Angel R.

Thoughts on Chapters 3, 9 & 10

Chapter 3 (intercultural communication) Review

The group did a really good job to conveys this idea to us, with good slides, videos and short (but good) presentations, However I would have made more emphasis on how a good intercultural communication affects us, after all if we communicated better the chances to create a better and more develop world would be astonishing. But, of the presentation, what cliqued and what not?

Intercultural communication is referred by Samovar, Porter & McDaniel as “the interactions that occur between people whose cultures are so different that communication between them is challenging” and although that statement is completely true, I differ in the sense that, at least from my personal viewpoint, all communication is a challenging act, not only the intercultural type of communication. You may ask “How would somebody that’s in the same culture as you don’t understand what you’re saying” and that’s quite easy and hard at the same time to respond. It’s easy to answer because we all have come across a time where we had expressed ourselves in a way that our audience didn’t catch very well, and it’s hard at the same time since we “have” a dictionary, a full book made with the intention to explicitly eradicate these kinds of misunderstandings.

Moving on, if expressing ourselves to someone in our same culture is hard on itself, how could we communicate effectively with someone who culture heavily differs from ours? to answer this we need to know first a thing or two about Dominant cultures, Co-cultures & Cultural identity. A Dominant culture is the leaned system of norms held by the majority of people in a society, a good example is the US, the Us is one of (if not the most) dominant culture in the whole world, in almost every place on earth we could find the values that rule the US and their stereotypes, and not only you can find it everywhere, but it is also well defined. But what happens when a majority of people living in a society doesn’t rely on one but on two different cultures? Well, then we got a Co-culture type of society, where the values of not one but two culture mix up to create a new standard way of thinking. But the majority of a society does not mean everyone, and for those special cases is where cultural identity comes, cultural identity is the way that oneself thinks based on how closely we associate ourselves with the cultures near us.

And so, to answer the question of how to communicate effectively the most important aspect to look at would be to whom the message to is, if you are trying to express to someone whose culture is stricter and rigid don’t try to convey an open and excited message, try to be the most concise and firm as possible, and obviously the other way around to other types of cultures.

Now, do I think that everything that I mentioned above was fully explain and developed through the whole presentation? Of course, I do! Not only they managed to explain this (and more) in a somewhat fun way, but they made it so that the information would last longer on the audience, this was a really good group!

Chapter 9 (Communicating in groups)Review

We all form part of a group, it could be a familiar, social or even virtual group, but what all of these have in similar is that the more communication there is between the members, the more effective the group would be. This group explained this in a bit of a more casual way, but what matters is that the information was delivered correctly and in a not so boring fashion.

Even thought this was the messiest group (the whole presentation took place in about 3 different days) the ideas that they discussed were well organized. Throughout the presentation there were various videos that portrayed in detail what it is needed to make a good and effective group, not only in a professional and lucrative way, but also in a more personal and social manner. One of the best things this group did was the last video, for me it was the cherry on top of all the groups, it was a weird video of a series of human-like being trying to cross a broken bridge with only cooperation and some elbow grease, this video saved the group and all the presentations from the hands of what’s college approved or professional, but the worse part is that it was the last thing I can remember from the presentation, I’m not saying that the presentation was useless, is just that the pure bizarre vibe that came from that video will stay with me more than almost anything I have learned, it was truly a bizarre video and a bizarre experience.

Chapter 10 Review

Leadership, my groups subject and one subject that I think should be discussed more. But what can I say about the presentation? Well, from an inside point of view it was kind of a beautiful mess, everyone started with different themes, ideas, ways to talk about the topic and more! But at the last minute we tried (with success) to make it all look somewhat well organized and clean, for example, I tried to do a more vanilla presentation with just photos and a good background, like almost everyone in the group, but there was someone that was trying to express his/hers love to Halloween by posting a dark background with dark clouds and such, I would be lying if I told you I didn’t like this unique type of slide, In fact, If this person tried and used his/hers leadership skills to convince us to do it, I would no questions ask. But leadership wasn’t all this group was about, we talked about problem solving as well, and to surprise to me it was well explained, or at least it was well explained to me.

To summarize all,  I think we all did a great job, the videos, the explanations, the slides, I truly think that for people that only had strangers and a week or least as a deadline these were pretty good presentations.