Intercultural Issues in a Virtual Diplomacy Special Interest Group: A Discourse Analysis Approach

The impact of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) on society is still evolving and our understanding of its social, psychological, political, and economic implications is far from complete. Online communication systems structure interaction in new ways, impacting on the types of social organization that emerge from people using them. Further, these actors could find themselves in circumstances where CMC is essential to negotiate an agreement or to establish a joint action plan, without being aware of the sociocultural mechanisms involved. The case is even more complex when we consider how different actors involved in a negotiation process, frequently driven by different agendas and with diverging interests, react to and in this new environment. Issuing from a previous study of Virtual Diplomacy (Conoscenti 2004), the present chapter explores the role of power relations in the development of a learning culture online. Re-assessing data generated from previous activities of a Special Interest Group (SIG), the study tries to show how in CMC ‘cultural and power issues’ are ‘other variables’ over and above interpersonal relations. Using a cultural approach to discourse the author argues that an ‘essentialist’ conceptualisation of culture can help explain certain behaviour when Non-Native Speakers of English (Non-NSE) are involved in the interaction. The aim is to carry out an analysis of intra-group processes in a Virtual Diplomacy setting in order to advance understanding of normative influence in groups. This is achieved through the observation of an intercultural group to verify how, even in such a particular case of Computer Mediated Communication, people do things with language rather than merely describing the world as it is.