Question

Texting, Blogs, Email, Twitter, Facebook and other Social Networking, Video Conferencing, and TelePresence are all newer forms of communication, which have only recently (within the past decade or sooner) gained widespread popularity. Each of these mediums of communication has different levels of information richness. Recall back to Hofstede’s culture framework and select one emerging communication medium that would be best suited to individualistic cultures and discuss why. In addition, select one emerging communication medium that would be best suited to collectivist cultures and discuss why.

Answer 1

Individualism pertains to those societies where everyone needs to take care after himself or herself as well as the immediate family. Whereas, Collectivism pertains to the societies where everyone gets integrated since their birth as the strong group, this helps them throughout their lifetime to maintain unquestioning loyalty. Individualists are more direct when they communicate rather thinking so much on other’s feelings or actions and also very much interested to seek information about themselves as compared to others. Whereas, Collectivist cultures prefer high context communication and attribute, hence, message content is often embedded. Thus, it is very much needed to understand the message properly and giving importance to two way communication and more frequent in nature to take decision. Individualists give importance to task performance whereas Collectivists give importance to relationships. Now, taking the example of “texting”, in many nations, people express themselves in their own culturally suitable way, by adopting the mobile phone. Therefore, in individualistic cultures, individual prefer ‘texting’ for efficient usage whereas, in collectivistic cultures, individual use texting to express themselves in style.