At my official fellowship blog — How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies — I use the Geert Hofstede model to study the cultural differences between the BRIC countries and US and wonder how a collectivist, paternalist, status-oriented and relativist social web will look like —
- What if the social web subjugated individual profiles and activity streams (high individualism) to group affiliations (high collectivism)?
- What if the social web parsed and displayed relationships between two users based on their status relative to each other (high power distance) instead of treating everyone as a “friend” (low power distance)?
- What if the primary relationship on the social web was “becoming a fan” (long term orientation) instead of “becoming a friend” (short terms orientation)?
- What if the complex relationships between users automatically changed over time and across context (low uncertainty avoidance) instead of staying the same until it is proactively changed (high uncertainty avoidance)?
Do you think that such a social web will ever come into existence? Do join the conversation at the How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies blog.
