Global Social Media Design

Bridging Differences Across Cultures

Huatong Sun

Human Technology Interaction Series

Presents a practice-theoretic design framework to approach cultural differences from the Global South vantage
Uncovers the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorients universal design standards
Provides three provocative accounts of non-Western social media design and use on a global cultural circuit
Offers innovative design tools of sensitizing concepts and sensitizing relations to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday practice

Global Social Media Design

Bridging Differences Across Cultures

Huatong Sun

Human Technology Interaction Series

Description

Social media users fracture into tribes, but social media ecosystems are globally interconnected technically, socially, culturally, and economically. At the crossroads, Huatong Sun, author of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, presents theory, method, and case studies to uncover the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorient universal design standards. Centering on the dynamics between structure and agency, Sun draws on practice theories and transnational fieldwork and articulates a critical design approach. The "CLUE2 (CLUE squared)" framework extends from situated activity to social practice, and connects macro institutions with micro interactions to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday life.

Why were Japanese users not crazed about Facebook? Would Twitter have had been more successful than its copycat Weibo in China if not banned? How did mobilities and value propositions play out in the competition of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk for global growth? Illustrating the cultural entanglement with a relational view of design, Sun provides three provocative accounts of cross-cultural social media design and use. Concepts such as affordance, genre, and uptake are demonstrated as design tools to bind the material with the discursive and leap from the critical to the generative for culturally sustaining design.

Sun calls to reshape the crossroads into a design square where differences are nourished as design resources, where diverse discourses interact for innovation, and where alternative design epistemes thrive from the local. This timely book will appeal to researchers, students, and practitioners who design across disciplines, paradigms, and boundaries to bridge differences in this increasingly globalized world.

Global Social Media Design

Bridging Differences Across Cultures

Huatong Sun

Human Technology Interaction Series

List of Tables
List of Figures

Introduction
1. A Move to Global Design
2. Designing for Empowerment with a Critical Practice Approach
3. Understanding the Criticality of Differences in Cross-Cultural Design
4. Facebook Japan: Connecting Micro to Macro with Discursive Affordances
5. Weibo of China: Hybridizing Performative Practice into Normative Genre
6. War of Social Messaging Platforms: Articulating Local Uptakes for Global Innovation and Competition
7. Reshaping Crossroads into a Design Square

References

Global Social Media Design

Bridging Differences Across Cultures

Huatong Sun

Human Technology Interaction Series

Author Information

Huatong Sun is Associate Professor of Digital Media and Global Design at the University of Washington Tacoma, USA. Her previous book, Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users (Oxford 2012), won a best technical communication book award from the National Council of Teachers of English of U.S.

Global Social Media Design

Bridging Differences Across Cultures

Huatong Sun

Human Technology Interaction Series

Reviews and Awards

"Sun's book will confirm readers' intuitive feeling that successful design is hard in the environment where everything is "global." Successful applications are notoriously difficult to replicate to serve different tasks or contexts. The research community that has developed around this problem has created sophisticated statistical models to capture intricate relationships among multiple required characteristics. The interconnectedness of the multiplicity of factors that constitute the design problem is this book's central premise and strength. It is an essential text to be studied seriously, a crucial resource for organizations working on the next successful app, or for any future designer working on a professional portfolio." -- Choice

"The problem of designing social computing and social media applications across cultural boundaries is one of the most important challenges in human-computer interaction. It is tremendously difficult yet absolutely critical to successful applications. Huatong Sun's work is essential to those trying to work in this space." -- Mark S. Ackerman, GH Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

"The way Dr. Sun has integrated her knowledge of multiple disciplines with her longstanding and deep understanding of global aspects of design gives her insights into social media particular weight. This perspective--and this book--are both unique and extremely important." -- Susan M Dray, Fellow of ACM and of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Founder of SIGCHI Across Borders Initiative

"Too many social media designs have been found wanting in addressing discursive and cultural differences or in offering approaches that are critically tethered to social practice. Sun has now offered us a compelling framework to address these challenges. Immensely global in its design methodology and deeply border-traversing in its situated case studies, Global Social Media Design represents a timely and significant contribution to understanding differences and 'deficiencies' in cross-cultural design practices. It is a must read for scholars and students in rhetoric and writing studies, and cultural and media studies in search of new paradigms for productive engagement with difference in this increasingly interdependent and interconnected world." -- LuMing Mao, Professor and Chair of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, University of Utah

"In Global Social Media Design, Huatong Sun relates practice theory, social justice theory, decolonialist methodology, and other strands to understand the implicit asymmetries in current design approaches, leading us to a design framework that aims to design for differences. Through careful comparative case studies of social media platforms, Sun illustrates her framework, sensitizing us to the ideological and discursive affordances in these platforms. The design insights are eye-opening and deeply needed as we design information and interactions for a global world." -- Clay Spinuzzi, Professor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin

"This ground-breaking book by Huatong Sun introduces a postcolonial / decolonial critique to design practices. Too often, design for other cultural locales, or 'epistemic locations,' embeds and thus exports Euro-American assumptions as privileged methods. In a globalized world, these assumptions miss key criteria that would make technologies useful, or better, emancipatory. Novel, localized practices can in turn revolutionize personal technologies worldwide by shifting the parameters for meaningful design." --Eleanor Wynn, Editor Emerita, Information Technology & People; Principal Engineer (retired), Intel Corporation