Reading :: Global Social Media Design

Global Social Media Design
By Huatong Sun

This isn't the first time I have read this book—I blurbed it!—but I picked it up a second time recently as I was working through a problem in my current manuscript, and was struck again by how insightful and timely it is. Here, Sun extends the CLUE framework from her first book into the CLUE2 framework, focusing on culturally localized user experience and empowerment. How can we better understand designed interfaces as they are deployed, received, and used across cultures? 

Specifically, she examines the design of social media across different cultures (including the US, Germany, China, Japan, South Korea), combining macro-level literature review and historical analysis of interfaces with micro-level case studies of users. To interpret these case studies, she draws on practice theory, dialogism, and postcolonial and decolonialist theory as they have been deployed in rhetoric, professional communication, CSCW, HCI, anthropology, and many other fields and disciplines. 

Along the way, Sun provides a wide-ranging review of applicable thought and lots of measured discussion of her own theoretical and methodological journey. For instance, in Ch.2, she notes that cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) seems instrumental because it lacks a political edge (p.50) and broadens her scope to practice theory and dialogism. In Ch.3, she focuses on difference in cross-cultural design, specifically "the differences that emerge from various categorical classifications such as ethnicity, race, age, class, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability" manifesting as "ways of life" (pp.56-57). She asks four questions: 

First, how does difference come into being? Second, what is the nature of difference ontologically? Third, how should we treat the difference methodologically and practically? Fourth, as designers, how can we turn differences into design resources? And how should we design with, across, and for cultural differences? (pp.57-58)

She methodically works through these questions, drawing on a broad set of literature to provide a coherent framework that underpins the case chapters.

The case chapters start with Ch.4, examining Facebook Japan—a story of initial traction followed by Facebook slumping against localized competitors such as LINE. As she notes, "the Facebook Japan case is one of the many examples that static meanings out of context are often transferred through cross-cultural design, neglecting local cultural preferences and use habits" (p.97). Specifically, FB Japan promoted "a hegemonic Eurocentric worldview (i.e., a Western model of networked sociality) and such a static meaning is complicated by the ideology of postcolonial conditions" (p.97). For instance, FB Japan followed American ideas of networked sociality by insisting on "a real name" (p.90), while "Japanese users like to keep a high level of anonymity for their profiles" in keeping with the Japanese values of "group consensus and harmony—affiliation" (p.91). To examine this conflict, Sun discusses affordances—not as static properties, but as "dialogic discursive relations" (p.103).

This framing brings us to the second case in Ch.5: Weibo of China. Weibo is a microblogging platform that was once described as the "Twitter of China" (p.137). But in its uptakes—that is, in taking up the genre of microblogging and accumulating localized practices—Weibo applied hybridization and reinvention strategies "to make contingent alliances and highlight the connections necessary to acquire agency for culturally sustaining designs" (p.137). As Sun argues, hybridization ("the cultural logic of globalization (Kraidy, 2005)" p.138) connects "concrete local experiences" with "general and abstract global processes," p.138). "It is through hybridization that heterogeneous elements and processes are linked from structures of hierarchy and networks," she adds, likening it to splicing (p.138). Reinvention involves "copycats" duplicating features (for instance, after Yik Yak became popular with US high school students, Jodel was released and became popular in some European markets; p.141). But reinvention involves uptake: "An uptake is formed through a process of hybridization as a form of localized reinvention" (p.142). In Weibo's case, 

local variations—uptakes—form an open, globally networked assemblage with dialogic relations flowing through the elements: Local uptakes share similar technological affordances and generic features; the technological affordances evolve all the time to account for the ongoing structuration; and a successful use for a particular task in one locale—the successful response to one situation—is expected to be reproduced in another locale (e.g., embedding rich-media content in the timeline of a microblogging service). Furthermore, an assemblage does not necessarily have a hierarchical structure or a center as a system, owing to the complex interactions between entities and their constant movement and flows in the contemporary condition. Therefore, a globally diffusing technology such as Twitter could be regarded as both the core technology, for those inspired by it, and an uptake, for those it was inspired by, in a global context. (p.143)

 In Ch.6, Sun examines a "war of social messaging platforms," including WeChat (China), LINE (Japan), and KakaoTalk (South Korea)—all messaging systems that resided on her friend's phone (p.147). She adds WhatsApp (USA) and applies "a relational view of design to explore how the material and the discursive are fused to articulate for culturally sustaining value propositions and global modalities" (p.148). To examine these, she oscillates between macro-level data such as number of users over time (p.150) and micro-level case studies of specific users in Japan, South Korea, China, the United States, and Germany (p.157). Using genre, she analyzes how discursive affordances are articulated as culturally sustaining value propositions (p.158), examining them in terms of design, innovation, and cultural consumption. Among other things, she notes that global mobilities—one example is that of a Hong Kong student studying in the US—shape "people's use of social messaging apps" and demonstrate "how hybrid and global a participant's experience was" (p.178). 

Based on these cases, Sun argues in Ch.7 that we turn the notion of a "design crossroads" into a "design square" with global interconnectedness (pp.190-191; she connects this notion to the 2 or "squared" in CLUE2). That is, she argues for a relational view of design that puts social practice at the center (p.192). 

In my blurb on the back of this book, I enthuse: "The design insights are eye-opening—and deeply needed as we design information and interactions for a global world." Still true! I'll come back to this book over and over—for my current manuscript, for thinking about genre and dialogism in the design space, for cites to sources on decolonialist design approaches, and for teaching my graduate and undergraduate students. 

Should you pick up a copy? Of course! Especially if you are involved in the social media or information design space.