Globally, the most important issue right now may be the recent decision by the Iraqi Governing Council to base Iraqi family law on Islamic Shari'a law, rather than the previous secular family laws. Riverbend described the decision and its expected outcomes in her January 15 post. She noted that the issue has received strikingly little attention in the media, and I've noticed the same thing (what a contrast to the extensive coverage of the few women who dared to remove their burkas in Afghanistan!). I'll send an email out later today to alert friends to this issue--it needs more attention.

In my own individual mind, another issue demands attention: a pile of upcoming course assignments and conference paper drafts need to be completed. Most interesting is a paper I need to write for a class in "Public Opinion and Communication." In this paper, I need to initially define a topic for my final paper.

During the past few years, my particular interest area has been usability engineering--designing things, especially computer interfaces and websites, to be easy for people to figure out and to use. Over the past year or so, in response to coursework I've completed, that interest area has broadened to include cross-cultural issues in usability. E.g., if an interface is easy for me as a Westerner to use, will it also be easy for an African or an Asian, or do they face difficulties (e.g., unfamiliar design metaphors) that I don't? Are there ways to design interfaces to work well for global audiences, or is localization--tailoring versions of the same interface to different cultural settings--the only solution, if achieving usable design is important to its designers?

Lately, that interest area has expanded again, mainly because of the communication patterns I observe online, especially in the blogosphere. I'm beginning to wonder how people's images of each other change when they are able to communicate face to face. For one thing, I'm of course thinking of the remarkable experience that millions of other Americans and I had last year, reading Salam Pax's blog posts from Baghdad as our government prepared and conducted an invasion of his country. The experience makes me wonder: If someone had started out with an image of Iraqis as the "enemy," how might reading Salam's blog have changed that perception? Would it have? For another thing, I've been astounded by the ferocity of comments I see in many blogs, especially in response to blog authors' comments about controversial issues such as America's war on Iraq. When interchange between people on opposite sides of an issue is vitriolic in the ways typically seen online, how are readers affected? In particular, how do their images of the commentor's cultural group change (or do they)? Do preexisting feelings of hostility worsen?

The topic I'm thinking of researching for my class remains squishy and nebulous in my mind right now, but at this point, I frame it like this: As an Internet user encounters online information--especially first-person material like blogs--about members of another cultural group, how do those encounters affect her image of that cultural group? In particular, if she previously held an "enemy image" of that cultural group, how is that image affected?

It's these questions that I'll likely address in my paper, but I'm also interested in possible design implications of what I might find. Can (does?) design influence communication in ways that affect communicators' images of each other? I have a meeting scheduled with my professor later this morning, to discuss my paper proposal and possibly clarify some of the issues that are currently all muddled together in my mind. Let's see where this project goes...