Social networking as a new media communication tool to foster cultural exchange across borders

This study is one of the first attempts to research international social arts networks online; in particular, it focuses on different issues and challenges of cross-cultural communication among participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. The main objectives of the research are to assess how these challenges are addressed through the design of international arts networks and to analyze the relationship between the quality of these tools and the cultural diversity of the users' population. The hypothesis of the study is that networks designed specifically to facilitate cross-cultural communication are likely to attract a more diverse population of users. This study presents a comparative analysis of two existing arts networks: My Art Space and Art Review. Both networks claim to be international artists' communities and possess comparable features and characteristics. Comparative content analysis reveals that the Art Review network has a translation system for the ten top languages used on the Internet, as well as profile personalization tools that allow users to redesign their personal spaces on the network. As a result, Art Review has almost twice as many countries represented. Moreover, the analysis of the recent users' population indicates that, among the recently joined users, Art Review has a higher proportion of artists from each country than My Art Space. Furthermore, Art Review has only 18.9% native users, while My Art Space has 57.5%, which testifies that recently joined users on the latter network are less diverse. An important limitation of this study is that the results of the analysis cannot generalize to the whole population of the networks and refer only to the population of users who joined the network two or three months before this analysis was conducted. More precise and accurate research would be necessary to analyze demographics of the total populations of users and to estimate the level of their cultural diversity. Nevertheless, this thesis has strong practical implications that can be applied to designing international social arts networks. In spite of the fact that this study is a first attempt to examine such arts networks, it opens new perspectives for further investigation and research.