Artifacts and cultures-of-use in intercultural communication

Abstract

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding how intercultural communication, mediated by cultural artifacts (i.e., Internet communication tools), creates compelling, problematic, and surprising conditions for additional language learning.Three case studies of computer-mediated intercultural engagement draw together correlations between discursive orientation, communicative modality, communicative activity, and emergent interpersonal dynamics.These factors contribute to varying qualities and quantities of participation in the intercultural partnerships.Case one, "Clashing Frames of Expectation --Differing Cultures-of-Use," suggests that the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools, their perceived existence and on-going construction as distinctive cultural artifacts, differs interculturally just as communicative genre, pragmatics, and institutional context would be expected to differ interculturally.Case two, "Intercultural Communication as Hyperpersonal Engagement," illustrates pragmatic and linguistic development as an outcome of intercultural relationship building.The final case study, "The Wrong Tool for the Right Job?," describes a recent generational shift in communication tool preference wherein an ostensibly ubiquitous tool, e-mail, is shown to be unsuitable for mediating age peer relationships.Taken together, these case studies demonstrate that Internet communication tools are not neutral media.Rather, individual and collective experience is shown to influence the ways students engage in Internet-mediated communication with consequential outcomes for both the processes and products of language development.For some social classes and in highly privileged geographical regions, we have entered into a period of rapid and efficient global communication practices mediating an array of interpersonal, discursivematerial, and cultural activities.Despite the robust connections between the increasing digitization of everyday communicative practice and issues such as globalization and homogenization, Internet-mediated intercultural educational activities remain demonstrably polymorphous.Reasons for this are many.Educational cultures and objectives vary across nation state boundaries (Belz, 2002) as well as across educational institutions within the US.Moreover, within the same university but across courses or time periods, student populations shift, pedagogical goals are reassessed, and micro-interactional phenomena illustrate their own "accentuality" (Volosinov, 1973), even when the task, as it were, is supposed to remain consistent across participants and time (Coughlan & Duff, 1994).The focus of this article is yet another dimension of human heterogeneity --the cultural embeddedness of Internet communication tools and the consequences of this embedding for communicative activity.Three case studies will be presented which illustrate some of the possibilities and problems associated with foreign language intercultural interaction mediated by Internet communication tools.I argue that Internet communication tools, like all human artifacts, are cultural tools (for an extension of this argument to the natural environment and the social construction of nature, see Braun & Castree, 1998;Harvey, 1996;Williams, 1980).Specifically, I show that e-mail, instant messenger, and forms of synchronous chat, are deeply affected by the cultures-of-use, or to borrow a biological term --phenotypic characteristics, evolving from the manner in which these tools mediate everyday communicative practice.To unpack this somewhat, most of the American students in the case studies have extensive Internet experience that catalyzes specific forms (and expectations) of communication.In turn, the resulting Steven L. Thorne Artifacts and Cultures-of-Use in Intercultural CommunicationLanguage Learning & Technology 39 communicative dynamics are consequential for both the processes and products of language learning.Importantly, these case studies span a 5-year period and in so doing demonstrate that the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools are rapidly evolving, if in geographically non-uniform directions, and play a critical role in the manner in which intercultural communication plays out in formal educational contexts.Of particular relevance to foreign language uses of "telecollaboration" (implying interaction mediated by Internet communication tools), I will include a critical discussion of recent Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) research (Walther, 1994(Walther, , 1996(Walther, , 1997) ) and will build on a theoretical framework that can broadly be termed a cultural-historical perspective of human communication and cognition (e.g., Bruner, 1995;Cole, 1996;Hanks, 1996;Levinson, 1995;Rommetveit, 1974;van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991).This approach emphasizes the process whereby individuals modify, transform, and comprehend artifacts and environments (e.g., Bødker, 1997;Cole & Engestrom, 1993;Kapetlinin, 199