Thinking Globally, Composing Locally.
An Interview with Kirk St. Amant & Rich Rice, by Gustav Verhulsdonck
Friction Points: You use "friction points" to identify elements that can affect or inhibit effective international communication in online contexts. Can you give us an example of a "friction point" and some of the elements that we need to consider (e.g., you mention technological, cultural, and legal factors) in addressing an audience in global and online contexts?
"A friction point is any element that can slow, shift, or stop the flow of information from author to audience in an international online exchange. Most Germans don't have Twitter accounts or use Twitter. So, if I'm an American in the U.S. and I want to use Twitter to interact with German counterparts on a given topic of interest to both of us, I've just hit on a friction point."
-Kirk St. Amant
KIRK:
A friction point is any element that can slow, shift, or stop the flow of information from author to audience in an international online exchange. So, for example, international bandwidth differences are a major friction point, for they can slow the pace at which writers can compose and post texts and audiences can access or read them. They can also cause shifts as writers in one nation—where high-speed bandwidth is common and inexpensive—might have to shift how they compose online (their rhetorical approaches and strategies) so their work can be accessed and read by individuals in areas where bandwidth is limited and access fees are high. They might also shift how they compose so that individuals there might be able to share that online composition with others in that location (e.g., forwarding a downloaded file to others in one's online network). And bandwidth differences can even stop the exchange of information altogether if they prevent certain kinds of compositions (e.g., video files) from being transmitted to or accessed (effectively or at all) by individuals in areas with low bandwidth.
"Friction points can also cause shifts as writers in one nation—where high-speed bandwidth is common and inexpensive—might have to shift how they compose online (their rhetorical approaches and strategies) so their work can be accessed and read by individuals in areas where bandwidth is limited and access fees are high, and so individuals there might share that online composition with others in that location."
Notice that bandwidth, as a friction point, is connected to the design or the nature of a technology that relies on a physical infrastructure one can easily locate to work (e.g., telecommunications infrastructures and power grids or utility infrastructures). Let's call this kind of infrastructure a hard infrastructure, for it exists in a form one can easily locate and review.
In international online contexts, however, another kind of infrastructure can create friction points. These are cultural attitudes toward technology and its uses. In this case, it is the attitudes, values, and beliefs a culture has that affect how individuals compose online within a network (the members of a culture). These soft (i.e., unseen) infrastructures can also create friction points that are just as problematic, but can be more difficult to identify, study, and understand, because they do not have a physical or fixed form.
Consider social media. Cultural attitudes toward these media can vary markedly and can include issues such as whether or not the members of a given culture use a particular kind of social media—even if it is readily available to them. Most Germans, for example, don't have Twitter accounts or use Twitter, even though access to it is easy and inexpensive. So, if I'm an American in the U.S. and I want to use Twitter to interact with German counterparts on a given topic of interest to both of us, I've just hit on a friction point, for the information I'm sending will likely not get to (i.e., be stopped from getting to) my intended audience based on cultural attitudes toward the technology in which I'm composing my message.
In terms of culture and social media, such differences can also include what one should and can discuss via compositions for social media, what available social media individuals from different cultures use to compose online, and with whom one should share online compositions in an online network (e.g., just family and close friends or all of the friends and acquaintances in one's network). All of these factors affect the movement of information—of composed texts—from point to point across the earth. As such, all represent friction points one needs to understand and address in order to more effectively compose for or share one's compositions with international audiences using online media to access texts.
Top of Page Directions
—webtext & interview by Gustav Verhulsdonck 2017
