Cultural Responses to Communication Technology:
An Experiment of Interactive and Graphic Features of Organizational Home Pages
People use the Internet not only as a new communication vehicle (Ferguson & Perse, 2000;
Papacharissi & Rubin, 2000), but also as a marketing, advertising, and trading channel (Lynch, Kent, &
Srinivasan, 2001) on an international scale. Considering this increasing utility, the importance of the World
Wide Web cannot be overlooked across cultures. Because culture is obviously acknowledged as an
important factor in mediating socio-cultural practices, the use of the WWW can be understood by many
cultural and psychological factors that are interrelated, inherited, and learned by each other (Kim, 2005;
Kim & Papacharissi, 2003). This paper therefore examines the effectiveness of home pages to discover
which design features of organizational home pages are more attractive to users of different cultures by
employing two theories that were developed for studying different aspects and contexts of personality: self-
construal and the social responses to communication technology (SRCT).
While self-construal is a self-image system constructed by cultural communication styles at an
individual level, the SRCT is a crucial theory that explains individual users’ perceptions of computer
interface design in human-computer interaction. This paper aims to tie together existing intercultural
communication theory with SRCT in ways that show that perceptions of computers are facilitated by the
self-image system. This paper first looks at the two theories that should be applied to the use of the new
communication technology. Then, it details how users respond to the new communication technology and
how they are affected by it. The goal is to ascertain the extent of those users’ incorporation in the use of
new communication technology, establishing hypotheses for an experiment in this paper.
Self-Construal
Cross-cultural differences in the definition of the self produce habits, perceptions or values that
favor certain processing styles over others (Kim, 1999; Park & Levine, 1999; Singelis, 1994; Singelis &
Brown, 1995). Self-construal has widely been seen as the most important of variables related to different
communication styles in individualism and collectivism (Eaton & Louw, 2000; Heydenfeldt, 2000; Park &
Levine, 1999; Singelis, 1994; Singelis & Brown, 1995; Somech, 2000). Singelis (1994) defined two types
of self-construal: independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal. While independent self-
construal is when an individual actor recognizes him/herself as an independent and unique entity from the
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Convention