I guess, even after all the helpful and interesting replies, I'm still not at all clear as to what "web culture" would be. It may be that my understanding is too fritzed up by too many years with Hall and Hofstede - see Jose's most recent reply. But I'm also missing the basic element: what do we mean by "culture"? U.S. anthropologists quietly dropped this term from their conceptual vocabulary sometime back, because despite a century of observation and theoretical debate, no working definition seemed to emerge that couldn't be undermined one way or another. I'm not quite ready to go that far ... but in the meantime, some additional resources and an advert 1) a special issue of JCMC was devoted to "Culture and Computer-Mediated Communication: Toward New Understandings" - exploring both the ways in which Hofstede and Hall could be used to some effect in analyzing online communication from a cultural perspective, as well as their limits and failures (Jose is more than right). the introduction can be found: Ess, C., and Sudweeks, F. (2005). Culture and computer-mediated communication: Toward new understandings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 9. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/ess.html No, that's not the advert ... Forgive my inability to resist noting: At the upcoming CATaC'08 conference, Jose Abdelnour-Nocera and Connie Kampf will chair a panel provisionally titled "Beyond Hall, Hofstede, and 'culture', understanding diversity from the top-down to the bottom-up and back!" I'm absolutely confident the panel will be first-rate, and pretty darned sure that those interested in matters of culture and the web will find it inspiring and ground-breaking. hope this helps, - charles ess
1) How would you define web culture? 2) How is it unique, in comparison to other cultures? 3) What are some good/classic resources on the web describing and defining web culture?
... Thanks ... Richard