Social Interaction Design in Cultural Context: A Case Study of a Traditional Social Activity

The rapid expansion in Taiwan of information and communication technology, mobile communication devices and the Internet has played a definite and considerable role in people’s social lives. The accessibility to various emerging communication media, as well as the speed of communication that these provide, has changed not only people’s cultural and local living contexts but also their interpersonal relationships. These developing technology devices and applications both support new platforms for communication and offer numerous possibilities for an unprecedented increase in social interactions. At the same time, these interactions have taken on different features and characteristics with different media. There are now a variety of new social communities, virtual and physical (Wellman & Hampton, 1999; Preece & Maloney-Krichmar, 2003). In this research, we argue that social activities are inherently embedded in a cultural context. However, social nuances, cultural values, and characteristics of traditional society are not generally taken into consideration in the pursuit of developing new technologies for social interaction. For this reason, a field study of a traditional social activity in Taiwan is presented with the idea of identifying the abundant cultural features of this activity. An understanding of these features, which merge with and influence people’s social lives, could serve to enrich computer-mediated communication or information designs in the future. In the past twenty years, computer-mediated devices, with their powerful capacity for organization, have been used for numerous and diverse tasks. They do help people to work more systematically and effectively. Information technology applications, moreover, have been developed and redesigned for different purposes. However, some unexpected forms of social interaction and other side effects have emerged which have slowly been adapted and incorporated into people’s lives (Ranson et al., 1996; Hutchinson et al., 2003). For instance, the main functions supported by personal blogs have changed from traditional information disclosure to information sharing and exchanging. In addition, the development of community diaries and collaborative blogging present evidence of rich sociality and communicative competence (Krishnamurthy, 2002; Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004). In fact, personal on-line diaries not only serve as a means to record one’s experiences and express