Designing and implementing culturally‐sensitive IT applications

Abstract

The Internet, World Wide Web, and related information technologies, originally developed in western countries, have rapidly spread to a great variety of countries and cultures.Many of these technologies facilitate and mediate interpersonal communication, an activity whose modes and means bind closely to cultural norms and values.This article provides a theoretical integration of Hall’s (1976) framework for culture values together with Information Boundary Theory, a model for understanding privacy and related issues that arise when personal information is shared or exchanged using information technology.The resulting hybrid framework can help understand and predict individuals’ reactions to various communication related IT applications (e.g., email, e-commerce sites, web-logs, bulletin boards, newsgroups) in diverse cultural contexts.An application of the framework to cultural settings in Middle Eastern nations concludes the article