November 17, 2025
In her new book, CREATE faculty member and professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Katharina Reinecke explores how “digital culture shock” manifests in the world, in ways innocuous and sometimes harmful.
The overwhelm people can feel when suddenly immersed in a new culture — a flurry of unfamiliar values, aesthetics, and language — is known as culture shock. In her new book, “Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters,” Reinecke argues that technology can similarly disorient, discomfit, and alienate people. Reinecke uses the phrase to describe “the experience and influence of actively or passively using technology that is not in line with one’s cultural practices or norms.”
The book explores how the self-driving cars trained on U.S. streets would likely struggle to translate to Cairo, with its drastically different road norms. It looks at how Yahoo! Japan, with its complex search interface, can overwhelm Americans used to Google’s minimalist design. Reinecke also digs into how so much technology emanating from specific regions, such as the Bay Area, can lead to forms of cultural imperialism.
In an interview with UW News, Reinecke shared that the idea for the book came from an embarrassing moment around 20 years ago. She was working in Rwanda to develop an e-learning application for agricultural advisors. When she presented her software to some of the advisors, they politely told her that they didn’t like the way it looked and didn’t find it intuitive to use.
She realized that her cultural background had influenced all the little design decisions made while developing the software: whether the interface should be colorful or simply gray and white, which she thought most people would prefer; whether users should be guided through the application or mostly explore on their own. The answer to any of these questions depends on a user’s upbringing, education, norms, and values.
“Once I realized that technology is never culturally neutral, I set out to earn a doctorate on this topic and the rest is history… Most people have no idea that their culture affects how they use technology and how they develop it. It’s just not something we usually think about or get taught.”
Katharina Reinecke, professor in computer science & engineering, and Director of the Wildlab and the Center for Globally Beneficial AI
“Over the years, I kept collecting similar technology blunders. It turns out, like me, most people have no idea that their culture affects how they use technology and how they develop it. It’s just not something we usually think about or get taught,” said Reinecke.
AI as a mirror of its developers
When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools came out, they were trained on mostly English data sources on the web, so early language models told us things like, “I am proud to be an American.” Asked for images of houses of worship, text-to-image models generated pictures of churches, as if churches were the only reasonable response.
Watch out for WEIRD design assumptions
Says, Reinecke, “The biggest risk is that technology will continue to be designed in ways that work for people most similar to those in the largest technology hubs, but that it is less usable, intuitive, trustworthy and welcoming to the rest of us.” That the design bias known as WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic.
The most consequential misassumptions about tech and culture
Reinecke finishes the book with a list of 10 misassumptions; in the UW News interview, she named her number one.
“To me, it is that people tend to think that one size fits all. They design technology and expect it to work for everyone, which is obviously not true,” said Reinecke.
For example, the Western obsession with productivity and efficiency often comes at the expense of interpersonal interactions. So many technology products are hyperfocused on making our days more efficient. There’s an app for any of our “problems,” and all of them try to somehow get us to function better, faster and more productively. But this laser-focus on streamlining misses the point that in many cultures, productivity works differently. In many East Asian cultures, for example, it takes time to build relationships before people will trust another person’s information — or that given by AI. So we need to get rid of the misassumption that technology design can be universal.
“My job would certainly be so much easier if people would stop believing this,” quipped Reinecke.
This article was excerpted from the UW News article by Stefan Milne.