Cultural differences in the use of instant messaging in Asia and North America

  • Authors:
  • Shipra Kayan;Susan R. Fussell;Leslie D. Setlock

  • Affiliations:
  • Oracle Corp, Redwood Shores, CA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • CSCW '06 Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Information technologies have the potential to facilitate cross-cultural collaboration, but this potential may be limited by different styles of IT use in different cultures. We report the results of a preliminary study and a larger follow-up study that focus on the use of Instant Messaging (IM) in North America and Asia. Consistent with the distinction between Western individualistic, low-context cultures and Eastern collectivistic, high-context cultures, we found that multi-party chat, audio-video chat and emoticons were much more popular in Asia than in North America. We conclude that cultural differences should be taken into consideration when designing tools for cross-cultural communication.