Rethinking Vietnamese cultural identity in the digital age

Abstract

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the progress of technological devices and the appearance of the internet opened a unique mode of communication in the history of humanity, where cultural exchanges at the individual level worldwide are possible. At that time, most capitalist nations embargoed Vietnam, preventing it from experiencing the first phase of the global and digital age. In this isolated situation, Vietnamese scholars profoundly questioned their cultural identity or cultural code, leading to energetic debates. They all agreed that it does exist, but proposed different answers to the question of “What is Vietnamese cultural identity?” such as features. After normalizing its relationship with the US in 1995, Vietnam entered the global and digital age, where local cultural diversities face global monoculture. Through the internet, Vietnamese people increasingly engage with a shared global monoculture, and thus, more or less, leave their territorial cultural roots. Therefore, the 1980s-1990s answers about Vietnamese cultural identity are not obvious today. Facing this dilemma, there are two common approaches: i) reducing cultural identity to tangible and intangible manifestations that need to be preserved, and ii) switching the attention to “everyday culture,” or how ordinary people construct their own cultural identity. However, neither of the answers above concentrates on how digital technology forcefully mediates the understanding of Vietnamese cultural identity. In this sense, the first approach can lead to an attempt to collect cultural manifestations in a seemingly dead museum, separating them from the insiders who create their meaning. The second one is also evident when contemporary persons, through the mediation of technological devices feel their independence from the historical and cultural heritage to which they belong. Therefore, the author calls for the rethinking these debates about Vietnamese cultural identity from the current digital technological perspective for creative suggestions. This discussion, in turn, might offer indigenous knowledges from the Global South on how to identify their culture in the current monocultural digital area.