Activity 1 - Culturability

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Activity 1 – Culture and the internet

The Yahoo! Sites

The main difference lies in the language and content. No big surprise really.

A comparison of the Chinese vs the Taiwanese and the Spanish vs the Catalonian sites shows that the desire to establish political identities supersedes culturability.

The icons depicted on the Chinese site are markedly different from the rest. Also the positioning of the links – while most sites have the links in a column on the left, the Chinese site has them in a bar lower on the page. Other wise, the reading direction is the same, from left to right.

From examining just the Yahoo and IBM sites, I find little evidence, beyond the Chinese yahoo site, of distinct cultural preferences and biases as stated by Barber and Badre (1998). Has there been a true merging of culture and usability due to exposure to various cultural presences on the Web? After all, it has been 10 years since B and B's paper was published.

My iceberg attempt – pls feel free to edit it!

Surface visible elements	Language – many of the Asian sites were in local languages except for those of the countries where English is widely used e.g. Malaysia, Philippines content of local interest colour – red is the predominant background colour in the Chinese Yahoo whereas all the others had blue
Unspoken rules, traditions, norms	Taboo topics e.g. criticism of royalty in Thailand and Malaysia Criticism of religion in Malaysian yahoo Criticism of government in Chinese yahoo
Unconscious rules, values, beliefs	Explicit nudity