New Media and Intercultural Communication

Pauline Hope Cheong (PhD, University of Southern California) is Associate Professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University. Her multidisciplinary research focuses on the socio-cultural implications of communication technologies. She has published widely in flagship journals including New Media and Society, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Information, Communication and Society, The Information Society, Journal of Communication and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.Judith N. Martin (PhD, Pennsylvania State University) is Professor of Intercultural Communication in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. She has published numerous research articles in Communication journals as well as other disciplinary journals and has co-authored three textbooks in intercultural communication with Thomas K. Nakayama: Intercultural Communication in Contexts, Experiencing Intercultural Communication, and Readings in Intercultural Communication.Leah P. Macfadyen (PhD, The University of British Columbia) is a researcher and instructor in the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Most recently, her writing on aspects of culture, identity and online education have appeared in edited collections such as Digital Differences: Perspectives on Online Education (2010) and Learning Cultures in Online Education(2010).

• Contents: Pauline Hope Cheong/Judith N. Martin/Leah P. Macfadyen: Introduction: Mediated Intercultural Communication Matters: Understanding New Media, Dialectics, and Social Change – Maja van der Velden: Designing for Culture: An Ecological Perspective on Indigenous Knowledge and Database Design – Beth Bonniwell Haslett: A Structurational Interaction Approach to Investigating Culture, Identity, and Mediated Communication – Bolanle A. Olaniran: Exploring Cultural Challenges in E-Learning – Kirk St.Amant: Culture, Context, and Cyberspace: Rethinking Identity and Credibility in International Virtual Teams – Natalia Rybas: Section Two: Constructing Identities 6. Producing the Self at the Digital Interface – Ping Yang: Who Am I in Virtual Space? A Dialectical Approach to Students’ Online Identity Expression – Guo-Ming Chen/Xiaodong Dai: New Media and Asymmetry in Cultural Identity Negotiation – Debbie Rodan/Lynsey Uridge/Lelia Green: Negotiating a New Identity Online and Off-Line: The HeartNET Experience – Wei Sun/Andrew Jared Critchfield: Inoculating against Invisibility: The Friendly Circle of Cancer Patients’ Chinese Blog – Joonseong Lee: Rite of Death as a Popular Commodity: Neoliberalism, Media, and New Korean Funeral Culture – Gado Alzouma: Far Away from Home… With a Mobile Phone! Reconnecting and Regenerating the Extended Family in Africa – Robert Shuter: When Indian Women Text Message: Culture, Identity, and Emerging Interpersonal Norms of New Media – Azi Lev-On/Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar: To Browse or Not to Browse: Perceptions of the Danger of the Internet by Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women – Carla Ganito/Cátia Ferreira: From the Coffee Table Album to the Mobile Phone: A Portuguese Case Study – Konrad Ng: Asian American New Media Communication as Cultural Engagement: E-mail, Vlog/Blogs, Mobile Applications, Social Networks, and YouTube – Nickesia Gordon/Kristin Sorensen: Jamaica and Chile Online: Accessing and Using the Internet in a Developing World Context – Irina Privalova: Cultural Peculiarities of Russian Audience Participation in Political Discourse in the Era of New Technologies – Herbert Hrachovec: The Vienna Unibrennt Platform: Hidden Pitfalls of the Social Web.

«New Media in Intercultural Communication comes just at the right time. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, audio and video download sites such as iTunes, YouTube, and Netflix, not to mention blogs, search browsers like Google, wi-fi technology, TiVo, mobile communication devices, and teleconferencing systems such as Skype continue to demonstrate their indispensability across wide-ranging and uneven modernities. Human dependency on an ever-adaptive yet consumer-practical digital communication infrastructure is deepening. Thus far, however, we know very little about how new media transform society and culture, and even less about how individuals and groups of people think about themselves and others differently, as a result. Tried and true intercultural communication theories are not easily retrofitted to address new media contexts and environments. Nor do theories of the Internet always recognize just how fundamental culture is to communication. But, New Media in Intercultural Communication does. Fortunately, it transports us into a 21st Century way of thinking about culture, communication, and new media.» (Kent A. Ono, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)