Is social media too western?

I was very honoured to be invited to participate in the annual Managing Cultural Diversity Seminar at Rhein Ahr campus once again this year.  Photos of the event are here and here. As ever there was a grand diversity of topics from finding out the diversity of ways in which we can greet each other across the globe to the difference between description, interpretation and evaluation. Social media was a running theme including its use in learning by Karsten Kneese and associates and how it was received in an internationalised company such as Deutsche Post DHL. I also took up the social media theme, in particular about what the most popular social media tools say about our culture and how comfortable we are with them as a result.

My thesis is that the most common social media tools are by and large of western origin and reflect the western belief in agency and individualism. In my session I wondered what type of status updates different cultures might prefer and in this I was helped by the kind people who filled in a survey I carried out earlier in the month.  In particular I asked about people’s policy on which name to use, how to represent themselves with an avatar and what type of status updates they made to their walls. I got a nice spread of ages, though a preponderance of people in education either as students or teachers so this may skew the results somewhat.

Name Policy
Facebook and Google + both insist on real names while Twitter doesn’t mind what you call yourself. Nicknames are great for hiding your identity and this can be used for good or ill. You tend to find the most vitriolic and intolerant comments made by people not using their own names on YouTube for example but on the other hand news from the Arab Spring and other politically sensitive events tends to come out by proxy and from people using pseudonyms. In my sample, 70% preferred to use their own name with 30% opting for  a nickname. So there seems a clear preference for openess in identity. In the Chinese sub-group the preference was more 50-50 but this may have something to do with the habit of Chinese students being known by a western name to help their fellow classmates and teachers. In the Indian sub-group there was a clear preference for openess in identity.

Avatar Policy
When it came to profile images or avatars, in the Chinese sub-group the results were again equally divided between those who would use a photo of themselves and those who would use something else such as a landscape photo or a cartoon. For the group as a whole 75% chose to use a photo of themselves while in the Indian sub-group, not only was the preference not to use a photo but to avoid any kind of representation whatsoever. So these results confirm my suspicion that Asian cultures are less comfortable with the idea of uploading photos of themselves. And I wonder if they are being made to feel even more uncomfortable as social media tools become more and more insistent that you upload something. Skype at the moment for example is being extremely aggressive in nudging me to take a photo of myself with my webcam for my profile even though I have a carefully chosen profile photo in place already!

Status updates
The third major area I wanted to investigate was what type of status updates would people prefer to add to their favourite social medium? I divided status updates into nine different types:

I think the above average presence of teachers and students in the sample is the reason for the knowledge sharing type of status update coming up with such a high percentage in the survey. (The question wasn’t compulsory hence the percentages don’t add up to 100). But again if we look at the Chinese and Indian sub-groups, it is only in the Chinese group that anybody chose the corporate honour type of update while in the Indian sub-group wise words were the overwhelming choice. So again I think that this supports my suspicion that pushing yourself as an individual does not fit comfortably in some cultures. In fact to be honest, it does not fit comfortably with many people in the western world either but the proportions seem to be significantly different in each of the groups; overall results, Chinese and Indian.

Practical implications

In my session at the Managing Cultural Diversity seminar I tried to get the participants to think about how differing attitudes to social media and how to behave in them might affect the reactions of different groups of people. As a starting point I showed the KLM Surprise campaign and straight away there were doubts in the room about how comfortable you would feel being suddenly confronted by an airline employee wanting to give you a gift based on what you had posted on social media. So next I divided the participants into small groups and got them discussing different scenarios such as the following:

You are a group of Chinese students doing a semester at Fachhochschule Koblenz.
You notice that many of your fellow students are on Facebook and often agree on social activities through Facebook.

• How do you feel about this?
• Will you join Facebook? If not what happens socially?
• Will you join one or more Facebook groups?
• What types of status updates will you post? Give examples

It was very interesting to get the feedback on these discussions so thanks to everyone who participated in the survey and everyone who participated in the Managing Cultural Diversity Seminar. Thanks also to those who discussed the survey at Linked In in the SIETAR Europa Competence in intercultural professions group where there was a great deal of discussion around the idea of personal branding on Facebook and how acceptable that was.