Technology is connecting us more than ever, but we still face linguistic and cultural barriers. Explore the cultural side of online communication and the skills you need to adapt content and engagement strategies to this forum, and learn about your own cultural awareness along the way.
New media venues give us unprecedented access across national borders. Explore the cultural side of digital communication and the skills you need to adapt content and engagement strategies to this forum. Digital communication levels the international playing field, but it is far from being a geography-neutral cultural leveler. As a message travels through a digital tunnel across cultures, the traditional accompanying body language and social cues are stripped away, and can render it ineffective, misunderstood, or even offensive. Learn different regional communication styles and perceptions of time, discover why graphics aren’t universal, and explore cultural preferences for layout, animation, sound, and even color in digital media. Multidisciplinary content draws on emerging research in intercultural new media studies, developments in neural machine translation, differing national legal regulations and restrictions on new media, academic theories on intercultural dynamics, and relevant studies in psychology and sociology. You’ll take away expertise in customizing digital content to engage subscribers from diverse cultures beyond simply translating and localizing text, and understand your own culture in a new way.