hightext

Samsung smack

This will certainly enable mobile phones to become a more 'high context' medium for communication...

Robust cultures

Two articles from TheFeature which I think complement each other. One from Douglas Rushkoff repeats the commonplace fear that global business is responsible for killing minority language and cultures because it ignores them, whilst the other from Howard Rheingold looks at the innovative ways that people in Kenya, Peru and India are using wireless technologies. Minority cultures and languages will not die because of global business producing products and services that ignore them, people will find their own ways to use technologies that support what they want to do.

Motoman project in Cambodia using motorbikes to retrieve and send e-mails in remote areas.

Leaving it on while getting it on

I guess this survey result means Germans are rather more, erm, polychronic than I thought.

Instant messaging and 'efficiency'

An article (pdf link) by Setlock, Fussell and Neuwirth of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on research done into decision making via instant messaging between Americans and Chinese raises the question of how we should assess 'efficient' decision making.

They set 24 pairs of three different cultural groupings (American to American, American to Chinese and Chinese to Chinese) one of those decision making tasks involving survival and what you would take with you, that you get on management training courses. The twist was that some pairs had to resolve the task via instant messaging.

They measured the efficiency of the decision making process in terms of time taken and numbers of words and speaking turns used. They expected the American to American pairs to be most efficient which indeed they were, but were surprised to find that the Chinese to Chinese pairs were most 'inefficient' even compared to American to Chinese pairs, where they were expecting cultural barriers to cause problems.

They found that instant messaging reduced but did not eliminate the effects of culture on conversational efficiency and content. By content they meant the amount of hedging or politeness used. Also, they suggest that it is the synchronicity of Instant Messaging that supports remote work amongst high context cultures like China rather than its richness.

Their conclusion is that the American to American participants viewed the task as an exercise in situation specific compromise, trying to find a mutually acceptable join rating form, whereas the Chinese to Chinese pairs tried to reach a real agreement, through consensus on the relative worth of the survival items they chose. This may have taken more time, but in terms of how persuaded by each other, and how 'happy' with the process they were, it seems to me the Chinese to Chinese pairs were more effective.