Understanding and Supporting Intercultural Computer-Mediated Communication

日時:
2009年12月11日 15:00～16:00

場所:
京都大学工学部10号館4階　第3講義室

講師:
Susan R. Fussell 　氏

講師所属:
Associate Professor/Department of Communication　and
a member of the Graduate Field of Information Science, Cornell University

講師略歴:
Susan R. Fussell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and a member of the Graduate Field of Information Science at Cornell University. She received her BS degree in psychology and sociology from Tufts University in 1981, and her Ph.D. in social and cognitive psychology from Columbia University in 1990. Dr. Fussell's primary interests lie in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work and computer-mediated communication. Her current projects include developing visualization tools to support collaborative intelligence analysis, leveraging the internet to motivate people to reduce their energy usage, and investigating the effects of culture on computer-mediated communication. Dr. Fussell has published numerous papers in the areas of social psychology, computer-supposed cooperative work and related disciplines. She is also the editor of two books, The Verbal Communication of Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), and, with Roger Kreuz, Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998).

講演概要:
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies provide new opportunities for people to communicate across space and time. Today, people connect with others from around the world by participating in chatrooms and discussion lists, by joining global gaming communities and virtual worlds, by authoring and reading blogs with international content, and many other means. In the professional domain, firms are establishing global work teams with members from several different nations, who “meet” mainly through technology which provides a combination of audio, video or text support. Bridging nations via technology does not, however, guarantee that the cultures of the nations involved are similarly bridged. Mismatches in social behavior, work styles, status and power relationships and conversational styles can lead to misunderstandings that jeopardize the interaction. In this talk I will first review studies my students and I have been conducting to explore the problems that arise in intercultural CMC. Then, I’ll describe several tools we are working on that aim to improve cross-cultural communication through training cultural sensitivity and by intervening in dialogues when problems arise.