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Relationships And Communities Session Two

Understanding Interpersonal Communication

Stewart, p. 14-42, 45-51

• Interpersonal Communication is a means by which:
  • We create (negotiate, discover, become) ourselves
  • We construct meaning together
  • We maintain relationships
  • We build, manage, and are socialized into communities, cultures, and societies
  • We exert some level of control on the future
  • We make things "common"

• Some Models of Communication:

An Interactive Model:

A Transactional Model:

A Unified Model of Communication:

• Our goals in interpersonal communication include:
  • To get our ideas across
    • Turn ideas into words that other people will interpret correctly
  • To influence people
  • To understand what others are telling us
  • To feel like we are not alone
• We cannot not communicate
  • Communication is continuous, complex, and collaborative
  • It includes both intentional verbal and non-verbal messages and unintentional behavior
• Our communication overcomes time, space, and scale. Different means of communication provide differing variations on time, space, and scale
• Out messages and our understanding of messages is bounded by our culture.
  • Different groups of people will negotiate different representations of meanings and sometimes different meanings.*Every time we communicate with someone we are negotiating both the relationship and our identity.
  • every relationship is unique
  • Who we are changes for different people
• Conversation is the most fundamental thing that people do.
• It is the first thing we do (we don't know it at the time)
  • It is one of the oldest collaborative behaviors that can be found in the history of our ancestors
  • We spend more time communicating interpersonally than anything else
• Conversation is a simultaneous act of remembering the past, interpreting the present, and imagining the future.
  • The past provides context that may radically change our interpretation of things
  • The present is what we are saying or hearing
  • The future is what we plan to say next and when we expect to be able to say it.
  • Note that choice is inherent to all three. We decide what meanings need to be communicated, how we can communicate them, what things mean, how important it is to listen, and how important it is to talk. "What can I help to happen next?"

RelationshipsAndCommunitiesSessionThree