The intra-national communication challenge I read recently in the article of Akanksha which discusses culture and social media with Knowledge@SMU, was very interesting.
For that reason I hereby would like to share a part of that article by topping the three most interesting and distinctive cultures (in my opinion) of Asia in the blogging matter:
In Japan, the culture is one where people are usually avoiding attention and interacting with strangers. Not surprisingly then the fact that anonymity on blogs is often preferred.
Compared to any other country, Japan’s blog readers are also less likely to take part in any activity after reading a blog. 18% of people interviewed in Japan said they took some sort of action as a result of reading a blog, similar to South Korea (19%) but significantly less than respondents in UK (28%), France (27%) and the US (28%).
Trackbacks are more popular than comments on blogs as this allows a traceable comment system where negative remarks need not be posted directly.
In Hong Kong, there are three primary communities. The expatriates, who favor English, the local Chinese whose first language is Cantonese and the increasing numbers of mainland Chinese immigrants who use Mandarin.
These differences are important to businesses as based on their target audience; their medium of advertisement has to change. Also, HK has a culture of shopping and thus there is a reluctance to shop online…as shopping is a ‘social activity’. Another thing note is that Hong-Kongers tend to visit chat sites more and haven’t really created much localized content like Korea or even china for that matter…Perhaps again since they have the culture of ‘following the us/uk’.
The third example I read and want to share to you is the one of China, a collectivist society which has a unique culture of being private. Traditionally speaking, the Chinese lead very personal lives hence the blogosphere is used for personal reasons as opposed to corporate use. Also power distance in China is quite high and businesses in China often follow a top-down hierarchical structure known for following long-established practices and thus they don’t really encourage activities such as employee blogging…however the traditional means of communication have been changing. Social media is gaining momentum in China as people are able to communicate their personal views to the rest of the world, which is something very new for such a close knit and suppressed culture.
These three are just some examples of the culture difference. Later on the coming months I will be interviewing speakers from the Internet Asia Summit & Awards 2009 and we will definitely come back to recognizing, handling and communication with the Asian culture on the Web 2.0.
