Why do we mention intercultural competence and social media in the same breath? Because of the way in which social media allows us to connect with orders of magnitude more people than would be possible in ordinary life lived at the local level. So in theory this is a chance to meet people from other cultures, either by accident or design. But is this really meeting people and if so are we meeting them in our culture, their culture or in a third place, as Kramsch talked about, and which in this case is online?

There are a couple of ways of thinking about this which may help here. First of all in 2007, the honeycomb structure of social media was proposed by Gene Smith What this showed us is that there are about 7 different elements of social software which makes social media different from the static websites of Web 1.0 So you can see in the diagram the seven aspects with identity right at the centre and other aspects such as presence, reputation and sharing. And if we look at different social media we can see that different social media tools emphasise different parts of the honeycomb. So for example, you've got Flickr with its emphasis on sharing, Twitter with its emphasis on presence and so on.   So if we wanted to experience different cultures and had a bit of background knowledge about culture theory we might decide for example that we might have more chance of meeting up with Asian cultures in group oriented social software. But maybe we need to take one more step backwards and think about where these social media come from? And mostly they come from Western cultures, so Facebook, Twitter and Skype for example were all conceived and designed from a Western perspective, where there is no division of the sexes, which emphasises the individual, and where these individuals make themselves highly visible through photos and videos. So maybe those who are having intercultural experiences are non-Western users of the social media.

Of course despite the world domination of Facebook, there are geographical variations in the use of social media with, for example, Mixi being preferred to Facebook in Asian cultures such as Japan. And there you can see differences such as the preference for pastel coloured interface in contrast to the bold colours of Facebook.

There is also a preference for the use of cartoon avatars as against using photos to represent yourself. It's been suggested that if these tools could be designed with more of a group orientation than based on the individual then they would be even more attractive to group-oriented cultures.

By the way, something interesting has happened since I first started talking about this about two years ago. Mixi 2 years ago... and now!

So in a world dominated by western social media is there any chance of intercultural learning through their use?   They do make contact much easier and the quality of the contact is potentially higher because it is based on networking rather than general calls to the whole world for exchange partners as happens for example in epals. This means that there is a higher element of trust because you are dealing with a friend of a friend. FOAF. I think there is also a higher chance of deep learning because the contacts can be prolonged and engaging through the use of tools such as Skype. When it costs nothing to talk with someone on the other side of the world for 20 minutes, isn't that better than sending a series of letters over a longer period of time? So intercultural learning through social media can happen but I would argue that it has to be planned; prompted and structured to overcome the echo chamber effect. The echo chamber effect refers to the phenomenon whereby we tend to link up only with like-minded people. This means that we are not likely to have our beliefs and values challenged. Of course we are not clones, so that even in a group of like-minded people, there will still be differences which will challenge you and make you think. But a good intercultural learning experience works better when it is explicitly planned to take you out of the echo chamber completely. And I think I can give two examples.

The first is Second Life, the virtual world where nobody knows how to behave. One of my favourite examples comes from its early days, about 2007, when I attended a meeting with other EFL teachers. Here is a screen shot of the scene. And after the event, one newcomer to Second Life who had also been there commented as follows on one of the attendees; who we can see more clearly now. … people seem to be having a great time assuming other roles and wearing clothes that would get them the sack in First Life.’ I think this reveals a great deal about the expectations that individual had about what a meeting looked like and how people should behave. I could mention that the person who made that comment has since gone on to be a great advocate of the use of Second Life as a place to learn language and intercultural awareness so he learned to accommodate the strange clothing people wear in Second Life.   It is funny that many educational organisations set up in Second Life and the first thing they did was to build a classroom where students could sit while listening to the teacher at the front. Many of these organisations then came to realise that it never rains in Second Life and people don't get tired standing for long periods in a virtual world and so the new norm is that you don't need a classroom in a virtual world. You see many educationalists going through that process in Second Life and I would call this a sort of intercultural learning.   There is another Second Life example, Islam Online, which was used by another EFL teacher, Mark Karstad in the United Arab Emirates. Many of these female students were not allowed by their families to go on the real field trip on offer to China so Karstad arranged trips to South Korea, Darfur and the USA in Second Life. And in our podcast he told us of how his students had fallen foul of the social norms in Islam Online when they did not have appropriate Islamic clothing on. And don't forget that I am talking about their avatars here, the computer images which depict the person. They were inappropriately dressed and were told by a devout visitor to the place to go away until they were modestly covered. So yes, there are intercultural lessons to be learned there.

My final example is the Flat Classroom project which started in 2006. Originally this was a collaboration by two teachers, Vicki Davies in Georgia USA and Julie Lindsey in Bangladesh who got together to study Friedman's book The World is Flat, hence the name. The project involved the students at both stations collaborating to study the various aspects of the book on a wiki and with regular skype meetings. The project generated such interest that Thomas Friedman himself contacted them and was able to engage in conversation with the students. It became an authentic, intercultural project. It has since grown to involve many other countries and covers different topics each year. The image shows one of the latest exchanges between a student in Qatar and one in Georgia. The exchange on its own may not look much but this is part of a long and multi-faceted conversation and collaboration and this is why teachers and students like it so much. The project has spawned many off-shoots one of which is Eracism – global debating for cultural understanding   So my conclusion is that yes, there is intercultural learning to be done using the social media but that it is more of a culture general rather than a culture specific type of learning because it is arguable whether the social media represent any existing culture. I think that they represent a third place, that we have to learn the rules and that there are several different social media cultures.

Social media Anne Fox http://annefox.eu Can social media contribute to developing intercultural competences?

The Social Media Honeycomb

Individual versus Group?

Western norms?

’… people seem to be having a great time assuming other roles and wearing clothes that would get them the sack in First Life.’

The Flat Classroom

Thanks to Smith, G Social Media Honeycomb The Flat Classroom Project King, C How cultural differences impact social media Kramsch, C. The Third Place Vicki Davies blogs under the name Cool Cat Teacher Virtual Second Life field trips, Absolutely Intercultural Image: Social Media Bandwagon