An example of there being not much cultural difference in use of communications technology, after all?
When I posted about bloggers in Iraq using LiveJournal, I namechecked Rebelcoyote as one of the US soldiers in Iraq who had a LiveJournal blog. It turns out (thanks to Norman Geras) he's called Private First Class Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and is now in hospital after a bomb went off under his transport, blowing off half his left foot, lodging some shrapnel in his eye and killing one of his colleagues.
The article also explains a question I had, about how far the US army allows its troops to blog:
"Soliders have the freedom of speech to express their own personal views. As long as it does not threaten anyone personally or denigrate the national chain of command, which is illegal, or claim to be from a standpoint of policy, that's fine," says Major Gary Tallman of the US Army Public Relations Office.
I wonder how many other countries' armies would allow such freedom of expression for their troops - I'm not making this point particularly to praise the US Army, just wondering if it's another cross-cultural difference. Specific differences that come to mind are, firstly, an American attitude that rules are rules, explicit and universally and rigorously applied, therefore soldiers will be well aware of them and will comply. Secondly, there also seems to be an American attitude to information that is quite different in higher context cultures, and is reinforced by the spread of internet access - that information is everywhere, so there is no point in worrying about shared organisational information becoming public. If you don't want it publicly known, don't share it within the organisation - viz Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq. Higher context cultures are much more paranoid - they worry that the unspoken rules may not be observed, and that putting even benign, shared corporate information into explicit form may subject it to all kinds of misinterpretations.
Apparently some questioned whether his blog was a fake, or just part of US Army propaganda, but as you can see from my previous list, he was one of several US soldiers in Iraq blogging on LiveJournal. And I would imagine, if he was a US Army PR flack, he wouldn't have got blown up, or at least it would not have been admitted that he had.
Continuing on from looking at The Mesopotamian blog, I saw a list of 9 other blogs written by Iraqis - they're all on Blogspot. Then I recollected that LiveJournal had a big list of where all their users came from, with links. Sure enough there are 260 LiveJournal users in Iraq.
Except there aren't. Yup, I was being naive and reckoning without the oh-so-ironic (in an Alanis Morissette sort of way) American teen who makes up the majority of LiveJournal users as far as I can tell. I clicked through 50 of the most recently updated and my rough estimate is that 80% are American teens living in Podunk, and the rest are US soldiers in Iraq, plus a few Americans who are out there on infrastructure building projects - oh, and two Russians for some unfathomable reason.
Actually it is quite interesting reading the US soldier blogs - with my HR/organisational change hat on I am trying and failing to imagine how their 'managers' maintain morale and purpose - maybe LiveJournal is a good place for them to vent though, and one shouldn't read too much into some of their down moments. You can find them by going to www.livejournal.com/users/ and then adding spastik-bob, givingintoashes, paladyn, rebelcoyote, mykmykmotorbyke, slownewsday, hawkinbagdad, themeshuggener, bumpthekoala, desertfox11m, combatpattybot.
So maybe LiveJournal isn't quite as multicultural as I had hoped. Another reason for choosing them now looking less attractive....
The Mesapotamian, an Iranian blog written in English, has had a recent brush with cultural communication differences. Alaa, the blog owner, wrote a very moving response ("I don't want to say anything to spoil this moment of awe. I kneel and kiss your hand.") to an American woman who left a comment on his blog about her two sons in the US Army, one in Iraq, one who was in Iraq.
Mr JoJo, (who describes himself as Western in outlook), left this comment:
"Do you know what the image of Alaa going down on his knees in awe brought to my mind? Well, it's a slave my friends. We Africans know alot about going on one's knees in a "moment of awe". American slaves did as well. There is NO need for him to go on his knees and kiss anyone's hands to show his appreciation for their help, support or sacrifice. Quite frankly the whole notion highly disturbs me. Showing gratitude is one thing; crawling head-over-heels to debase oneself is another. I hope I am not misunderstood [...]
What I am trying to tell Alaa is that it is not necessary for him to play to his audience. I may be wrong but the notion of his going down on his knees in awe smacks of over dramatization. It appeared to me as a calculated statement made to elicit a favorable reaction"
You can imagine this led to quite a lot of debate on The Mesopotamian, mostly quite restrained, as I think a large number of the commenters realised they were dealing with cultural differences rather than deliberate nastiness. Looking for some theoretical back up to my sense that there was a culture clash going on I picked up Hofstede to look at the results of his research with regard to Iraqis and Westerners such as Americans and Brits. The biggest difference between Iraqis (in Hofstede lumped in with Arab nations as a whole) and Americans/Brits in the various dimensions Hofstede looks at is in what he calls 'uncertainty avoidance' - which is a measure of how comfortable people are with ambiguity, measured by how stressed they feel at work, how rule oriented they are and so on. Americans have fairly weak uncertainty avoidance, whereas Arab countries have quite strong uncertainty avoidance. In Arab countries therefore, it is the norm that "emotions may at proper times and places be ventilated", compared to "emotions should not be shown" for the USA and Northern Europeans. Interestingly, West and East African countries are pretty similar to Arab countries on most of the dimensions, apart from uncertainty avoidance, where they are closer to the US.
So what might seem rather florid, over-emotional and possibly manipulative language to Alaa's Western readers is not at all how an Arab reader would react to Alaa's language. As the Saudi woman who trained me in intercultural theory recently told me, it's not uncommon for Arabs to cry at work. To give Mr JoJo credit, he came round to seeing that Alaa was just expressing himself in a way that was quite normal in Iraq.