Dialogue in and between Different Cultures - International ...

128 Angelika Fröhlich & Sonja Lux
third one is looking for a partner, but neither is here without a reason. These
different expectations lead to a slightly different behaviour and might even
cause misunderstandings.
− And last: the chat communication is in some of its features very close to faceto-face
interaction as found in dialogues. This is true especially for the
briefness of the utterances, the colloquial tone, the jokes and allusions and the
often phatic tone of the conversation, but exactly these features often
implicate a certain kind of ambiguity (cf. Crystal 2001:36). While this
ambiguity is often easily dissolved in face-to-face communication by
interpreting the facial expression, the intonation or the body posture, these
features are not or only partially available in the chat room (cf. Fix 2001:41,
Hentschel 1998).
3. Influences of the Internet on cultures
3.1 Interculturalism and the Internet
As Craig Storti observes well, culture as such is a system of beliefs and values
shared by a particular group of people, so that we can subsequently ask ourselves
if the Internet has born its very own culture, that can be experienced when
entering the Internet and communicating with others. Concerning the adaption to
a different culture Storti (2001:15) states:
The adjustments we have to make to a new culture are invariably of two kinds: we have
to adjust or get used to behaviour on the part of the local people which annoys, confuses,
or otherwise unsettles us; and we have to adjust our own behaviour so that it does not
annoy, confuse, or otherwise unsettle the local people. So long as we are put off by or
consistently misconstrue the behaviour of the locals and so long as we repeatedly
provoke or baffle the locals with our own behaviour, we can never expect to feel at ease
abroad or to be wholly effective in our work.
The Internet is not a place where people have to adjust to an already existing
culture with its own behaviour and rules, it is a place where values and beliefs
from all different kinds of cultures meet, as seen in weblogs, forums and chat
rooms. It is quite easy to adapt to certain behaviour according to the language that
is used in forums, chat rooms etc. But the overall used language on the Internet is
still English and can be seen as the most understood language in interaction
among different cultures on the Internet, so that language is not always an
indicator for rules valid in a certain culture. In other words: even though one tends
to expect a certain culturally determined behaviour when recognizing someone as
belonging to a certain culture, and even as this attribution as belonging to a
certain culture is often made by identifying the language, the Internet is not a
further area of the Anglo-Saxon culture.