Culture and Instant Messaging

It is always important to consider the cultural backgrounds of those your colleagues, or clientele. It will help you to communicate effectively if you acknowledge where they are coming from, and what message they will be receiving based on how you act. There are high context, and low context cultures. High context cultures communicate with many non-verbal cues, and rely heavily on context. Low context cultures expect a direct, verbal answer.

Knowledge of these contextual norms works well when meeting or conversing with someone face to face. But what happens when you are sending instant messages?

Oracle Corp. and Carnegie Mellon University have performed a study aimed at determining whether it is important to take cultural context into consideration in the creating of a cross-cultural instant messaging server.

They have found that in high-context cultures there is more of a need to be on the same server, in order to have the same features available. They placed a higher value on multi-party chat, audio chat, and the availability of video chat. Those from a high-context culture also reported using emoticons in conversation more often than those in a low-context culture.

In low-context cultures people are more likely to communicate on different servers as the main conversation piece is the information being typed. They were also found more likely to have multiple conversation windows open at the same time than those of high-context cultures.

So when you’re using instant messaging to converse with colleagues or clientele, try and take notice of their cultural background, recognize whether they are a high or low context culture individual, and put your knowledge to practice. This will increase the effectiveness of your communication.

References:

Fussell, S.R., Kayan, S., Setlock L.D. (2006). Cultural differences in the use of instant messaging in Asia and North America. CSCW ’06 Proceedings of the 2006 20^th anniversary conference. p. 525-528. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93.9583&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Guffey, M.E., Loewy, D., Rhodes, K., Rogin, P. (2010/2013) Business Communication Process and Product. United States of America. Nelson