Intercultural communication

Intercultural communicationOnce I had a Chinese friend from Nanjing, China who’s named is Eva (a self-given name, her real name is Zhou Man Yi). She was a really individualistic in nature; she was extrovert, independent and she did not bother to act like a typical collectivist Chinese in common. Normally, people would perceive Chinese as a collectivist society whereby high interdependency, conformity and mutual sympathy are common. However, this is not the case with Eva. She loved English songs, shows and movies. She did everything from writing on her own to travelling with her friends to another city in China during midnight for fun. As an independent girl, she could easily adapt with various groups of friends in different occasions. In contrast to her mother and father who were more conservative, she was open and extremely frank when conversing with others. Her parents were more introvert; they conform to others’ opinion and keep their own opinion so as not to appear to harsh and forceful. For instance, the older Chinese generation used to try very hard to please their business partners; as such they would accompany their clients for rounds of drinks and meals, plus extravagant gifts for the clients to bring home. This is a typical Chinese act of ‘face-saving’. After all, Eva is not alone; so as her parents in terms of generation gap that exists in China today. Many of Eva’s friends were individualistic too. While the older generation, including Eva’s parent, tend to be more collectivist because they still retain strong Chinese identities with them. Looking at the above comparison, one may have to consider certain factors before communicating with people from different generation in a same cultural group. Due to globalization in China, many young Chinese generations experience sudden, drastic cultural revolution like never before. Therefore, to deliver an effective communication, different aspects such as age group and cultural group should be observed carefully. should we teach ourselves to be more sensible when communicating with different group age/culture?

agenda setting function

Agenda setting functionOne of the aspects of mass media was to set an agenda for its audience. Looking at the recent news coverage in Channel News Asia from the international news on US presidential election to Asia news on Malaysia election, what make these news so phenomenal? The answer lies in the repetitive nature of these news being broadcasted in the local TV station. Why were those news being repeated so many times? It was to raise public awareness regarding the importance of such issues, which may not be true in reality. Let us compare with the current news regarding a victim of gun shot by a local policeman in Outram park MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) station. The latter news would be more important to raise the public and government awareness of local police. As a police, his/her job is to maintain the effectiveness of the law but not to kill the wrongdoers. Whatever the reason is, taking away one’s life is a crime (except for capital punishment).Here, the local media is not really effective and accurate by prioritizing the wrong issue; the media should give more importance to the policeman incidents rather than the US and Malaysia election. This is an effect of priming, whereby the media attend to some issues over the others thereby altering the standard by which people evaluate the issue. Therefore, the public was mislead by the information broadcasted by the media.Another interesting issue raised was, why should the media prioritize the election news rather than the local policeman shooting incident? Well, first of all, the government might want to please the large number of Americans settling in Singapore by broadcasting the progress of presidential election. Or maybe the US is perceived as the ‘super power’ whereby any issue originated from that country would raise the concerns of people worldwide. Such agenda set by the media could easily distort the audiences’ view of the degree of importance of certain news.  what do you guys think?

groupthink

Groupthink – “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action”From my inference, group think, although at a glance seems absurd where people would easily give up their personal freedom to conform with one another, actually has a basis for it. Firstly, when a new member has just joined a new group, he/she should conform with the other in order to be accepted as a part of the group. Conformity pressure greatly influences a newcomer as he/she will be likely to get into trouble or ostracized by the rest of the group members if he/she expresses dissonant idea (Heylighen, 1992). Though Conformity pressure is relatively irrational as it often rejects adequate knowledge or idea; however, it is unavoidable since it implies that a belief does not vary among individuals. This first step of getting accepted by a group would have a prolong influence to an individual. A person, who at the first stage of adaptation into one group seems compliant would consider to keep such status (or maybe most of it) later so that his/her group members see him/her as a ‘faithful follower’. This is what most probably will contribute to Groupthink in a long term.

Dan “Harry Potter” dates Emma “Hermione Granger”??!!

The above are two interesting and funny videos I had taken from the You tube. First video contains lots and lots of the couple photos (but I doubted the accuracy, since they appeared fake or being made up by someone using photoshop, for example). As I continued to search for more reliable sources to prove the accuracy of the first one, I found the second video. The second one is obviously a made-up video clip, that consists of several clips of both Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson during different occasions, such as press conferences, TV talkshows, break during a movie shootings and etc (in the sense that I considered the latter is more reliable than the first video). Both videos might only a mere gossip??? or they are really true (who knows??). But most importantly, there are some factors that we should take into consideration if we want to analyze whether Dan and Emma are really dating..

Well, first of all, the two main characters of Harry Potter movie sequel appear to be almost chat together during some press conferences. However, interestingly Rupert Grint “Ronald Weasley”, the third main character, appear to be secluded from both of them even though the three of them are standing/sitting side by side with one another.  This may contribute to one of the quantitative approach of interpersonal communication, Dyadic primacy, whereby the tendency of interpersonal communication that breaks down to two-person exchanges. Thus, such scenes might draw the public’s curiosity on the status of Dan and Emma, as the public consider them as a natural “paired-up” who have more things to share in common.

 Secondly, both Dan and Emma were almost always seen together, whether it was during the break of movie shooting, CNN press conferences or some TV talkshows. I choose some evidences from these sources because they tend to be more reliable & accurate (as it is more difficult to make up). The closeness may reflect one of the relational formation factors, which is proximity. According to the concept of interpersonal communication, proximity may predispose one to relationship with another that he/she always hangs around with or shares the same space with. Therefore, the fact that Dan and Emma mostly seen hang around or stand close with one another shows that they have a greater likelihood of becoming close friends (or perhaps lovers…)

In summary, I found that both Dyadic primacy and proximity best described both Dan and Emma’s relationship. We may judge how close their relationship based on these two interpersonal communication factors.. Or perhaps if you guys have differing or additional perspectives, feel free to add on….

Audi R8 car ads

Listen to how the advertiser use the song choice..

Watch on how the video plays slowly to emphasize the dramatic effect of the car making process..

Both audio and visual effect illustrate two definitions of non-verbal communication; they are the sender approach and receiver-based approach to non-verbal communication. The ads suggests that non-verbal communication occurs when it intentionally communicates using symbolic non-verbal cues, plus it also suggests that non-verbal communication only occurs when a receiver assigns meaning to it and thus intrepreting it.

In conclusion, an ads can convey different meaning to different people and more importantly different advertiser may assign different meaning to his/her advertisement.

Toyota amuzzing advertisement!

This video suggests that nonverbal communication accentuates the part of verbal message… The nonverbal cues draws our attention to a particular part of a verbal message. Check out how the whole video actually describe the verbal message “human touch” effectively..

My 1st COM 101 blog..

There are some interesting aspects of communication perspectives that were discussed in lecture 2.Communication perspectives can take in several forms, such as the psychological perspective that is looking at an individual’s factors contributing to communication while social constructionists’ perspective emphasizes on symbolic factors, cognitive customs, shared roles & rules and cultural traditions shape communication. Subsequently, pragmatic perspective draws attention to communication & individual patterns and lastly, cultural perspective believes that any given culture is a web of interconnected acts of communication. Looking at all of these factors, I believe that each one of the factors is essential to contribute to an effective communication. It is wise to look at four of them as interconnected. Only when one is considering the four factors as a whole therefore a successful communication may be achieved. The illustration is as followed: It is the 1st day of new semester. With a burst of energy and enthusiasm, Derek is ready for the new semester’s syllabus, new challenges, new instructors and most importantly, new classmates. It was still early in the morning when he reached the school. As he entered his new class, he saw a sweet, feminine girl with a bright pink headdress sitting at the front row. She looked up upon hearing the cracking sound of door handle being turned, but after she saw Derek, she continued to progress in her reading. Ignoring her action, Derek smiled and greeted her warmly as he entered the class and spontaneously reaching out his right hand to introduce himself. As Derek is aware of, such gesture is a perfectly normal thing to do when 2 strangers meet at the 1st time. However, to his surprised, the Muslim girl responded with a shrug in her shoulders “I’m Rokiah, nice to meet you”. Her reluctance to respond to his handshake confuses Derek. Let’s analyze the above situation. Derek probably only possessed social perspective when trying to communicate with Rokiah, because he thinks that it is perfectly acceptable to greet and give a handshake when meeting a stranger for the 1^st time. However, he forgot to consider the individual and cultural factor as such that for someone who is brought up in a conservative Muslim environment, Rokiah is unfamiliar with his social code and she is not supposed to have physical contact with men unless her own family members. Furthermore, Derek has also ignored the pragmatic approach as he did not notice Rokiah’s body language pattern after seeing him entering the class. In this case, Derek might have the first sour impression with Rokiah by thinking that Rokiah is an unfriendly classmate. In conclusion, miscommunication might easily occur to someone who does not understand and consider all of the four communication perspectives. One should not expect to establish an effective and efficient communication only with one or few of the perspectives. Should Derek and Rokiah understand the four perspectives well and use them as a whole, they should achieve a better understanding of each other.

My Communication perspective

There are some interesting aspects of communication perspectives that were discussed in lecture 2 & 3.Communication perspectives can take in several forms, such as the psychological perspective that is looking at an individual’s factors contributing to communication while social constructionists’ perspective emphasizes on symbolic factors, cognitive customs, shared roles & rules and cultural traditions shape communication. Subsequently, pragmatic perspective draws attention to communication & individual patterns and lastly, cultural perspective believes that any given culture is a web of interconnected acts of communication. Looking at all of these factors, I believe that each one of the factors is essential to contribute to an effective communication. It is wise to look at four of them as interconnected. Only when one is considering the four factors as a whole therefore a successful communication may be achieved. The illustration is as followed: It is the 1st day of new semester. With a burst of energy and enthusiasm, Derek is ready for the new semester’s syllabus, new challenges, new instructors and most importantly, new classmates. It was still early in the morning when he reached the school. As he entered his new class, he saw a sweet, feminine girl with a bright pink headdress sitting at the front row. She looked up upon hearing the cracking sound of door handle being turned, but after she saw Derek, she continued to progress in her reading. Ignoring her action, Derek smiled and greeted her warmly as he entered the class and spontaneously reaching out his right hand to introduce himself. As Derek is aware of, such gesture is a perfectly normal thing to do when 2 strangers meet at the 1st time. However, to his surprised, the Muslim girl responded with a shrug in her shoulders “I’m Rokiah, nice to meet you”. Her reluctance to respond to his handshake confuses Derek. Let’s analyze the above situation. Derek probably only possessed social perspective when trying to communicate with Rokiah, because he thinks that it is perfectly acceptable to greet and give a handshake when meeting a stranger for the 1^st time. However, he forgot to consider the individual and cultural factor as such that for someone who is brought up in a conservative Muslim environment, Rokiah is unfamiliar with his social code and she is not supposed to have physical contact with men unless her own family members. Furthermore, Derek has also ignored the pragmatic approach as he did not notice Rokiah’s body language pattern after seeing him entering the class. In this case, Derek might have the first sour impression with Rokiah by thinking that Rokiah is an unfriendly classmate. In conclusion, miscommunication might easily occur to someone who does not understand and consider all of the four communication perspectives. One should not expect to establish an effective and efficient communication only with one or few of the perspectives. Should Derek and Rokiah understand the four perspectives well and use them as a whole, they should achieve a better understanding of each other.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!