Description

In the near future, most of the world's internet users are going to come from five countries: the US, Brazil, Russia, India, and China (or USABRIC). Each country has a profoundly unique culture and government-institutional memory that will shape how its citizens interact online through social networking sites (SNSs). But hard culture has been caught up in a swirling vortex of attitudes and customs online, where sharing more data about oneself and getting more connections and friends provides social capital benefits that can exceed the benefits from a country's cultural norms and its appetite for being more open about itself or more closed about itself. Thus, a desire for standardization in the form of a global social networking system is strong -- as shown by Facebook's rapid growth worldwide. As this standardization becomes more normal, though, hard cultures will emerge again and shape the way that SNSs look and feel and perform so that peoples' online data truly reflects their identities. But it will be through a model -- one which I propose -- of transparency in which users have greater control over their own data yet they still share it willingly, according to their cultural comfort levels.