MediaSpace Wiki

Intercultural Spr2006 Sess02

Index card assignment due today

What is your cultural background. No one in this country is just an American. What is your cultural background? List as many different cultural backgrounds as you need to be reasonably complete. Write your answer on one side of a 3x5 index card.

Reading due today

Chapter 1 of IC in Context and Chapter 9 of Readings in IC. Bring two questions to class based on the readings. Write your questions on one side of a 3x5 index card.

Notice

On rechecking the grading criteria I discovered that the class grade only added up to 90 points. I have updated the syllabus to correct this problem. Papers are now with 50% of your grade. Participation is now worth 15% of your grade.

Intercultural Communication: Imperatives and Change

Readings

• IC In Context, c. 1;
• Readings In IC, c. 9

Agenda

• Introductions around class
• Discuss Baldwin Article as a class
• Discuss Index Card Assignments in groups
• Discuss Group Discussions as a class
• Overview the Imperatives
• Questions

• Discussion of Baldwin article
  • What do we learn about the author's culture?
  • What do we learn about the culture he is living in?
  • What does the reading tell us about the role of
    • self-awareness in intercultural interaction?
    • history in intercultural interaction? Are people trapped in history? Is history trapped in them?
    • power in intercultural interaction?
  • Think Star Trek

• The value of studying intercultural communication
  1. The reality of our society (the Demographic imperative)
     • We live in a multicultural society
       • More so than any other society on the planet
     • And it is becoming more so
       • Immigration continues
       • Our transportation culture
       • Affirmative action
     • We have a choice
       • To be insular (or nativist)
       • Or to be tolerant, even encouraging, of difference
     • Our society has long been characterized as a melting pot
  2. The reality of who we are and our choices (the Self-Awareness imperative)
     • It doesn't always seem like we live in a multicultural society
     • Many of us grow up in communities where everyone is pretty similar to us
     • That creates perceptual biases
     • Its not that we try to be biased against people who seem different
     • Its that we are "programmed"
       • to recognize and feel comfortable with similarity
       • to recognize and feel uncomfortable with difference
     • Mirror neurons
       • Neurons that fire when we do something
       • And also fire when we see other people do that something
       • They create empathy
       • It is likely they also play a role in recognizing difference
     • Attribution
       • We make systematic errors in our thinking

If something goes	for us	for someone else
right	we credit ourselves (we're good)	we credit the situation (it wasn't our fault)
wrong	we credit the situation (they were lucky)	we credit them (its their fault)

• We don't always make these mistakes, but we often do
• These mistakes extend to how similar people are to us
  • We are more likely to treat people like us as an "us"
  • We are more likely to treat people who are different as a "them"
• When we know we make these mistakes we can adjust for them
1. The reality of our global economy (the economic imperative)
   • Companies increasingly operate across cultural and national borders
   • Understanding and accepting other cultures is important to success.
2. The reality of war (the Peace Imperative
   • War is somethings referred to as "negotiation by other means"
   • It may not always be avoidable
     • It takes two to maintain a peace
     • But it should certainly be an act of last resort
     • It doesn't matter who "wins" in war
     • Inevitably, everybody loses.
3. The reality of McLuhan's Global Village (the technology imperative)
   • Even before the Internet
     • Mass Media content was breaking down barriers between cultures
     • Global cultural events have long been routine in the mass media:
       • The Olympics
       • Global Celebrities
         • The Beatles
         • The Pope
         • Lance Armstrong
         • The President of the United States
         • American Movie and Television Stars
       • Large Scale Disasters
       • Amazing Accomplishments
         • Landing on the moon
   • The Internet Accelerates this Trend
     • We aren't just sharing common experiences
     • We are talking to each other about it
     • Using dozens of new Internet Media
   • We are, in an odd dialectic, making contact with people who are
     • very different than us in at least some ways
     • very similar to us in others (communities of interest)
   • There are challenges in this
     • "Reduced Cues", which is at least partly resolved through the use of emoticons
     • Identity Management (multiphrenia), which is always an issue (see Meyerowitz' "No Sense of Place"
       • but which is more of an issue when you are maintaining ten different Instant Messenger sessions in parallel.
4. The Ethical Imperative
   • We have a responsibility to, as much as possible, avoid harming others
   • Ethnocentrism is not a harm in and of itself, but it can lead to harms
     • War
     • Colonialism
     • Slavery ("The White Man's Burden")
   • This isn't an ethics class
     • But neither absolute values tolerance are ethical
   • The problems of ethics are usually at the boundaries of our values
     • And intercultural communication operates at those boundaries
   • Hence we will take a dialectical approach that assumes
     • that the extremes are usually wrong
     • And the boundaries are relative