Personally, I feel I can work with someone that I don’t trust emotionally, but I do trust cognitively (I know they’ll get the work done) in a virtual environment. In fact, I could really like someone and trust them emotionally, but without the feeling that they will come through in their tasks (especially virtually), I would rather not work with them. This is different in the office as I feel there is a lot more political positioning when sharing space and it is important for someone to “have my back”. However, I know some of my students from other cultures need to have the emotional trust before they can work with someone, regardless of the format (in office or virtual) while others would rather not have the personal bond in any environment because they feel exposed.

I remember when my students did a project with a group from France, there was very little “chatter”. If given a deadline, the French tended to post by that deadline, but there was no conversation in between. Having worked and studied in France and Francophone Switzerland, I see this as a common cultural trait among French speakers in that they do not want to put something in writing that is not of a high quality. They are acculturated through school that something poorly written reflects badly on the writer. The feedback I received from their teacher was that they were shocked at the poorly written e-mails they would get (with typos, grammatical mistakes, etc…). In this case, the lack of communication (silence) ended up being a cultural difference that did affect communication.

One year, however, the “silence” was due to a major flood that knocked out all the computer terminals for almost a month. Being half a world away, this flood did not make national news, but clearly impacted communication. If I had not corresponded regularly with their teacher in France, my students might have interpreted this as a cultural rather than a technical problem.

On the other hand, the group my students worked with in Peru had internet access only through their professor in class. All e-mails and correspondence went through the professor. Some students did set up Yahoo groups, but it soon became clear that they were expected to notify the professor. My students were also supposed to copy me, but many times did not. This was a difference in culture as South American business/organizational structures tend to be centralized and hierarchical. This made communication slower, and sometimes the silence was due to the more centralized nature of communication slowing down the process.

In each case silence is an indicator. The difficulty is trying to determine what it indicates. I don’t advocate ignoring the silence, but rather trying to determine what is the cause. In the first case, my students found that setting deadlines closer together made the time between silences shorter. The the second case, having other ways to contact key players so that there could be communication in times of crisis or technology breakdowns was important. In the third instance, students needed to be given permission to participate. That is something that should be recognized (perhaps creating private spaces for communication, for example).

Kia ora Christine!

In an online elearning environment (such as in a chatroom) where a community lurks, the platform can often yield information to the participants as to who has ‘come into’ the room and who has ‘left’. This is an attempt (albeit contrived) to proffer some indication of presence and absence. It is not unequivocal, for I can ‘come into’ the room and then go away and watch TV and still be registered as ‘in’.

BUT, even in a F 2 F situation, one can never be sure of mind-attendance. For instance, any teacher who has had classroom experience will tell you that there are students who are there ‘in body’ alone. Fact. They are what I call Clayton’s attendees, for their minds are somewhere else.

NOW, when we have a group of people interacting at a party, say, it is still conceivable that the personalities that one thinks one is interacting with in those situations may well be quite removed from what they are like when in a work situation or some other environment (and vice versa). With the virtual environment the possibilities for THIS sort of personality flip (call it deception) is just as likely, but more difficult to keep track of.

In the blogosphere, I can understand why some people are actually scared to participate, for they don’t know who is watching. For those with imagination, it could be like a million web-cams pointing at them as they walked down the street etc.

I’m afraid I don’t go along with the communication through silence bit (sorry Viginia :-). I quote (again) Ashleigh Brilliant’s “I waited and waited, and when no message came I knew it must have been from you”. One must have a lot of faith in telepathy to genuinely believe that communication can take place through not saying anything, especially (as Virginia pointed out) if you don’t really know if they are ‘in’ the room.

So, hmmm. Y’know, perception is where it’s at with me. If it’s difficult for me (say) to take someone at face value when interacting F2F, it is (to me) evidently more complex in a virtual encounter.

People love to play games. Even making a set of rules doesn’t guarantee that everyone adheres to them. If they don’t, then why do we make the rules? In the blogosphere some rules are defined by what we might accept as netiquette (or whatever). But there’s nothing in netiquette that says anything about the rules of lurking (are there any?) Like, I mean, I’m remaining silent (as a lurker) but, yknow, I’m actually breaking a rule of netiquette in what I’m thinking. Yeah right!

Ka kite anō
from Middle-earth

I do think many people idealize working globally. Clearly there are people who are cut out for it, and those who are not. Good to get a sense of that before you find yourself immersed in it.

I wonder if the issue was using the wrong technology for the task? If you were on a real virtual team, you would have most likely done a conference call (for any real-time discussion you needed to have), maybe taking notes in a wiki or Google doc. Then you could have had people add to the minutes and go off and do what needed to be done on the project, adding to your shared document as they found their pieces of information. I guess my point is I wonder if your experience is pointing out the need to be clear about which technologies work best for which kinds of circumstances. I would have seen a phone replacing chat and a google doc or wiki replacing the emails. Very interesting to see this in action. . .

Another comment I wanted to make had to do with your understanding of “US” culture. When I worked in Costa Rica, I was the only American from the East Coast (the rest were from the West Coast and the Mid West) and the only Roman Catholic. I learned how different our values were when doing cross-cultural training, especially when we were preparing a group of high school students to go throughout the US. As the majority of the students were Roman Catholic, I was shocked at the things some of my colleagues were saying about being Roman Catholic in the US. Interestingly enough, one of the best trainers we had, who was well versed in being Roman Catholic and its potential impact in the US was a woman who had been a missionary in Panama for the Morman church.

I am interested: are the Americans all from the same part of the US? Did you see differences in “culture” from those from different regions? I have lived in Colorado, South Carolina, and have family in the midwest (Wisconsin, Illinois, Wisconsin), the South, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest. While there is an “American” culture, I also believe that regionally there are very strong cultures based on deep seeded differences in values.