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?