CROSS-CULTURAL INTERNET EXPERIENCES

Whilst in Germany, we learned that Facebook is just now getting to them.  Our friend Micha describes it thusly:  Germany saw the success of Starbucks and Facebook, and made their own versions of each.  Starbucks is now in Germany (and competing with Balzac, of course); but our German friends hadn’t joined Facebook yet.  We impressed upon them the crucial nature of Facebook to Micha’s getting to know his new American friends during his internship at Duke this fall — he must join, we said, to be in the know!  So we were all delighted to find, upon coming home, that we had three new German recruits to Facebook.

It’s been interesting to see what the father of my new charges (well, they will be my charges in January) has been up to on Facebook.  I think he’s on Twitter (he’s very technologically savvy), so his statuses are fun to read, and today his status says “nice tool for constructive criticism: http://www.nicecritic.com/.”

Maybe this isn’t really worth going into on a blog, but I have to say that I think this is such a great representation of German honesty and “rationality,” as some might term it.  When we talked about different cultures in Global Trends and Interpersonal Communication, Professor Corbett showed us some continuums that deal with how different countries’ cultures view time, commitments, etc., and usually Latin America was on one end and Germany was way WAY on the other end.  It’s a place where timeliness, contracts, and general following-the-rules-ness is even more important than it is in America (if you can believe it). 

If someone were to send me an anonymous email that said almost anything from that NiceCritic web site (sample: “A breath mint would be beneficial today” or “Your hair looks great today”), I think I might flip my lid.  I’d go nuts trying to figure out who’d sent it, what the subtext was, and why it bothered them so much that they felt they needed to send a message.  But I think if a German person (specifically a German man) got it, he might be more inclined to take it in stride — as “constructive criticism,” as my future employer would say.

I’m on-and-off anxious about living in Germany, but it’ll stretch me.  I know it will.  I’ll return to the good ol’ US of A with a more disciplined head, a more-developed heart, and more practiced hands.  For now, I’m having fun making predictions and biding my time before I go.