Social Technologies and National Contexts
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(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog – How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)
When you are doing an interdisciplinary study of social technologies across four countries, it is important to focus on the connections between otherwise unrelated factors, and it is useful to develop a framework to look for these connections.
Here’s the framework we have been using for our research on social media in BRIC countries –
The outer circle is the national context, which comprises of the five interconnected Cs of computing devices, connectivity, culture, content and capabilities. The inner circle is the social media ecosystem itself. Our research, which looks at the connections between the two, has three layers –
Layer 1: The role of the national context in social media adoption
Layer 2: The dynamics of the social media ecosystem
Layer 3: The role of social media in changing the social context
Finally, the national contexts we are looking at are the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and United States (as a reference point).
Most of our posts so far can be classified into one of these three layers. Posts about culture (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ) and access (1, 2, 3) belong to the first layer. Posts about social media usage (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) belong to the second layer. Posts about the impact of social technologies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) belong to the third layer.
We have found that there are different challenges in all the three layers.
In the first layer, the challenge is to identify and focus on the most important factors in the national context that impact social media adoption. There is a lot of prior data-rich research associated with each of the 5Cs and, unless you identify the most important connections, it’s easy to be lost in all that data.
In the second layer, the challenge is to focus only on the dynamics of social media usage that are important in the context of BRIC countries. Again, there is a lot of interesting (and sometimes data-rich) research on both the theory and usage of social technologies, and it is useful to tightly focus on the BRIC context.
In the third layer, the challenge is to look beyond anecdotal evidence and make connections that haven’t been made before. There is very little data-rich research on the impact of social technologies on the social context and it’s both a limitation and an opportunity.
The framework applies to our overall research, but, with minor variations, it can also be applied to Ben’s research on “privacy 2.0″ and Pavneet’s research on “civil society 2.0″.
What do you think of our research framework? Are we looking at all the important factors? Are we looking for all the important connections? Do share your feedback with us.
Anurag and one other person are discussing. 
MarialRBeyer, 
max191, 
Gautam Ghosh 9:36 pm on August 7, 2008 Permalink |
It’s interesting to note that Hofstede did his study originally for IBM which wanted to understand how national cultures might help or hinder how a global IBM culture might be established. I don’t think national mainstream culture changes so much in a matter of centuries – forget decades – so if Hofstede’s research is right then these will hold fairly true for a majority of the population.
Even if one aspect changes – like say, power distance, for a small fraction of the population the larger impact would be minimal. And even if we assume a large part of the population changes its orientation even then with regard to how India is placed in the world it would not change much, IMHO.