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Something for next week, if you need something that free or unlimited equals a service of > 30KBps - as in shared backhaul if all online, then more detail at

I guess this may be more relative to Programme Four, but I'll throw it in here because it's partly inspired by the talk of tribes and partly by SheffTim's (was it he?) comments about the impossibility of creating products that are universally appealing.

Links are to ´óÏó´«Ã½ articles where possible because that presumably makes it easier for the team to research more deeply.

I teach, ie I try to commnicate new ideas and knowledge, to people who belong to a different tribe than me. As the web is all about communicating and tribes, I started wondering about something that few people seem to consider - although I think someone did mention it in one of the replies to this blog recently - which is the effect of the web on the human brain.

The issue is how people collect, or filter, information and how they process it. I find that many language text books written in western countries make assumptions about the students that are not valid in Asia. For example, students are expected to master the past simple tense in just one chapter (say, eight pages) and the past continuous in the next. The Chinese language doesn't have different tenses for past, present and future so students usually forget to use them. One chapter is not enough to change the habits of a lifetime, but we go that route because that's what works with students from France or Germany - people with a similar culture. We're trying to impose a systematic 'method' of communication on people who don't see language as a system.

Chinese-language speakers describe the time by saying 'yesterday I go', and in their language the right choice of words is essential to convey meaning clearly. Time is inferred from context, to stay with this example. So locally-produced books focus on vocabulary-learning instead of basic grammar. People try to learn English in the same way as they learn Chinese, and it doesn't work. Their approach to language is not systematic, because systematic thinking is not part of their culture/language/neurology.

So what does this have to do with the web? Well, aside from engineers in the west displaying the same cultural ignorance when they designed the DNS system to only work with the latin alphabet, for instance, there is a deeper relevance.

For starters, it appears that Chinese-language users are right-brain thinkers to a much greater extent than westerners.

There was also a recent article I can't find now about how learning languages stimulates the growth of neurons in the brain. Specifically, the left side of the brain, and specifically European languages.

So, westerners are more likely to be left-brain thinkers and Asians are more likely to be right-brain thinkers.

Dr Scott puts this down to the tonal nature of Chinese, but that's because she has never tried to teach Chinese speakers to write an academic paper. A much better insight comes from Dr Richard Nisbett's research -

"East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations.

"Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning.

"In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context.

In other words, western people process information systematically using the left side of the brain, whereas Asians process things contextually, using the right side of their brains. Now compare the above to this quote from Bill Thompson on the impact of the web on our thought processes:

"Today's internet presents information in bite-sized chunks, linked together into a rich tapestry where the connections often carry as much meaning as the words themselves.



The article mentions that 'we' no longer process information linearly, which is what I struggle to teach my students to do, although it doesn't encourage the idea that new neural pathways are being built. So what does this article, if correct, mean for Asian people when they get online? Does it change the way they experience the web? (And, if Bill is right, is the web changing the way 'we' experience the world?)

It seems that people from Asian cultures process information very much differently than people from western cultures. This is not genetic, it's learned, and it's not a wholly east-west thing. I've been talking to Dr Nisbett, and this from a recent email:
Naturally I agree with everything you say. I didn't dwell on the lack of rhetoric skills on the part of East Asians in my book, but it is certainly a big and importance difference. We do have some data on Asian Americans brought up on English. They look more like European Americans for most of our tests than like Asians.... You might be interested to know that we are finding Eastern Europeans to be more holistic than W. Euros., southern Italians to be more holistic than northern Italians and mainland Japanese to be more holistic than residents of the individualistic island of Hokkaido. So it's not really just an East-West thing. The mediator of the cognitive differences appears to be interdependence vs. independence.

There's a lot of language in use there that is of great interest to anyone involved in building systems to communicate information: holistic, cognitive differences, interdependence, independence, lack of rhetoric skills. Basically, people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds see the world in different ways, they attach importance to different things, and they narrate their experiences differently. And their brains work differently. Do they also respond to different stimuli?

Take a look at this site, which is supposed to be the primary information source for foreigners visiting Taiwan and needing a visa.
Notice the annoying graphics? The clutter? The irritating and pointless music you have to listen to? The notice telling you that if you are not an obedient user of Microsoft products (and only Microsoft) then the site may not work? The extreme difficulty in finding any useful information?

This is how people want the web to be in this part of the world. The most popular blogging site is this one - - but I can hardly bear to look at it. Compare and contrast to Blogspot, which nobody here uses.

This means that a website, or other application, built to please people from one culture are not going to be attractive, useful, or interesting to people from some others. But there is the possibility that using the web - the western web as it is today - will make 'us' become more like Asians in the respect that we learn to process information more contextually, more holistically. The web is an interdependent entity, and interdependence encourages holistic thinking. It also is being blamed for making us stay in our comfort zones, which is the accusation I hear levelled at Asians almost every day.

Oops. Forgot to post the link to the TW site.