Hofstede's work has often been misused as a way to understand culture in the context of CMC and online behaviour. His national culture dimensions are too broad and high level to understand the complexity of 'web culture'. There are many different levels at which cultural reproduction, transformation and construction occur on the web, especially in on-line communities. These are some of many papers about online communities and CMC that show how Hofstede's dimensions fail to explain accurately on line / cmc behaviour based on the nationality of users. In all of them, authors tend to provide only conjectures about why certain behaviour did not correspond to that 'prescribed' by a particular national culture dimension. CALHOUN, K. J., TENG, J. T. C. & CHEON, M. J. (2002) Impact of national culture on information technology usage behaviour: an exploratory study of decision making in Korea and the USA. Behaviour & Information Technology, 21, 293 - 302. EL-SHINAWY, M. & VINZE, A. S. (1997) Technology, culture and persuasiveness: a study of choice-shifts in group settings. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 473-496. In my earlier life I did an attempt to make sense of cultural construction in IRC communities from a qualitative social psychology perspective Here it is http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2002.tb001 46.x I am aware this only addresses one aspect of web culture...but I thought it might help. Cheers, José Dr. José Abdelnour Nocera Senior Lecturer Institute for Information Technology Thames Valley University Room TC371 St Mary's Road, Ealing - London W5 5RF Tel [work] +44(0)2082800251 / [home] +44(0)1908648376 Fax +44 (0)7006015408 http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/~jabdelno/ -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Callahan, Ewa S. Prof. Sent: 17 January 2008 00:49 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] What is web culture? Hi all, Culture is a concept, so we can describe it the same way we describe cultures in general (in terms of values and artifacts) although it is rather like describing human (or world) culture. The Web in itself presents a variety of different spaces, each of them with its own set of characteristics. Is bloggers culture the same as Facebook culture? There is probably some overlap, but number of people will embrace one, but not the other. As someone pointed out, Web is an artifact, although we can still talk about the culture of Internet users, who are similar to other cultural groups that are identified on the bases of the activities they do (a specific music culture, soccer culture etc) rather than national/ethnic upbringing. Additionally, if we consider web an artifact, than we have to keep in mind that its content is created by people of different cultural (national/ethnic) backgrounds that will be reflected in the web content and interaction. Someone mentioned once to me that the Web user culture can be described in the terms of Hofstede's cultural dimensions (low power, high individualism, masculine, etc.) but I have never found an actual citation to that research. If anybody seen a study discussing web culture from this perspective, please let me know. Best, Ewa Callahan Assistant Professor of Communications Quinnipiac university -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Hall, Richard H. Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 1:14 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] What is web culture? 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 -- Richard H. Hall Professor and Program Director, Information Science and Technology Missouri S&T http://mst.edu/~rhall _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/