Social media F2F and on-line communities

This is a tryout. Just entering some text and see what happens. Could influence some parts of the DB-industry, or not at all. Anyway. Here it is:

In the on-line communities of today we face some issues not present in every day face-to-face situations. The on-line communities consist of participants that are to be found from a variety of cultures and they are forced to write in another language than their mother-tongue. Various cultural differences influence degree of participation in on-line communities.

Using a language that is not your mother-tongue furthermore in a mainly written environment presents some issues. How will you get your thoughts thru? How do you connect via a language that is not known by heart. You are also forced to write - and not speak – in that foreign language. However, the video and image based communities might present a solution.

This thesis is a practical walk-through of a 27 year long experience in on-line communication, from the stumbling steps in text based communication systems when Internet was just born. It also covers the necessary adaptations and limitations forced upon on-line communication in a multi-cultural non face-to-face world.
One finding made is that it become more easy to get the communication to flow if there are common (multi-cultural, non F2F and non-mother-tongue) jokeable items within the on-line community.