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Intercultural Spr2006 Sess28

Announcement

Lambda Pi Eta, the National Communications Honor Society, is sponsoring a Communications Community Networking Night on Thursday, May 11 at 6:00PM in Lanigan 104. Free Pizza. Real dirt on the professors in the department.

Communicating in Borderlands: Intercultural Communication

• The immigrant experience
• Adoption and cross cultural relationships

Discuss and optimize take-home final

due at 2:00 on Thursday, May 18. I will return your paper when you hand me your exam. We'll have a little party.

1. Select a culture other than your own. The culture you used in your papers will be fine in most cases, but any culture will do. How would you be different as a person if you were born and raised in that culture? Why would you be different?
2. You are an intercultural consultant. A company that has a very successful product in the United States has decided to market the product in Japan. They have hired you to help them understand how they should market their product there. What advice would you give them about how they should market their product? Should they market it differently in Japan? Explain why or why not. What issues should they research before making final decisions about their marketing campaign.
3. Your employer asks you to move to Italy for three years to manage the companies operations there. Discuss the changes you are likely to experience while you are living in Italy and the process through which you are likely to experience them.
4. While traveling in the southwest desert you encounter a rock on which pictures of animals are drawn. Discuss these pictures (it doesn't matter exactly what they are) from the perspective of semiotics. What is the signifier? What is the signified? Where does the meaning of these pictures reside? Do they mean the same thing to you that they meant to the people who drew them? Why or why not? What assumptions have you made in answering this question?
5. A new technology is developed that enables reliable short distance teleporting (e.g. stepping through a door and immediately stepping out of another one fifty miles away). What kinds of changes might occur in a culture as a result of this technology? How will people adapt to it? How would structuration matter to these changes?
6. The SETI@Home project detects a reliable single from many light years away that appears to be a message from an alien civilization. What kinds of things will we likely need to know in order to understand the message? What kinds of attributions are people likely to make about the culture that sent the message? Why?
7. After joining the peace corp you are assigned to work in a village in Kenya. What kinds of stereotypes are people there likely to have about you? How do stereotypes affect their perception of you and your culture?

Issues

• Individualist cultures
• Variations in cultural norms
• Culture as social construction
  • Structuration
• Self as social construction

An alternate conception of the Intercultural Communication Course

• Organize the course around types of media and genre as expressed in the Intercultural context
• Package the core Intercultural concepts
  1. the importance of experience and culture based worldview
  2. the differentiation of individualist and collectivist cultures
• through different kinds of media
  • Use more film in class
• The types
  1. Interperonal Media
  2. Broadcast Media
  3. Group Media
  4. Manufactured Media, including Production Media
  5. Community Media, including Educational, Performance, and Deliberative Media
  6. Art Media
• The issues
  1. Cultural Media
     • the Definition of Self
     • the Perception of Other
     • the Nature of Language and Meaning
  2. Cultural Genre
     • the effects of culture on expression within a medium
       • individualism/collectivism
       • other dimensions
     • rules, roles, and rituals
  3. Cultural and Intercultural relationships
     • with variations of relationship sorted by level of medium
       1. Dyadic with Interpersonal (Friends, Intimates)
       2. Systemic with Mass
       3. Group
       4. Subculture with Manufactured
       5. Community
       6. Individual with Art
     • Relationships within Culture
     • Relationships between Cultures
     • Relationships across Cultures
     • The Alternate Culture Alternative
  4. Theoretical Perspectives
     • Phenomonology with Interpersonal
     • Semiotics and Critical with Mass
     • Probably just these three with recurrance as appropriate
     • Early reference to medium as message, but with rapid segue to the message of culture.
• What do you think