of these frameworks flagged their static and essentializing nature (see for example: Macfadyen, 2010). Others nonetheless made attempts to elaborate more dynamic and nuanced perspectives. Some defined culture as a dynamic mix of variables–national/geographic, organizational, professional, or disciplinary–that are constantly interacting. Others focussed on ideas of culture as a shared value system or a system of shared meaning, implying that such shared symbolic and meaning delineation contributes to group identity and that language plays a primary role as an expressive and interpretive resource in constructing shared meaning. Another perspective offered a reciprocal relationship between culture and technology, suggesting that each defines and redefines the other.

Works in our 2025 corpus also employ a variety of definitions of culture, continuing to reflect its complexity and the different perspectives from which it can be understood. These definitions range from traditional views linking culture to inherited traits and group characteristics, to more dynamic interpretations emphasizing its constructed and evolving nature .

Traditional and descriptive definitions present culture as something a group ‘has’ or inherits, often characterized by shared elements. Dominant theories for understanding culture in the literature continue to draw on those of Hall (1976) and Hofstede (1991)–these suggest that people from a certain country tend to share characteristics, implying a “collective programming of the mind” that distinguishes them from other groups. These frameworks, however, are often seen as providing only a crude set of tools for analyzing culture, offering only a few dimensions compared to the many elements identified by anthropologists. The field of International Intercultural Education scholarship, in particular, has been criticized for relying on such rigid or simplistic understandings of culture, which are not always well-explained (Ess & Sudweeks, 2006; Lennerfors & Murata, 2021).

Uzuner (2009) notes that traditionalists continue to connect the idea of culture to nationality and ethnic origin, and define culture as acquired behaviours, perspectives, and values that are characteristic of a particular group or community. Similarly, Shih (2013) reports that culture is generally regarded as a set of knowledge, behaviours, attitudes, ideas, and traditions formed within, owned, and shared by a group of people and passed down from generation to generation. Dahl (2014) offers Norwegian social anthropologist Arne Martin Klausen’s description of culture as ideas, values, rules, norms, codes, and symbols that a person receives from the previous generation and transmits–usually slightly transformed–to the next generation.

In more recent work, however, a number of scholars promote constructivist views in which culture is not something people ‘have,’ but rather something they ‘do’ or ‘construct’ in specific human encounters, where mutual relations and power are part of the context. These writers assert that meanings are shared, interpreted, created and re-created through communication (Dahl, 2014; Hua et al., 2022; Lennerfors & Murata, 2021). They understood culture to be a fluid phenomenon that transcends ethnic and national boundaries, encompassing “the patterns shaped by ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, geography, profession, ideology, gender, and lifestyle” (Branch, 2009, p. 7). This perspective suggests that every person and human group is both cultural and multicultural (Uzuner, 2009). Work in this lineage urges scholars to focus not on defining what culture is, but on what people do with culture and how they do it.

(Revisiting the notion of cyberculture or internet culture, Couldry and Hepp (2019) offer the idea of media culture, defined as any culture whose primary resources of meaning are provided by technologies of media communication. This definition emphasizes the role of media technologies in shaping cultural experiences and interactions, illustrating how digital environments influence the construction of meaning within various cultural contexts.)

Broadly, we see that the question of what culture is remains unsettled, and that the tension between essentializing and dynamic understandings of culture persists. Articles compiled in this new collection continue to elaborate that culture is a complex term with a long and intricate history of definitions, ranging from stable, inherited traits to dynamic, constructed realities that adapt to various contexts, including online environments and media interactions (Ess & Sudweeks, 2006; Uzuner, 2009) .

ii.      Theories of culture and communication

Important to our investigations are the models that researchers embrace to help them think about ‘what happens’ when individuals or groups from different cultural backgrounds have contact in digital spaces. Understanding culture and communication in digital spaces requires a re-orientation of existing theories and frameworks, as these spaces are dynamic, unbounded, and superdiverse (characterized by many, intersecting dimensions of difference–language, migration histories, class, religion, digital repertoires). Twenty years ago, Goodfellow and Hewling (2005) referred to such spaces as the “virtual intercultural interface”, which they imagined as a space of critical cultural construction and negotiation processes. The diversity of languages, cultures, and communities online creates unprecedented opportunities for intercultural and transcultural communication. Virtual spaces are seen as ‘superdiverse space par excellence,’ offering endless possibilities for self-expression and community formation (Baker & Sangiamchit, 2019).

Several theoretical perspectives are proposed as particularly useful for this endeavour (Goggin, 2016). Sociolinguistics, the study of language in social context, offers a range of theoretical lenses that are proposed as foundational for studying practices in digitally diverse spaces, especially when illustrating the digital practices of international speakers within contexts of superdiversity (Solmaz, 2020). Croucher (2011) also offers a theoretical model for the influence of social networking on cultural adaptation.

Meanwhile, the notions of intercultural and transcultural communication represent different approaches to understanding cultural interactions. Intercultural communication continues to hold a prominent position as a conceptual framework in this field, perhaps unsurprisingly so given its origins in the 1950s, its enduring legacy, and its deep integration into practical domains such as professional development and training (Leeds‐Hurwitz, 1990). This framework focusses on the exchange between (what are imagined to be) distinct cultures, and 89 (55%) of the works in this new collection still make use of the term intercultural. The implicit spatial metaphor invoked by the ‘inter’ prefix is sometimes considered no longer adequate, although some contemporary critical approaches to intercultural communication do address more emergent and fluid links between culture and language. In digitally mediated settings, however, communicators are rarely ‘between’ two cultures; they negotiate meaning across layered networks and practices, making the ‘inter’ in intercultural an unstable–and sometimes misleading–assumption (Baker, 2022; Baker & Sangiamchit, 2019; Ess & Sudweeks, 2006).

However, a noticeable shift is underway, as current scholarship increasingly introduces the notion of transcultural communication in an attempt to better capture communicative practices where cultural and linguistic boundaries are not simply crossed but transcended and transformed. 88 (54%) of the papers in this corpus make use of this concept. (Note that counts are non-exclusive: some studies use both intercultural and transcultural, so totals can exceed the number of works). In this view, discrete languages and cultures are not taken for granted, and borders become blurred. Some contemporary scholars argue that this term is more accurate and meaningful than intercultural communication, especially in the digital context, and their work seeks to elucidate the development and implications of transcultural communication (Baker, 2022; Baker & Sangiamchit, 2019).

It is worth cautioning, however, that in some cases transcultural concepts are treated as synonyms of the more binary model of interculturality, rather than understanding the original conception of transculturalization as cultural process. We follow Lösch’s 2003 explanation that transcultural competence is the ability to manage various cultural processes in what have been described as states of transdifference –states of parallel and different conceptual and cultural systems, not limited to the mere juxtaposition of static conceptual, cultural or linguistic systems. It a significant finding here that transdifference and other dynamic approaches to culture are almost completely absent from work located for this scoping review. Hepp (2009) is an exception as he advances transculturality as a lens for media-culture research, capturing flows and hybridities beyond national-cultural containers.

A noteworthy development in the literature of this field, on the other hand, is the deliberate move to incorporate African, Asian and Latin American (Averbeck-Lietz, 2011; Goggin, 2016; Petrus, 2016) theories of communication and media over the past two decades. Such efforts are central to the processes of de-Westernizing, decolonizing, and internationalizing communication and media studies. For example, Goggin (2016) argues we must now revisit both grand (meta) theories and canonical theories of culture, communication, and media when working in Asian contexts.

Ultimately, it seems likely that understanding culture and communication within digital environments demands a multifaceted theoretical approach to adequately address the complex, global, and superdiverse character of interactions in online spaces.