A final thought!

One concept from this chapter which I felt needed further discussion was that of Group Communication. If you think of your daily routine, communication is inherently Group Communication. Whether it be your family, roommates, or colleagues, you are almost always engaged in some sort of Group Communication. Therefore it is important to know and understand the rules and relationships that go along with Group Communication. Table 7.1 in the Trenholm book highlights the Characteristics of Groups and was a great resource to look at what constitutes a group, how they form and how they behave. What is most important, I believe, is to understand the shared behavioral standards of the different groups you are a part of. For example, the way in which most friends speak to each other would most likely not translate to how you would speak to your parents. For this reason, our speech behavior changes automatically from group to group, most of the time without conscious effort. In this way, by taking the time to study Group Communication and our own behavioral patterns within our personal groups, we can better understand how to adapt to the ever-changing environments.  

A list of bests about this class!

The biggest thing I have learned through this class honestly, is how a virtual class is run. Since many of the concepts I have previously studied at Cal Poly, the refresher was very helpful and interesting, however the new territory I encountered was the virtual environment of the class. Since I have never taken an online course before, it was very different for me to become accustomed to taking tests and communicating with the professor and fellow classmates exclusively online. For this reason, I found it was useful to include as much detail in my posts as possible since this was basically the only interpretation my classmates and teacher would have of me. In a way this aspect was also my least favorite thing about the class.  Though the online nature made the course convenient since I am a full-time employee, I still prefer the classroom environment. With that being said, I thought the class was very well structured, the professor stayed in constant communication with her students via email and her blog. The only thing I would change, if possible, would be to have a classroom meeting at least once a week where personal interaction could be fostered.

Language and Culture

One concept that I found exceedingly interesting in this class was that of Language and Communication. As I discussed in a post back in June, the relationship between language, communication and even cultural or social constructs is fascinating especially given my areas of interest and minors in Spanish and Latin American Studies. The way in which a culture identifies with a language, helps to shape the culture and vice versa. The immersion of language and culture in the way in which we communicate is specific to each culture and helps distinguish cultures from one another. For this reason, my interest is spiked whenever the three are combined: language, culture and communication. As we read in the Trenholm text, “a concept that is central to the language of one culture may be translated into another language only with difficulty,” (Trenholm, p.337) and therefore makes the study of these differences even more interesting. As we have learned from the text, and my own personal experiences from studying abroad, part of the communication process is learning these language and cultural differences, and being able to appreciate the differences.

Models

An interesting idea discussed in Chapter 2 of Trenholm is that of the model and how it can sometimes give us a skewed perception of reality instead of a true likeness. Though tempting, I will not go into the “model” debate in the fashion sense, but rather use an example that recently came up from work. We are to move to a new office in November and this past Monday, our CEO came to visit our office from Taiwan. While here, our CEO was only shown a model of our new office since he couldn’t make the trip to go and see it in person. Immediately he took issue with the front entrance of the model, due to the fact we will be sharing our reception area with another company. In this way, the representation we had created for our CEO brought about a miscommunication that caused controversy within our company. Luckily we were able to rearrange our plans and take our CEO to see the new office in person and completely resolve the issue, however I thought the books description of the miscommunications which can arise from models was valid and highly relevant to my work.

The games we play

After reading in the text about the pragmatic perspective, it makes sense to think of communication as, “a system of interlocking, interdependent behaviors that become patterned over time,” however I feel that to apply this concept, cultural and environmental differences must be accounted for to generalize to all communication contexts. For those who have grown up, or assimilated to cultural norms can will have assumed communication norms which dictate a pattern of conversation. It gets a bit tricky to generalize this idea, since so many communication circumstances can arise between all the possible situations you might encounter. For example, my family is a very loud, over-bearing Italian(ish) family which has its own set of communication norms; just like in a game we all know and understand the rules of communication and therefore we all know how to play the “game”. However, these rules that we’ve established that work particularly for my family cannot, and maybe should not, be generalized to other families, or communication situations. For this reason, it would be like a gymnast trying to play a game of golf at the US Open-not nearly the same rules, skill sets or scoring system.

Siesta

When trying to think of examples of a social construction, the first that came to my mind was of a Spanish siesta. When I was living in Barcelona, every afternoon from anytime between 2-6pm, the busy streets would calm down, store fronts would close up, and life literally stood still. During this time, nothing was scheduled-no class, no meetings, nothing mandatory was desired of you by the Spanish. Instead they invited you to relax in the afternoon with a siesta, or afternoon nap, or any other kind of leisurely activity. Though most people don’t take the entire afternoon off every day, there is no scheduled time for this “siesta”. Offices close on a whim, when the manager feels like leaving, so business hours are never posted on store fronts and it’s always TBD. This lifestyle, and idea of a siesta, is a way of living life that doesn’t exist in American culture. We have a very rigid idea of time and scheduling, especially in the business world; something the Spanish could never adhere to. For this reason, I love living in Barcelona for the 5, almost 6 months I was there. Every afternoon, I was able to be free from school and walk around the city, enjoying friends, sights and more often than not, wine or sangria. In a sense the Spanish have a much more open and free interpretation on how to live life, and taught me how to slow down. Deadlines and schedules were replaced with meaningful conversations and friendships which understood delayed deadlines and worked around schedules instead of dictating them. It is hard to say which culture has a happier lifestyle, but one thing I know for sure is I do sincerely miss my afternoon siesta.

Here's a glimpse at what I would find on my afternoon explorations in Spain when most were taking a siesta:

Suvery's

One interesting topic from Chapter 13 that invades my daily life, is Surveying. At work, as an HR Specialist, I often create, implement and disseminate surveys to my company in an attempt to receive object and honest feedback to better serve my company. The interesting I have learned from creating surveys for my company, is how hard it actually is to write a good survey, and also, how hard it is to get a good response from that survey. Since we do not want to force people to take our surveys (that would create a bias) we normally list the surveys in the lunchroom or in our company-wide newsletter, using free sites such as SurveyMonkey. The problem herein lies with response rate. Since we are such a small company, even if half of our employees respond, to generalize the date to all employees would be hard to do. Also, when writing a survey about health and nutrition (I’m about to launch a Fitness Campaign at work) for the company, it is difficult to come up with questions that are not leading or manipulative to compile the information I wish in order to shape the Fitness Campaign in the direction I want. In addition, with such a sensitive topic, it was difficult to write questions which would not cross boundaries at work, such as weight and exercise, which in other settings would be appropriate. For this reason, the section in Chapter 13 on survey research was valuable and interesting to read since it pertains to what I do at work.