Global Culture

At the recent O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, PhD candidate Danah Boyd gave a lecture entitled “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide”. Since I’m an avid reader of her blog, the fact that her position was so relevant to this blog made it truly energizing.

As the ultimate objective of this project is to introduce the online tools to facilitate a cultural migration for the global citizen, her presentation is of special interest as it addresses some of the aspects that we must consider during this process:

• Embedded Observation: refers to the process followed by ethnographers in which they can assimilate a culture much better if they are living it day by day. Applicable to online communities by having customer representatives participate in the dialog in such a way that they can understand the context that is unique to those participating, therefore providing a better service by tweaking the community to serve the interests of its users.
• Scalability: as an online community succeeds in reaching out to a diverse group of users, the processes to support them get more complicated. Being able to provide the mechanisms by which the community can strive on its own by evolving or adapting the tools is critical.
• Serendipity: fostering an environment where people can come across other individuals that they did not plan to interact with, but based on their behavior are likely to be “safe” online buddies.
• Language barriers: the farther a community reaches, the more likely it is to face important challenges to align the cultural contexts of its participants. Bridging the symbols of so many local cultures is not a trivial problem.

While it is early in the process, I believe her conclusions map well to the fundamental structure of our project:

• Recognizing that the best agents of culture are those who are forced into foreign contexts through migration and making them the power users of this initiative ensures that we have an “embedded observer” in not one but all the various cultures we represent.
• Providing the tools for these agents to adapt the tools for their own community, will ensure that each one is only dealing with a small group of users, allowing for scalability without a centralized node.
• Danah’s position about strangers with some similarities finding it easier to interact has been observed as new migrants arrive at a community. They find it easier to interact with previous migrants that have the same origin, even if they are complete strangers. These are our users.
• Language must be simple if we expect all these local communities to exchange information. I believe that one possible mechanism will be self-adapting folksonomies, where each community grows their own folksonomy (a simplified dictionary of their culture) and through the experience of migrants any two of these can be mapped to each other, in fact bridging two distant local cultures.