The digital language divide: COMMUNITY

The digital language divide: COMMUNITY

inclusion

exclusion

structure of language

interaction

common interests

interaction is limited by language

Twitter users tend to confine their follows, tweets and retweets to those that speak the same language

German: hashtags

Chinese > English, in terms of what one can say in 140 characters :

purpose of social media use differs among language groups

conversation 👥

sharing information ✏

most used languages on Twitter - Semiocast (2010)

English (50%)

Spanish

Japanese

Portugese

Malay

Language Matters in Twitter: A Large Scale Study (Lichan Hong, Gregorio Convertion, and Ed H. Chi)

language and associated cultural differences matter indeed and need to be considered when designing cross-cultural communication tools

hashtags

German: 18% of tweets

Japanese: 5% of tweets

number of hashtags used by a pair of language communities = how likely these communities were to tweet about the same topics