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Mindscapes And Internet-mediated Communication

John Gammack
Murdoch University

Abstract


Cultures are considered to be epistemologically heterogeneous, and it is assumed that epistemologically similar individuals exist across distinct cultures. Epistemological type is viewed as prior to, and transcendent of, nationality and culture. Identifying a shared epistemological basis for communication will be more likely to succeed in dialogical contexts where conformity to prevailing national stereotypes may fail. Two levels of communication are distinguished: explicate (here seen as conformity to social and cultural symbolic norms and conventions), and implicate (the level at which implicit, abstract communicative intention originates). Cyberspatial interactions potentially undermine normative cultural influences and permit multicultural or transcultural environments in which new codes extending from epistemological types (rather than cultural) become possible, limited only by media potential and symbolization itself. Drawing upon Maruyama's (1980) theory, implications for an alternative to the homogenization of verbal communication, and potential elements of codes for universal understandings are considered.

Introduction


Cyberspace, particularly as the Internet increasingly mediates organizational and social interaction, provides a unique milieu for the exploration and development of new forms of global communication together with the potential for developing personal skills relevant to the promotion of multicultural understanding.

As an apparently non-physical space, its occupants may metaphorically roam freely, stake territorial claims and define new cultural norms, in which conceptions of tribe, race, community, and other societal constructs may be explored, reconstructed and reprioritized. Utopian or dystopian visions are often projected against such a background. Rather than to speculate upon one or another picture suggested by the potential, in this paper some broad themes seen as relevant to the construction of particular visions of community will be outlined, and their relationship to Internet communication assessed.

The first theme concerns biases in shaping cyberspace, or at least in imposing structures within which interaction will occur. Both bottom-up and top-down forces apply here. The drivers are likely to be understood within categories of economic, cultural and technological dominance and control as top-down imperatives, and with innovation, expressivity, communication and individualism generating content from the bottom up. A rhetoric of empowerment, free speech, increased citizen participation in government and a democratizing and egalitarian ethos is also currently promulgated from grass root sources, and being examined by governments currently (Rowe & Frewer, 2000). History has traditionally shown the "wild west" being effectively tamed. The ability to construct sites, to innovate, to establish distributed groups and communities, and to subsist relatively immunely within those, however, remains a virtually constitutional right, and many self-organizing groups already exist within cyberspace, determining their own norms of communication.

The prospects for real communication and true democracy may, however, be limited. The potential for minute tracking and recording of all communication raises privacy concerns, and is a potential inhibitor of expression. Face-to-face interaction provides contextual information that aids interpretation, and a minimal literacy is assumed for all communication. A terse communication style, where expressing personal feelings can lead to lawsuits, is becoming the major communication mode in business, and increasingly in personal life. Clearly not everyone has computers, modems and access providers, and whether such suffrage is desirable or not, not everyone would be expected to make the transition to such an ecology willingly. The similar priorities of national governments (e.g. economic and military competitiveness) are likely, however, to exert a concerted pressure towards a technological society. With business and personal transactions increasingly likely to occur remotely and globally, attendant cultural misunderstandings (at individual, workplace and agglomerate levels) are implied. The forms of organization in cyberspace will be influenced by sets of forces, which are not primarily national in origin, and an analysis of the shapers of these must go beyond traditional, geographical and historical analyses to constructs addressing more universal human drives. In this paper, the major interest is in the basis for communicative understandings in relation to the Internet as a medium.

Communication Potential and the Internet

Although Roland Barthes' author may be dead, computer-mediated, like other mediated forms of communication, generally has both its originator's intrinsic intention and an external appearance in conventional forms understood by a community. When information leading to personal decisions is being passed, clarity and lack of ambiguity are paramount. Some initial norms for web presence and activity have de facto been established by the dominant Internet nations, particularly the United States, which actually embodies a more conformist character than its apparent free-spirited persona suggests (see de Castillejo, 1973, 1997). The prevalent technologies and policies invented, adopted or propounded by the Internet Society and major technology vendors set the environmental parameters for interaction, both social and organizational. Homogeneous standards, de facto or adopted by international bodies, make the infrastructure for mediated interaction confined within certain limitations, where the early concerns with security, surveillance, power rebalancing and social control have largely been allayed within the technologies of the Internet, and corporate policy-making.

From a communication viewpoint, the uniformity of technical languages and presentation media make sites worldwide appear homogeneous, with little clue to national origin or native style. The way in which the limitations of a powerful and dominant medium attracts and shapes the forms of interaction is readily seen in the way office suites and other application software have gravitated towards global standards. Corporate and academic presentations have largely converged around rapidly cliché-ing presentation graphics, and media development such as that projected by McLuhan (1969) will no doubt occur as countercultural elements foster innovative practices and evolution of those practices. But there seems little doubt that the extrinsic parameters of cyberspace, regardless of the types of content that are mounted, are formulated within a Western tradition, and informed by its dominant values.

Languages of the Internet

Statistically, the primary Internet language is English (Nadeau et al., 1998), although numerous languages are increasingly represented. An accident of history has led to the adoption of English as the prime language of the USA, which has largely pioneered the Internet, and the subsequent dominance of English as the language of international business. Its polyglot quality and large vocabulary have enhanced and sustain the dominance of English, although other polyglot languages exist with even larger vocabularies and more speakers. Statistics may be found on this, and Bryson (1990) is one particularly entertaining treatment of such statistics. The convention of dual language home pages is, in a sense, realizing the hope of the Esperantists, that there would be a common language to foster international understanding. Esperanto, however, has been criticized for its Eurocentric bias (Berlitz, 1982), amongst other problems (although see Harlow, 1995). Other attempts, aimed to be culturally neutral, such as Loglan (http://www.loglan.org) have not had significant impact. Latin, a formerly dead language [1], is deemed to have advantages for legal and medical applications, and there is a proposal that formal languages using logic constructs be adopted for electronic contracting activities (Reynolds, 1999), avoiding interpretive ambiguities. Any given system of linguistic symbols, however, will have limited expressibility and it is debatable whether a smaller or larger vocabulary ultimately aids communication. Current initiatives, such as world dictionaries (e.g. Microsoft's joint venture with Longmans), and publishing policies (e.g. some Francophone journals' decisions to publish only in English henceforth) are, however, likely to ensure that English remains the main language of technology and business, as well as academic publishing. Such a process inevitably loses nuances specific to certain languages, and there is an analogous threat of extinction of traditional cultural norms of expression finding continuation in cyberspace, which is yet to be explored. Approximately 90% of the world's languages are endangered, and half of the currently extant 6,000 or so languages worldwide will die out this century. Fifty-one languages have just one speaker, the majority of those being in Australia, where 98% of the 250 aboriginal languages will disappear (Crystal, 1998). These numbers are not being balanced by new languages emerging (e.g. through migration), and attempts to revive extinct languages from documentation suffer from the incapacity to cover their full range (Nettle & Romaine, 2000). Cultural assimilation, rather than natural forces, is the main reason. Traditional knowledge encoded in the terms of these languages, such as agricultural techniques and natural history, may not survive.

Indigenous cultural phenomena, such as anime in Japan, are becoming more widely popular, but the understanding of Japanese culture required to produce anime is such that few Westerners are considered competent to work in this field (according to an article in the UK film magazine Empire in 1995). Many examples can be given of faux pas and similar misunderstandings affecting international business ventures, and books describing the explicate norms of social and professional behaviour for particular cultures may be found in any airport. Globalised Internet business, however, is likely to converge around the norms established by currently dominant models and technologies, rather than by a natural extension of native models. Not all cultures subscribe to such a logic of imperialist homogenization (Maruyama, 1994), but the extrinsic requirements of the Internet, where content is reduced to form, makes global competitiveness on other terms difficult. The dominant characteristics of interaction that a Western cyberspace promotes seems largely to be styled by metaphors of shopping, novelty seeking, channel hopping upon a whim, individual choice, marketing and presentational tricks, visual excitement and attraction, and digestible information with minimal narrative commitment. The illusion that everyone can communicate because "everyone" from school children to multinational corporations can present a home page in the homogeneous format due to the foreseeable limitations of markup languages implies a bias towards a communicative conformity.

Here we are suggesting that the Internet is being socially and politically constructed along particular lines, and an extension of personal biases to the biases of organizational players, and the installed technologies can mean the establishment of a dominant technological infrastructure that selectively includes or excludes particular interactions. A sensitivity to initial conditions (i.e. the technological standards of the 1990s) implies a development agenda of cabling and networking entire nations, delivering information increasingly through virtual interaction and relating to others remotely through verbal and visual media, encouraging a dependency on physical sight, computer literacy and individualism. Debord (1967) has eloquently elaborated the consequences of cultural trends towards alienated experience, noting that "... society which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation" (Debord, 1990). The separation involved in mediated communication merely takes a different form, and the messages of the literate are transmitted in different terms, which are not simply understood culturally. The consumerism that drives much of the Internet development is also anticipated in Debord, and coincides with the values of the currently techno-economically dominant nations.

If a globally communicative Internet presence requires a conformity to non-indigenous values, and if the traditional values associated with specific cultures are to remain in some form, a framework for distinguishing relevant constructs in the formation of online communities is required. These will be transcultural and refer to more fundamental properties of communication, referenced to an Internet context. The ideas of two thinkers are found helpful here—David Bohm, and Magoroh Maruyama—and the next section indicates some of their relevant concepts.

Explicate and Implicate in Communication

The above introduction emphasized some properties of the communication forms possible, and currently existing, with the network medium, and considers these as externals of the intentions or thoughts behind them, which web page items represent or symbolize. In many transactions the mapping is direct - the form is the content, and (say) a pictorial product catalogue refers simply to a specific stocked product with little interpretation required. Another class of communication, however, is when greater abstractions are being conveyed, with organizational implications for strategic decision or policy making, legislation, establishing business protocols, and especially collaborative tactical or operational activities in design, documentation or planning. With e-mail records increasingly being used in litigation, and the fact that language is naturally ambiguous and to be understood in its immediate context, it is important to establish the intent of the communication distinct from properties of its appearance. This applies both immediately and retrospectively if the communication is to be archived for organizational learning purposes. Although his is a vastly more far-reaching theory than this present application, the terminology of Bohm (1980) provides a useful construct which may be used to place considerations of communication in perspective. He distinguishes the explicate from the implicate orders and a brief indication of what this means now follows:

[the widespread] distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good (largely originate) in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and 'broken up' into yet smaller constituent parts ... considered to be essentially independent and self-existent (Bohm, 1980, p. ix).

An outstanding physicist, Bohm distinguished two orders of physical reality which he termed the implicate and explicate orders, referring to the primary, undivided and holistic flow, which encompasses thought, and specific manifestations of thought in the temporal world of identified objects. Bohm's deeper concerns led him in later life to elaborate these ideas in the realm of social reality (Bohm, 1990), and develop ideas of dialogue in which meetings of minds occurred distinct from the dominance of one argument or theory over another. Such an occurrence is suggested by the common phrase "being on the same wavelength".

Following Bohm's (1980) terminology in situations involving communicative intent, the implicate order may be described as holding the potential from which the explicate (formal symbolization) is made manifest. Any mediated communication will have both these aspects. In the introduction, we were primarily concerned with aspects of the explicate - the outward signs and digitized or bounded symbolizations only to which the Internet has access. Prior to any symbolization is the idea intended and, although it is always possible to ascribe personal meanings to any set of symbols, the real communication occurs when an idea is fully received as it was sent. Sharing ideas, seeing eye to eye, meetings of minds and true dialogue are the aspects of communication we are primarily concerned with in this section, in an attempt to get a handle on the implicate order beyond secondary media representations.

Social communication is not only about information transmission between a source and a receiver, as in the classic Shannon & Weaver (1949) model, but in a system of simultaneous mutually shaping entities is a means by which minds come to understand one another, much as pebbles become smooth. Casse (1994) has outlined the new paradigm of communication in which such minds construct and create their environments and relationships. Casse has also developed a typology of communication styles (including a test), which profiles communicators in terms of various emphases (process-oriented, people-oriented, action-oriented and idea-oriented, and so forth). The important point from his paper is that if the values and styles of communicators are incompatible, increasing clarity or explanation of a message, or disambiguation of other interpretations will be to no avail, contrary to standard business communications advice. Such communicators will not see "eye to eye" in any meaningful way and fail to shape a jointly understood concept.

In effective communication, forms of symbols can get in the way, distracting from the message, and their formal properties such as beauty or mathematical consistency may take precedence in establishing their acceptance, and mere externalities, such as words in e-mails, become referenced to discourses never intended. Discussions, which may be institutionalized into political or religious movements, potentially confuse the diversity of forms and externalizations with the essential purity of the message or intentional thought. This phenomenon impacts on multicultural understanding, which itself is largely invested in national and cultural identities. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether cyberspace threatens or reestablishes traditional identities, new norms applicable in cyberspace are unlikely to immediately supplant terrestial understandings.

In this regard, the easy transglobal communications which enable new business ventures, personal relationships and access to previously "unavailable" cultural resources, are likely to be governed by an overlay of emergent 'netiquette' norms, largely influenced by Western values, and superficial relative to the forms of communication meaningful in other cultures. The meaning of dialogical communication must transcend the superficiality of the medium, which is no panacea for overcoming the notorious problems of international communication, particularly between Eastern and Western cultures.

In his exploration of the concept, Bohm (1990) characterised dialogue as a meeting of minds beyond forms of symbols which, although temporarily mediating a message, do not ultimately matter. Discussion is the term he reserved for a battle between symbol forms for dominance, with the goal of prevailing rather than understanding.

Naturally there is a more foundational level at which such behavioral and external norms do not apply, and from which misunderstandings may be appropriately assessed as such. The understandings which enable a deeper communication across cultures may be termed implicate, and are ontologically prior to particular conventions. Such understandings can apply within, as well as across, cultures, but their universality remains an issue. Many categorizations of individual types, ancient and modern, testify to the diversity of human nature, and forms of astrology and personality typing which cross cultures indicate their relative power as explanatory sets of constructs. While scientific evidence is ambivalent, (typical studies indicate some effect, but leave most of the variance unexplained), personal experience of compatibilities and dissonances can usually be adduced to support folk theories and pet beliefs. Whichever form of classification is imposed, however, any significant culture will embrace diversity in which harmonies and dissonances will be possible. It is here the mindscapes theory of Maruyama (1980) has direct applicability.

Rejecting the simple-mindedness of typologies, Maruyama's mindscape relationology goes further than mere temperamental classifications of individual qualities to specify an epistemological basis from which communicative and behavioral styles are generated. The heterogeneity of a culture where each mindscape type is represented in some proportion, despite particular patterns of dominance, ensures viability through intracultural diversity. As a biological phenomenon, the need for diversity is well understood by geneticists, and large organizations are increasingly paying attention to ensuring such within their operation (Maruyama, 1994).

Maruyama (1980, 1994) has identified four frequently occurring, canonical mindscape types, of varying prevalence within national cultures, but ultimately transcending those. One of the differentiating constructs is the tendency towards either a homogenization, or a heterogenization of the environment. Homogeneity is associated with control, order and structure, but not with innovation and creativity. Heterogeneity is harder to manage, to quantify and predict, but is less vulnerable to changes in circumstances. If a corporation hires only people exactly like the boss, innovation is unlikely, and the operation will be predictable. Equally, nations differ on the extent to which their people flourish within particular mindscapes. Each culture, however, is held to contain people of each mindscape type, regardless of the dominant national or cultural stereotype.

The four mindscapes are best understood from reading Maruyama's original writings, but may be characterised for present purposes as H, I, S and G, where H is the dominant Western style. The patterns of behaviors seen in mindscape H are characterized by tendencies to hierarchy, formalization, rules, homogenization, control, intolerance of variety, and functionalist and goal orientation in activity. G (which has some similarities with S style) is characterized by a heterogenizing style (increasing variety), pattern developing, spontaneity, growth amplification, polyocular vision and other distinguishing characteristics. Some African and Asian nations have sophisticated models of management and social economics based on G style characteristics which Maruyama (1994) has lucidly outlined. Maruyama's theory has been extensively considered in relation to foreign policy, import tariff settings, invention, cultural decision-making and several other aspects (Maruyama, 1994).

Relating the theory to interpersonal communication, one implication for communication consistent with Casse (1994), as mentioned above, is that given an epistemological difference between two parties, increasing the clarity, emphasis or other formal attributes of a message will be ineffective. This has practical implications for organizational communications, but also for cultures. Natural forms of communication become suppressed as stress-inducing conformity to a dominant style occurs, a phenomenon identified as subsedure (Maruyama, 1991). The understandings across cultures are more likely to be mediated by attention to implicate aspects of communication, such as mindscape epistemologies and the styles and values those imply, than by mere expertise in social niceties. According to Maruyama, those with other mindscape types obliged to conform to the cultural practice of a dominant mindscape undergo hypocrisy, strain, underdevelopment and subsedure, whereas arranging diversity harmoniously is more likely to enhance communication and engender innovation. An analogy here is the classical form of oriental art, in which the principle of balancing nebulous and fluid components in a holistic harmony of diverse areas achieves an emergent beauty in which each 'part' plays a role defined by the whole.

As virtual communities develop, establish a shared consciousness and communication norms, and link with each other in business or service ventures, understanding the communication norms beyond simple linguistic misunderstandings, and without requirement to conform to a dominant and non-indigenous symbol system will be essential. Such "birds of a feather" can self-select their preferred communication modes in self-organising groups, but intra- or inter-organizational teams may have no such luxury. The possibility for such a form of communication is now explored.

A Code for Transcultural Communication?

We assume there can be no unique type to which all human individuals or cultures must conform, and that it is desirable for a harmony in diversity to be properly appreciated. As national and cultural boundaries continue to blur, identities call for redefinition. Virtual interaction undermines many traditional constructions of perceived identity: race, gender, age, origin, education level, accent, class, status are invisible, and need not be apparent during interaction. This focuses on the qualities of the formal message, which as suggested earlier, may be constructed along the dimensions of the values of a dominant or emergent culture. If interaction is increasingly mediated virtually, and along the lines suggested above, communications which emphasize only the explicate forms may lose the informal contexts of message origin which condition a fuller appreciation of the intent. If this is English, the potentialities of pictographic languages are recessed, and if a service does not lend itself to mediated representation, its value may be hard to assess. Furthermore, if an H type mindscape governs or dominates commercial interactions, more sophisticated and egalitarian models of commerce and management may find it difficult to become established in cyberspace, as national governments conform to Western agendas. Barter, for example, is one trading model which is more natural to many and which has Internet equivalents.

Diversity of content is assured given the nature of the Internet: diversity of expressive communicable forms and media in cyberspace will increasingly be technologically realized and forms matter little if the message is successfully communicated. But can the basis for mutual understanding be mediated symbolically, and are the forms available for messages sufficient to this task? Or do they merely constitute another set of polite norms, superficial, alien, biased, and perfunctory. In understanding another mind polite formal engagements can miss a necessary empathy.

The basis of mutual understanding, which is prior to cultural norms and other overlaid social constructions, is surely epistemological and closer to (if not beyond) the biological and developmental factors which shape linguistic appreciations. Epistemologies and biological development are transcultural and as such are likely to provide a better basis for codifying understandings that inform appreciation of the formally symbolized.

Metaphorically, native colors are not to be simply melted into a brown uniformity, but find their place in a mosaic, or as a unique reflectance of white. Identifying the (implicate) predifferentiated archetypes which generate specific but transient explications promises a theoretical means to establish universal codes. Such a code will be white and not brown. The non-linguistic codes pointing to these archetypes in turn are perhaps currently best represented by icons addressing common human experience, under a general rubric of emotion.

Many cultures have terms for specific emotions, which don't readily translate. Examples include triste in French (a form of sadness); scunnered in Scots (a form of disgust); and a certain word from Tierra del Fuego describing the feeling arising when two persons are present, both knowing what needs to be done, and wishing the other would start it. The broad categories of anger, fear, happiness, sadness and jealousy are generally held, however, to apply to all cultures, if not indeed ages, and are candidate archetypes. Their abstraction into the more fundamentally positive and negative emotions goes deeper into the implicate generator where even these archetypal forms are seen as explications. Facial expressions can holistically identify emotional intentions and suggest a more universal basis.

Regardless of connotative meanings within cultures, color is another candidate for representational codes that relate to universal biological constraints, although this is a point of contention (Saunders & van Brakel, 1997). Recent work in this area is beginning to examine this possibility (Gammack & Denby, 1999).

The emphasis on verbal and visual aspects of virtual communication may suffice for superficial correspondence, but the emotive intent of a message impacts considerably more on understanding than the formal words, and this is the aspect lost by disembodied communications. Although emotions themselves are culturally relative, as another aspect of human symbolic functioning, they can act to enhance and clarify complex messages and intentions, through their connotations such as intonation. Although their construction may be relative to societal norms, as a primitive and immediate experiential quality they may have a biological if not an epistemological universality. Much communication is likely to have an emotional component, but in conveying such a quality in symbolic interaction, can some form of coding be established relevant to preservation of its implicate quality?

Believing that such communications are not verbally registered, but that communication with another, whether in cyberspace or in physical space depends on sharing referents for a symbol system, Gammack (1999) investigated the emotional attributions made for iconic representations of faces. The literature suggests that categorization of facial expressions is essentially universal, and that the categories of human emotion do not differ across cultures. Given the Internet convention of rendering the emotional intent of a message that might otherwise be misperceived by the use of a 'smiley' the study examined whether icons representing a range of emotional states would be reliably perceived and categorized across distinct cultures. Evidence for some universality was found across Chinese and British populations, with the facial expressions themselves underdetermining the range of labels which could be applied in each culture. The data, however, provide a basis for identifying relatively unambiguous archetypes at the level of icons for recording "emotional" information in a culture-free way.

Finding that the broad categories were reliably perceived implies that a cross-cultural code may be developed which notates the emotive intent of a message in a relatively unambiguous manner, and which is based more upon deeper and more ancient biological than cortical structures. Such a lexicon, however, is essentially just another set of conventionalized symbols, and can be disingenuously manipulated to mislead, since it has only an associative relationship to its emotionally registered referents.

A Culture-Free Correlate for Mindscape Types

Inspired by the work of Maruyama, various researchers worldwide have been attempting to establish and use a culture-free instrument for profiling mindscape types. Originally developed and validated in Tokyo, Brussels and Budapest, these are known as TOB tests (Maruyama, 1994). A TOB test uses visual patterns representing different levels of complexity, redundancy, heterogeneity and interaction, which are some of the dimensions on which mindscape types differ. One TOB (Maruyama, 1994, p.131) consists of 42 different patterns laid out on a 4 x 4 checkerboard. The patterns are reproduced in Figure 1.


Figure 1. TOB test patterns, with coordinates labeled for this study.

The instrument has been used to assess aesthetic preferences, relating them to mindscape profile, so that these may be used indicatively as a test for mindscape type. Aiming to identify patterns of aesthetic preferences against dominant mindscape types, the present study is a small part of that effort, in which a sample of people provided data for relating some mindscape characteristics to such aesthetic preferences.

Underlying this work is the assumption that despite culturally dominant mindscapes, a simple cross-cultural comparison will not yield predictable differences, whereas a mindscape-based classification of the respondents will show a greater, and more useful commonality. In the present application, some general dimensions of aesthetic judgement are expected to emerge, against which particular individuals may be assessed for dominant mindscape type.

Method


Subjects were 29 mature students on a UK Business Information Technology Master's degree course, with a mean age of 30.3 years, being trained as "hybrid managers," capable in both contemporary business and technology, and liable to be managing diverse teams. Demographic data on age, sex, first-degree background and whether or not they had lived overseas was collected. The communication styles test of Casse (1994) was also applied and ratings obtained on each of his four modes. Subjects then circled one of four statements indicative of distinct mindscape characteristics, under various headings, including decision making, ethics, beauty, social attitudes and so on. Following this they rated each item of TOB on a 7-point scale representing degrees of beauty ranging from ugly to beautiful.

The TOB ratings were then subjected to a Pathfinder (Schvaneveldt, 1990) analysis (assuming only ordinal level of measurement), and complemented with a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis (Kruskal & Wish, 1981) to identify the major constructs distinguishing the items for this group as a whole. This combination of analyses graphically shows both the underlying dimensions explaining the variance, and the relative position of similar items in a minimal spanning tree of the data. As the MDS may distort item position to fit a plane, the local interpretation of nearest neighbours is best provided by the complementary analysis. MDS, however, shows the main differentiating dimensions among the items. By relating this analysis to independent indications of dominant mindscape tendencies, any patterns of correspondence evident between aesthetic preference and the indicated mindscape type suggest a valid way forward in a larger, rigorous study.

Results


The analysis for the group of subjects is summarized in Table 1, with the coordinates of items not to scale, but retaining their relative positions, and the link weights omitted for clarity. The two-dimensional solution is shown (with a rather high Kruskal stress value of 2.51, indicating poor goodness-of-fit), but where the clusters of items are spatially indicated. Two major dimensions appear to apply. The first is symmetry, which is a dominant aesthetic dimension for Western populations expected from the literature, and where a generally increasing level of symmetry is evident along the y-axis. Although regularity or complexity is one candidate, the other dimension, along the x-axis, is less clear, and no firm conclusions may be drawn from this. There does appear to be some structure in the data consistent with the expectations that mindscape theory would suggest, which solutions in higher dimensionality or more exacting studies might begin to tease out. As some anomalies occur, the interpretation is not simple, partly because aesthetic preference itself is complex, mindscapes are rarely pure, and the diagram averages over a group, which naturally contains heterogeneity. But with an essentially monocultural sample it is clear that even if there are some shared dimensions that may be identified, individual preferences and opinions vary widely.

Subject ASubject BPatternMean Rating
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)E32.28
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)D22.31
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)A62.66
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)c62.69
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)F12.93
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)B43.59
beautiful(1)beautiful(1)D53.59
ugly(7)ugly(7)G23.97
ugly(7)ugly(7)C44.00
ugly(7)ugly(7)C34.10
ugly(7)ugly(7)B14.17
ugly(7)ugly(7)G54.24
ugly(7)ugly(7)D64.59
Table 1: Pathfinder and MDS analysis of 29 subjects on TOB test (selected patterns only shown).

The construct of symmetry (or information redundancy), however, does appear to broadly distinguish items, with both diagonal and orthogonal axes of symmetry showing some clustering. Most individuals scored highly on the G mindscape type in terms of agreement with statements characterizing that type. For the beauty question, however, preferences were mixed, with more subjects indicating preferences consistent with H type than G and S type combined, and in line with the predicted general Western cultural preference for regularity and symmetry.

Various methods for statistically comparing individual Pathfinder and multidimensional scaling analyses exist (Gammack, 1988), which remain to be done. To illustrate some individual differences however, two subjects, with high and low G scores, and also with high and low scores on the Casse 'people' dimension, were compared. The first subject was a 34 year old male, with a background in business administration, who had lived abroad, and whose score was very high (16/20) on the Casse people dimension. Additionally, every one of the statement areas was circled g and his aesthetic preferences are shown in column 1 for items of interest. The second subject was a 31 year old male engineer who scored lowest (1/20) on the people dimension, and had only agreed with 2 statements reflecting G mindscape, which was also among the lowest of this group. He had not lived abroad, and his ratings on the same items are shown in column 2. The item codes themselves are in the third column, with Figure 2 showing the patterns themselves.

Figure 2: Sample TOB items in Table 1 ordered aesthetically

A t-test showed overall ratings correlated at r = 0.66, significant at p <0.05 (two-tailed). This suggests that cultural factors may dominate individual variation. Even with rather different attitudes, generally similar aesthetic judgements, perhaps governed by the principles of symmetry and complexity obtain, and codes embodying these values may be applicable in heightening communication, as their judgments largely agree.

The subjects' comparative ratings and group mean are shown in Table 1 for those items that had exact agreement at the scale extremities (1 and 7) and some informal, qualitative assessments may be made. The patterns for these subjects are in line with the group ratings, and generally the extreme agreements on beauty seem to correspond to symmetrical shapes, and ugly to the asymmetric, although not all the symmetrical shapes were judged as extremely beautiful in the sample. The extra dimension of complexity partially differentiates these for both respondents, where simpler (orthogonal) symmetries are preferred to shapes with diagonal or non-rotational symmetries. Incidentally, item F2, (mean = 4.9) was considered ugliest by the group, rating 6 from subject A and 7 from subject B, but the top four items (E3, D2, A6, and C6) coincide with the group's top four.

Conclusions and Implications


Maruyama's work points to picture coded information systems, which, by analogy to Chinese and Japanese writing systems, convey more information faster, and in applications where complex relations must be appreciated simultaneously, such as in face recognition, the parallel quality has advantages over written systems. Enduring codes for universal concepts may best be represented in pictorial forms, and Maruyama has developed some candidate systems for this (Maruyama, 1986, 1994). Encoding information systems in a culturally fair manner may well involve pictures, emotions, colors and other non-linguistic symbols, but all are essentially limited by the nature of symbolization, which is to support interpretation, ambiguity, conventionalized meanings and the like. And it remains the case that meanings of symbols are attributed by humans, in value-laden contexts and for specific purposes, all of which are variable. Even colors may have nationalistic or mythological connotations. Although finding a suitable convention may help to democratize cyberspatial interactions and virtual forms of communication, these essential limitations of mediated communication remain. Regardless of diversity of forms, and indeed content, and the relative universality of conventional encodings, it would seem that shared understandings are beyond what may be formally conveyed, and depend on a shared mindscape epistemology, where the formal attributes of a communication are secondary.

The practical implications of this, if true, are that seeking universality at the level of forms and mediated symbolic conventions is fruitless. The mindscape types identified by Maruyama, and which we take to exist in all cultures, imply that shared understandings are possible, but that across types and mediated forms there may be communication difficulties if not impasses. It was notable that the statements, even with respect to beauty, showed a variety of respons, while the aesthetic judgments showed a greater similarity, possibly explained by universal underlying principles of aesthetics, such as symmetry and complexity, adjusted by secondary considerations. Such tensions between verbal forms are viewed as necessary in a pluralistic society, operating essentially verbally, but the resolution of their implications for conflict remains a consideration, with which political, religious and other great ideologies alongside practical management and psychological approaches frequently fail to deal.

We believe that being free of the limitations of a type or of a form allows a proper recognition of unique abilities, and healthy attitude to diversity, and the ability to translate among styles of interaction. Recognition of the equivalence of intentions despite formal differences allows communication attempts to be translated into a presentational form for an alternative audience. Translation implies a mastery of two expressive forms, together with a third code or generative basis from which their conceptual equivalence may be established. Mindscape type G is the most developed type with respect to these skills and can enhance the experience of other types by providing a diversity of vision. Picture codings are claimed to help develop G-type thinking (Maruyama, 1994, p. 95) and interactive video games develop such skills. It is in the awareness of different mindscapes, and in the education around this, more than the codings themselves, that will allow effective transcultural communication.

The training of integrated abilities in single individuals which have hitherto been distinguished as relevant to the programs of one or other faculty has led to several suggestions concerning the (tertiary) education of the 'hybrid manager' (Earl & Skyrme, 1992; Howell & Gammack, 1996). This term has fallen into disuse, not least because of the connotations of the word hybrid in French. Such individuals, however, will continue to be essential in the endeavor of knowledge management in organizations, and continuation of inter-faculty education programs, where individuals' gaining knowledge both of business processes and of relevant supporting IT are indicated. Such individuals can act for two sides, with separate cultures and differing immediate goals, but while they may embody the adaptability of the generalist, if they lack the in-depth skills of the specialist their position may be unrecognized or untenable against metrics which rely on the explicate properties only.

Handling diversity and complexity in the workplace and elsewhere, and relating to a variety of expertize and cultural backgrounds will be critical for managers in the new economy. Educationally, university teaching emphasizing linear verbal narratives may be retrogressive in a world of multimedia technology, and developing emotional intelligence where "the virtuoso in interpersonal skills is the corporate future" (Zuboff, quoted in Goleman, 1995, p. 170) is already being recognized in training and advanced educational programs.

One could extrapolate more and more combinations of skills along these lines, designing specific programs of integrated education for individuals, or more ambitiously for stabilized teams. A holistic education strategy fostering integrative abilities would naturally require the specialist skills to be developed, in ways different from multiple trainings in distinctive disciplines. The content of what is related is seen as secondary to an ability to abstract underlying patterns and perceive relations across disciplines. Thus as the knowledge in the disciplines changes or updates, the adaptation will be quicker and less dependent on specific forms of information. An understanding of the theory of mindscapes provides a basis for the design of such a truly transcultural program.

Footnotes


[1] An online article, by Rachel Konrad "Net helps resuscitate a 'dead' language," December 6, 2000, describes this. Retrieved 15 January 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4025384.html

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About the Author


John Gammack was senior academic in Information Systems at Murdoch before taking up a professorship at the School of Management at Griffith University. Following his Ph.D. (Cambridge, 1988), in his postdoctoral work he developed intelligent and collaborative decision support systems in the financial and defense sectors. Twice a British Council visiting Fellow to PR China, he has over 100 publications in the field of IS, emphasizing human knowledge and intelligence in organizational systems. His current research involves knowledge management and Internet commerce applications.

Address: School of Information Technology, Murdoch University, Murdoch WA, 6150, Australia, Ph: +61-8-9360-2410, Tel: +61-8-9360-2941.

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