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Accounting for cultural differences in technology design:
viewpoints from mediated discourse analysis
Annamari Martinviita
University of Oulu, English Philology
PO Box 1000
90014 University of Oulu, Finland
+358456792822
annamari.martinviita@oulu.fi
ABSTRACT
This position paper introduces the basic principles of mediated
discourse analysis as applied to the design of online social spaces
for culturally diverse communities. Mediated discourse analysis
offers concepts that can help designers understand how social
practices develop in new environments. The concepts of historical
body, interaction order and discourses in place can be applied in
designing online social spaces that are sensitive to cultural
differences among prospective participants. The paper provides
examples from a case study of a newly-designed online service for
16–18-year-olds in vocational education.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.3. [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and
Organization Interfaces – web-based interaction, asynchronous
interaction, evaluation/methodology, organizational design.
K.4.m. [Computers and Society]: Miscellaneous.
General Terms
Management, Performance, Design, Human Factors, Theory.
Keywords
Online interaction, online community, educational tools, nexus
analysis.
1. INTRODUCTION
The design, implementation and usage of new technologies is
always affected by the cultural backgrounds of the individuals
involved at any stage of the process. Mediated discourse analysis
[7] (also known as nexus analysis when discussed as a research
strategy [6]) provides a description of social action which can
help in identifying the variety of elements that are likely to affect
the interaction that takes place in any new technologically
mediated environment, knowledge which can then be used in the
design process to produce outcomes that better meet the needs of
participants from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Indeed,
mediated discourse analysis allows the analyst to bypass culture as
a starting point, as the notion of culture may be difficult to define
[2] and contain too many assumptions [3], preferring instead to
focus on the practices and discourses and understandings that
individuals bring to any social action, and following the
trajectories of those understandings through the sociocultural
landscapes that those individuals inhabit.
In what follows, this paper introduces the key concepts of
mediated discourse analysis in terms of cultural diversity and
technology design, illustrated by examples from an ethnographic
case study of a newly-developed online service called WiseSteps,
designed to support the study motivation of 16–18-year-old
students in vocational education in Oulu, Finland. The case
provides an example of a design scenario where there are
significant differences in the backgrounds and expectations of the
developers and the participants in a new environment. The case is
more fully discussed in an article forthcoming in the proceedings
of the 2015 Communities and Technologies conference [4].
2. MEDIATED SOCIAL ACTION
Mediated discourse analysis (MDA) views all social action as
mediated by cultural tools, both physical and conceptual: there
are a variety of objects, technologies, practices, identities, social
institutions, communities, languages and other semiotic systems
enabling us to take action in the world, by allowing us to
understand the world around us and to make ourselves
understood. Our actions are influenced by the cultural tools we
have at our disposal, since each cultural tool has its affordances
and constraints: the things that can and cannot be done with them
[5]. Individuals from different backgrounds tend to have access to
different cultural tools, and from the point of view of MDA,
culture can be described as the accumulated meanings and
discourses a group of people has learned to associate with objects
in their surrounding social and physical world. However, MDA
does not focus on culture, but rather takes instances of social
action and analyses the variety of influences that have come into
play to make that social action unravel in the manner it does,
recognizing the fluidity and variability of the sociocultural
influences that direct our each action.
MDA provides three concepts that help deal with this melange of
influences; historical body describes the backgrounds and
previous experiences of the participants to a social action,
interaction order refers to the social organisation that brings the
participants together, and discourses in place points towards the
discourses habitually associated with the scene of the action [7]
[6]. Figure 2 illustrates the overlapping nature of these three
“lenses”; it should be noted that the three concepts are highly
interlinked and always concurrently at play. In what follows, each
of the concepts is in turn taken as a starting point for discussion,
with examples provided from the WiseSteps case. First, we turn to
a brief introduction of WiseSteps.
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Copyright is held by the author.
C&T ’15, June 27-30, 2015, Limerick, Ireland
2.1 Case environment: WiseSteps
WiseSteps was a newly-developed online service designed to
improve the 16-18-year-old participants’ study motivation, based
on the principles of positive psychology [4]. The case study
followed the development of the site, beginning at a time when
the system was undergoing further development based on the
results of an earlier deployment with a different user group. The
developers referred to here were the originators of the WiseSteps
concept, who had employed a technical team to design the site
functionality according to their requirements. The concept and
original design was based on the developers’ expertise in positive
psychology. The refinements were based on comments from the
early users and, at the later stage, my own experience as a
researcher of online communities, which I shared with the
developers. No significant process of participatory design was
undertaken, however, and the prospective participants for this
version of the service had no input in its design.
Figure 1: Community page layout
The specific tools related to recording “steps”, i.e. everyday
successes, were accessed through a private section of the site. In
addition, the service included a “community page”, accessible by
all registered participants, where the students could engage in
more free-flowing group interaction (Figure 1). The community
page included a section on “star moments”, where recent “steps”
from the private section were anonymously reposted, and a score
board for mini-games members gained access to as they recorded
steps. The majority of the activity on the community page
revolved around a chat feed where participants could post short
messages based on the leading question “what’s great about
today?”, and post comments or “thumbs up” on each other’s
messages. The community page was accessible by all the users of
the service: 69 students, two administrators, and teachers and the
students’ personal support persons. The examples in the following
sections are based on the interaction that occurred in the chat
feed.
Figure 2: View of social action in mediated discourse analysis
2.2 Historical Body
Historical body refers to an individual’s accumulated life
experiences, beliefs and practices. In terms of technology design
and use, all the individuals (from designers to participants)
involved in the process of introducing new technologies come to
the interaction with prior expectations.
Many or most of these expectations will not be conscious, but
rather exist in the form of assumptions for how the world, and our
interaction within it, is supposed to work, shaped by the variety of
experiences each of us has, and the cultural environment we have
lived in. At its simplest, the MDA approach proposes that
developers, designers and administrators should proceed with an
awareness of who they are working with and how those
individuals are likely to approach their interactions with the
world. When designing for existing communities, it is necessary
to also have an awareness of the social practices and issues central
to that community.
However, our expectations for how the world works are also
continually shaped as new experience is gained; as an individual
grows used to the practices and purposes of a new online site, for
example, those practices become internalized and “naturalized” to
the point where they are no longer a remarkable part of interacting
on that site [6]. Thus, thoughtful design is capable of producing
new ways of doing and being for a community, but never on its
own: the design is always interpreted by the participants in the
interaction that takes place, and can easily take on new meanings
not foreseen by the designers.
The following example from the WiseSteps case helps illustrate
this point. In designing the chat feed tool, the developers had not
foreseen quite how strong a historical body the 16–18-year-old
students would have for using a variety of such “status update”
tools, as well as being involved in the more general discourses of
youth online interaction. The developers assumed that providing
the leading question “what’s great about today?” above the
message entry box would shape the messages posted, and produce
the kind of positive interaction they desired for the site. This
succeeded to an extent, with students sporadically posting about
positive things in their daily lives. However, by far the majority of
the messages posted dealt instead with insider jokes and
references among the students, internet memes, and youth online
culture in general, as in the following excerpt (see [4] for more
examples):
spedo
spbudrös sbörös :DDD
10.11.2011 10:18:14
Too Cool
Spudma Spädme
Too Cool
Spedebear
Paula
Sounds like fun ;) would be even better if I could
understand!
The excerpt shows a typical response by one of the developers,
posting as “Paula”. In moderating the chat feed, the WiseSteps
developers were able to react to these off-topic messages in a
constructive way (despite their previous inexperience with such
topics of interaction), not restricting off-topic messages but
allowing the students to construct the chat feed as a kind of
“virtual playground” in order to motivate them to participate on
the site in general. This fulfilled one of the development goals,
albeit in an unexpected way [4].
Analysing the historical bodies of the participants to a social
action is essential to understanding how they orient themselves to
the action, but the next section shows how the interaction order
among them also shapes, enables and constrains social action.
2.3 Interaction Order
Interaction order refers to the participants in a social action and
the relationships among them, and good design needs to be aware
of the relationships that are or will be present in a new
environment being designed. This is of particular importance
online, where many participants are often invisible, and posting
can evoke a variety of feelings, such as speaking before unknown
masses, needing to portray one’s best self, or uncertainty as to
how one’s contributions will be received. Thus, technologically-
mediated environments need to offer clear boundaries for how
communications are delivered and to whom; boundaries which
participants can trust [1]. Designers need to ask the question: who
will be talking to whom? How will they want their interactions to
be handled, delivered and stored?
Additionally, design and administration needs to be sensitive to
arising power structures: does the design of the technology
provide different levels of status to different participant groups?
How is this explained? Who feels as though they have a right to
speak, and on what topics? How are the various participants
identified, and what sort of identity work can they perform on the
site? Do participants already know each other or does the site
encourage the forming of new relationships? In short, what sort of
interaction does the site enable?
In the case of the WiseSteps “what’s great about today?” chat
feed, the off-topic messaging on topics unfamiliar to the
administrators was in part motivated by the students’ awareness of
who would be viewing those messages: while the only active
participants in the feed were the students and one of the
administrators (an adult who had her own status and position of
power over the students), the students knew that their teachers
could also view what they posted on the community page. This
meant that the students were less motivated to post about personal
feelings of success, and more motivated to misbehave in front of
authority figures, in a manner typical to teenagers [4]. The
students also had existing friendships outside the service, which
enabled them to “claim” the chat feed to themselves, excluding
others by referring to insider knowledge others would not have
access to, most strikingly through the references to memes, games
and online phenomena which functioned practically as a foreign
language to the administrators, who could not penetrate the
meanings of these references. Thus the students were able to gain
power in a situation where authority figures had obliged them to
take part (participation on WiseSteps was compulsory for the
students as part of their school work).
As the above example shows, interaction order is always related to
the historical body of each participant. The third key concept in
MDA completes the configuration of interrelated lenses, now
focusing on the “discourses in place”: the discursive elements tied
to the scene of the interaction which enable that interaction or are
used by the participants as cultural tools in their action [6].
2.4 Discourses in Place
Historical body and interaction order is tightly wound up with the
notion of discourses in place: the discourses that each participant
associates with the place in question or other places like it (e.g.
this is the kind of website where one is supposed to share short
“status updates”, with all that that entails); the discourses that the
designers associate and advertise for the place (e.g. this is a space
for positive interaction and discussion of daily successes – as in
the case of WiseSteps); and often a variety of wider-reaching
discourses regarding online interaction in general and all the
cultural and political discourses that are present in the background
of how and why a particular individual goes online. Is posting in
an online community something that is natural for this individual?
Is it something they feel they ought to do, “since everyone else
does”, but they feel reticent, “because I’m not the sort of person
who does all this technological stuff / all this sharing in front of
strangers”? What are the stories that individual tell themselves
regarding their participation in a particular environment? What is
the significance of online interaction for members of different
cultures?
In the case of WiseSteps, the students were required to take part
as part of their school work, and teachers were involved in the
interaction on the site, so the students tended to associate their
interaction on the site with discourses of schoolwork and teacher-
student interaction, as well as the discourses of online interaction
that were present for most of them on a daily basis. They used the
chat feed in ways reminiscent of Facebook and other social
networking sites, and spread some of their everyday social
interactions on to the site, rather than fully engaging with the
purposes the developers had attempted to build into the system
[4]. It is possible that they would have been less quick to dismiss
these other purposes had the design of the site been radically
different from other sites they were familiar with; as it was, the
chat feed page closely resembled the Facebook status update
functionality, and was easy for the students to be treated as such.
The previous sections have provided a brief overview of the main
principles of mediated discourse analysis. The following chapter
offers an overview reflection on how culture can be understood in
terms of mediated discourse: as a fluid construct created in
interaction based on the experiences of each participant.
3. CULTURE AS MEDIATED DISCOURSE
Mediated discourse analysis highlights the role of culture in every
social action, viewing culture as sets of learned practices in each
individual’s historical body. Culture is created as individuals
come together repeatedly in some similar action, making that
action recognizable as a nexus or intersection of practices [3],
such as the action of “updating one’s status on a social
networking site”. While the action may at first have seemed
remarkable, and involved many steps to achieve, through
repetition it becomes naturalized [6] and an object which may in
itself be used as a cultural tool: status updates can be a topic of
conversation, for example, where to certain participants it is not
necessary to explain what is involved in the process of “updating
a status”. It is part of the historical body of those participants; part
of their cultural language. A nexus of practice may also become
one that an individual or group identifies with, creating
recognizable identities such as “students at a vocational college in
Northern Finland”.
Thus MDA could be seen to posit that there is always cultural
diversity involved in any social action, as no two individuals are
likely to have exactly the same experiences and views of the
world. At the same time, we are fluent at navigating our social
worlds despite this apparently ubiquitous potential for conflict.
Individuals tend to move in circles familiar to them, among
people who share similar historical bodies, and thus the potential
for major conflict is minimized. As we can often infer the
meaning of an unknown word from its context in a sentence, so
we can bypass small differences of viewpoint or motivation in
interaction when there are no problems of understanding on a
larger scale. It is only when a more significant difference exists in
the historical bodies of participants to a social action that
significant conflicts may also arise, due to misunderstandings,
power conflicts and differing values. MDA highlights the fact that
cultural diversity is present everywhere, and must always be
accounted for; particularly when bringing together people who
might not otherwise meet. There is a danger in assuming that the
future users of a technology will come to it with the same
understandings as its developers. Participatory design processes
may help illuminate the various viewpoints of current and future
participants in a new environment, but the same caution applies to
those processes: who are the participants, what are the power
relations among them, and do they really understand each other?
The WiseSteps case, as presented here, provides one example of
the effects of cultural diversity on technology design and use. In
this case, the key cultural difference among the participants is
their experience of online interaction. The developers approach
the WiseSteps design process as digital visitors, who tend to go
online to use a particular tool for a predefined purpose and avoid
leaving traces of their identity online. The students, having grown
up with digital technology, show a tendency to approach
WiseSteps as digital residents, who go online to inhabit social
spaces; they live out part of their lives online, maintaining an
online identity, expressing opinions and developing relationships
[4][8]. In other words, the key participant groups on WiseSteps
show a very different understanding of what online interaction is
for, and what one can or should do on the internet. As previously
discussed, the developers are in fact able to deal with this conflict
relatively well in their activities as administrators on the
community page, but a clearer understanding of the needs and
backgrounds of their prospective users at the design stage may
have helped reduce the conflict further, and enabled the
developers to produce a design more suited to the needs of the
participants.
4. CONCLUSION
The use of the three “lenses” into social action here illustrated
may help developers shape new technologies in ways that are
more closely in tune with the needs of all the individuals
involved. The MDA approach focuses on the processes of
learning involved for all participants in a new setting; the cultural
diversity brought to a new social scene can become a source of
innovation rather than conflict, if handled with awareness. The
WiseSteps case shows that flexible administration practices that
are sensitive towards these aspects of human interaction can also
help reduce the friction among participants from different cultural
backgrounds, and ensure that the needs of all participants are met.
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