A failure to communicate — words and meaning

Over the last 20 years the Internet has made it possible to communicate more easily with more and more people in more and more places, but in some ways it has made us more, rather than less aware of the barriers to crosscultural communication.

We sometimes use the same words, but there are a whole lot of unspoken assumptions behind the meanings of those words that does not get communicated.

The word I have in mind at the moment is the American word "program",[1:] and the assumptions behind it...