A Google Street View car

The demarcation between public and private is generally made very clear in Germany and Austria. We discovered a blogger’s post, an expat in Germany, from 2010 that illustrates this demarcation (although all has been settled since).

Some prominent German government officials, most notably Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner, have denounced Google’s Street View. In a magazine interview, Aigner claimed that Google’s ‘comprehensive photo offensive is nothing less than a million-fold violation of the private sphere. I reject this form of exposure. There is not a secret service in existence that would collect photos so unabashedly.’

In Germany and Austria, the home is often considered a private sanctuary where only close friends and family are invited to visit. The expat in Germany who wrote the post linked to above said, “Germans really don’t like anyone peeping over their high fences and hedges. That’s why they are there.” Of course, this is a deeply rooted cultural value many Germans share (perhaps this is a value unique to certain generations). So, what did Germans do about this?

At the federal level, Aigner’s Consumer Protection Ministry now has a downloadable form online that German consumers can use to request that their house not be included in Street View – which could make Street View rather useless in Germany if Google complies with such demands. Google already allows people in Germany to request the removal of house address numbers.

More recently, this article on the TIME magazine website gives an update on the progress Google made in gaining acceptance of Street View in Germany. It seems the possibility to contest Street View, made possible by German authorities, quelled the anxiety it brought to privacy-conscious individuals.

Hamburg’s Johannes Caspar, the data protection head responsible for making it possible for Germans to oppose Google Street View, said he was happy with the service. ‘The Google camera car was, for many people, a symbol of a digital world trying to appropriate the analog world,’ said Caspar. Giving people the possibility of opposing the service, he explained, ‘diffused the situation and helped Street View gain acceptance.’

This is an interesting debate considering it has been a non-issue in the US where Street View was born. However, technological innovations are often cited in many public debates. Subsequent increase in adoption and usage indicates cultural change, where people form values around the utility of a device, whether it’s a cell phone or a new way of mapping the world. What technologies are at odds with your cultural values?

Josh
RW3 CultureWizard

DenizenMag.com created the above infographic on the modern third culture kid (TCK), a term coined in the 1950s for those individuals who grow up abroad or outside of their parents home country, for example. Click the image or click here to see the full infographic.

I think it’s interesting that 1 in 7 TCKs are dating another TCK. Is this simply because of the shared experience?

Are you a TCK? Let us know what you think.

Joshua

RW3 CultureWizard

A blogger in China uncovered a phony Apple Store in Kunming, China, the capital of Yunnan province in Southwestern China. It is neither an official re-seller nor a true Apple property, although the owners have gone to great lengths to mimic the style and feeling of typical Apple Stores.

Forbes.com picked up on this story and published some commentary.

The most interesting facet of this story is that both sources claim the employees of the store believe they work for Apple and Steve Jobs. I’m wondering if the employees are aware that they work for a store that has no connection to Apple other than the products they’re selling (authentic or not). For the employees to openly admit that they don’t work for Apple when the store is trying so hard to appear genuine would promote disharmony and would cause a loss of face, two things Chinese culture generally prohibits.

This also makes me think of the employment market in China and what attracts young Chinese to foreign companies. From both a cultural and generational perspective, I’d suspect innovative Western companies top the list. Do they? Read my related post on the employment market in China for more insight.

The demand for products with Western brands has had a robust consumer market for so long in China that fakes abound in places where the real thing doesn’t reach. What better place than a second or third-tier Chinese city? I wonder how this store’s management recruited it’s retail representatives. In any case, intellectual property as a concept does not fly so high in China.

Thoughts?

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

The CultureWizard Twitter feed will include articles posted on the CultureWizard Blog, tweets and retweets of links to interesting content, responses to our followers, and musings that we’d like to share with the CultureWizard community. Much of this content will be unique to our Twitter feed, so be sure to follow us @culturewizard!

The task of knowing a culture takes more than collecting data, although it is a good point of departure. Visceral cross-cultural experience is another ingredient that should be added to this list, but of course it’s not accessible to everyone. CultureWizard is an online intercultural learning platform that addresses the task of building cultural awareness and knowing about the specific preferences and behaviors attributed to cultures around the world. Understanding learning styles can be gleaned from the interactive tools on CultureWizard, directly impacting the designer’s success in blending culture-based content into a learning product. According to the article,

Culture-based content provides for the needs of learners in both anthropological and psychological ways. This means that the learner’s ways of being and seeing the world, as well as psychological ways of being and seeing the world, are addressed in the design of the product.

How have you developed cultural knowledge? What is your favorite way to do this (for example, via books, the internet or travel)?

Joshua

RW3 CultureWizard

Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo, says in the Bloomberg article that “Emphasizing English is definitely the right direction to go, as the domestic economy has peaked…Companies need more sophisticated English speakers for their globalization, which is crucial to spur profits.” Many English-language schools and training companies have also seen a recent surge in activity, as companies and individuals seek to prepare themselves for international expansion.

It seems that a collection of 1500 words and simple grammar makes the language accessible to a larger number of people while legitimizing the use of a reduced form of English in the marketplace.

Do you speak Globish? I imagine people learning Globish will use it with non-native English speakers who have a similar understanding of the language. How effective is this way of speaking English in terms of effective intercultural communication?

Josh

RW3 CultureWizard