Overcoming the challenges of online cross-cultural communication
The advent of the Internet and online communities has made the world a much smaller place thanks to the ability to communicate quickly—and fairly easily—with people across the globe. Besides the telephone, one can argue that no other communications mechanism in history rivals the Internet's impact on global and cross-cultural communication. But, as with all advances, there are also challenges to the increased ability to communicate cross-culturally.
One of the hurdles to online cross-cultural communications that may immediately come to mind is the problem of not being able to pick up on body language and even breathing patterns, i.e. a bored sigh or impatient huffing and puffing, which can often be of great help in evaluating the tenor of the conversation. But experts say one of the most important issues to consider when communicating cross-culturally is what modality is preferred or best accommodates the way in which people in your counterpart's community interact with each other.
"One must first recognize that different cultures prefer different communication styles," explains Michael Soon Lee, MBA CSP, President of EthnoConnect.com and co-author of "Cross-Cultural Selling for Dummies." "Studies show that Hispanics tend to be more kinesthetic while African Americans are generally more auditory and many Asians like pictures, charts and graphs. To effectively train online one must build 'multi-modal presentations,' which reach all of these groups."
Lee may be on to something. Social media networks like Facebook®, Twitter® and, to a lesser extent, MySpace® have people brought together who would have otherwise more than likely never come into contact with one another. The groups in Facebook and trending topics on Twitter allow people from various cultures to come together based on a common interest. Although people may find that they have some overlapping interests in these online communities, communicating with one another may not feel easy, or even possible, due to language and even cultural barriers—which can be frustrating to the parties involved because of the value they may feel they are missing out on from exploring the thoughts and ideals of a potentially like-minded individual, educator or business.
But, as an article on Mashable.com points out, there are technological features like apps that can help make such cross-cultural communications easier and more understandable for both parties. Even for truncated communication like tweets, "Apps like Twinslator, Tweetrans and Twanslate allow you to tweet in other languages, and Twanslate’s Firefox® add-on translates others’ tweets into your language of choice."
One of the benefits of the continued growth of online cross-cultural communication, according to some, is that it can essentially help with creating a universal language—at least in online settings.
CEO of Social Media Wired Nancy Perez told Mashable that online communities and networks like Twitter create an all emcompassing experience that people across the globe can take part in. “The interests, behaviors, thought processes, speech patterns and daily commonalities of life translate [Twitter] conversations into the universal language of humankind,” she said.
In the workplace, research shows that cross-cultural online communications can be of great assistance in building relationships between companies on different continents with divergent cultures.
In the research paper "The global village: Online cross-cultural communication and HRM," which was published in Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, the authors investigated the personal and business effects of online cross-cultural communication and found that it could actually benefit global business transactions in ways that are not possible in in-person settings, especially in human resources.
"It was found that diversity-oriented Human Resource Management can reduce the cultural fault-lines between individualist and collectivist (IC) cultures, and thereby positively moderate the relationship between cross-cultural online communication and affective, cognitive and behavioural outcomes," reads the article's abstract.
The growing popularity of social networks, global classrooms, online meeting technology and the like, along with the insurgence of these tools in educational and business settings, makes the experience of virtual cross-cultural communications an increasing reality for most Americans. Because of this, it is critical to understand and accommodate the fact that people from different cultures communicate best in certain modalities, and to also take advantage of the technological applications that allow people to break down and better comprehend language and cultural barriers.
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