Evaluating the Cultural Anthropology of Artefacts of Computer Mediated Communication: A Case of Law Enforcement Agencies

Abstract

The renowned orientations of cultural models proposed by Hall and Hofstede has been the subject of criticisms. This is due to the weak, inflexible and old-fashioned nature of some designs resulting from them. In addition, is the ever-changing, formless and undefined nature of culture and globalization. Consequently, these vituperations have resulted in better clarifications when assessing the cultural anthropology of websites. Based on these later clarifications and other additions, we seek to evaluate the cultural heuristics of websites owned by agencies of the Nigerian government. Note that this is verily necessary because older models did not include Africa in their analyses. Specifically, we employed the online survey method by distributing questionnaires to different groups of experts drawn from the various regions of Nigeria. The experts employed methods such as manual inspection and use of automated tools to reach conclusions. Afterwards, the results were assembled and using the choice of a simple majority, we decided whether a design parameter is either high or low context. Findings show that websites developers tend to favor low context styles when choosing design parameters. The paper attempts to situate Africa in Hall’s continuum; therein, Nigeria (Africa) may fall within French Canadian and Scandinavian and/or within Latin and Scandinavian for the left hand and right hand side diagram respectively. In future, we would study the cultural anthropology of African websites employing the design parameters proposed by Alexander, et al.