Our group chose to take a closer look at the influencers in Indonesia and Germany on the social media platform YouTube. In this process we focused on identifying the special attributes that are particular to these two nations. With that foundation, we tried to understand in what ways people stage themselves on the internet differ and how the viewers actually perceive them.

Throughout our process, we summarized our impressions we got while watching the selected videos and created key visuals that function as a creative metaphor for our personal perceptions. In the questionnaire, we wanted to determine how others react to it and how they perceive the message. All together, we created an interactive medium to visualize our overall impressions of intercultural differences and similarities.

We were tasked to survey our surroundings and search for European foreigners and Indonesian locals to complete our questionnaire. The main questions consist of a polarity profile where we inserted keywords of our own that were linked to the key visuals, and of their impression and what message they perceive from it. The first key visual was a penguin flying among the birds, which was a metaphor for something that does not fit in a casual situation. The second key visual was two Youtubers on a phone screen who highly contrasted in color and personality, which was meant to visualize a contrast between monotone and vivid. We managed to ask 8 locals and 6 foreigners from all over Europe, with an equal 50:50 ratio between the men and women. All were over 20 years in age and the majority were bachelor graduates. Most professionally worked in the service industry with arts and humanities coming second.

The general audience’s impression of the first key visual was foreign and unusual but also beautiful. And the message conveyed was about something that does not fit and freedom. For the second key visual, their impressions were neutral, a tad bit solitary and they perceived it as a contrast between monotonous and vividness. In summary, the questionnaire results showed that both the creators of the questionnaires and the interviewees had the same impressions towards German and Indonesian influencer videos and it was well represented by the key visuals, as our message behind them was perceived by the audience.

While our first goal was to point out the differences between two cultures located half a globe apart, we quickly realized that there were not as many as we expected. In fact, through globalization and especially social media, there is a very strong connection between them. This aspect was present in the videos because in the Indonesian videos the way of talking, the gestures, the topics as well as the video editing style were nearly identical to german influencers. In the German videos, there was a sense of similarity when there were two or more people included. In these cases the expressiveness really suited the Indonesian influencer style, which is communicative, fun and loud. In the questionnaire, we pointed out the similarities as we chose the filter to first only work out abnormalities from the Indonesian answers. Second, we did the same for german answers and then compared them. Additionally, we also compared males and females as well as intercultural and monocultural.

With all the insights gathered through each step, we were able to create a unique expression of cross-cultural collaboration in the form of a prototype. The prototype is about a game of memory cards. For those that don’t know, in a game of memory, it is the goal to find hidden pairs of the same image. In this case, all of the pairs represent different tropes of Indonesian and German Influencer media. The pairs might look different in detail but they are still about the same thing, showing that even though the presentation varies, Indonesian and German media still contain the same content. Internet culture is a big melting pot for cultures across the world which leads to international communication being as simple as watching a YouTube video. That there were only a few differences was conspicuous but they really stuck in our minds. The similarities, on the other hand, formed the majority, for example, mimic, gestures, structures, ways of talking or pronouncing and production value. The overlaps were much more frequent and common than already expected. It went so far that sometimes you even understood what was going on and could interpret the speaking. In the end, the biggest impact on us was represented by the fact that despite the fundamental cultural barriers, today’s internet society managed to create its own non-verbal language.