"I don't actually know who I am and where I am from": cultural texture of Q&A website as dialogical community

Abstract: New media connect people with the world, allow them to transcend temporal and spatial distances in communication and provide a sphere for self-presentation. The users of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) may feel enjoyment presenting their social image and building up social interaction with other online fellows. In the last years, the large use of social ‘question and answer’ websites (Q&A) has changed the sphere of inter-cultural exchanges, promoting enjoyment. Specifically, we conjecture that online self-disclosure may increase opportunities to present social identity and redefine intercultural exchange boundaries. Focused on Quora.com website, the main objectives of the present study are: a) to investigate how the use of self-presentation and self-disclosure strategies on Q&A website facilitate cross-cultural communication; b) to detect the role of modulation expressions in the intercultural mediated interactions and in the acculturation processes. These goals can be achieved through Critical Discourse Analysis and Dia-textual analysis to analyse websites’ texts, phrases, strengths, idioms, and lexical forms. The results of present study show that Q&A websites promote sense-making processes and weave intercultural communication based on the respect.