Professor Stoner's Lecture

Professor Stoner’s lecture was about adjusting to living in a new place.  This could be a trip to a foreign country or even just going up state for your first semester of college.  She told us that one of her key interests that she focuses on while conducting studies is finding two different elements of a subject, idea, or problem, and finding the relationship between the two.  With this said, she discussed studying abroad and asked the class what we thought some of the benefits of studying abroad were.  We offered answers such as “It teaches valuable lessons about other people and the cultures they are a part of,” and “It looks good on a resume.”  Then she introduced the term “new media” and asked if we knew what it meant.  I raised my hand and answered that new media are new technologies like cell phones and the internet, as the name implied.  After this, she explored the relationship between studying abroad and new media.  She said that she thinks that new media makes the study abroad experience less meaningful in a way, because new media is keeping people constantly in touch with their family and friends from back home which is taking away from their learning of the new culture they are a part of.  The last part of her lecture that I took notes on was the cultural adjustment curve.  The cultural adjustment curve is a representation of how much comfort a person experiences after entering a new culture over time.  The first part of the curve is the honeymoon, where enjoyment is pretty high for the first couple of months, but over time, the curve dips extremely low.  This part of the curve is known as culture shock.  Then, the curve begins to go back up, through the adjustment stage, and eventually to the mastery stage, which takes a year or two to reach. 

Studying abroad, or even visiting a city that you’ve never been to for a few days can produce this same curve, sometimes at a smaller scale though.  Some of the things that connect Professor Stoner’s guest lecture to the other concepts we’ve learned in class are our discussion of language and dialect.  As you travel to different places, the common languages, accents, and dialects change, which can take some getting used to.  Also, we discussed non-verbal cues.  Non-verbal cues can also vary quite significantly from culture to culture.  What might mean “nice job” (thumbs up) here, can mean something totally offensive in other cultures, for example.  Also, stereotypes and controlled prejudice can come into play when entering new cultures.  It is ok to have your own opinion about certain people, but when you overgeneralize too much, or let these generalizations cause you to treat someone negatively, that is where problems can occur.  Also, the cultural adjustment curve can relate closely to cognitive load and cognitive dissonance.  Upon entering a new place, people experience the honeymoon stage.  This stage can be a result of all of the new things they are seeing, without actually knowing much about them.  Simply seeing a new city can be a wonderful experience, but over time, it becomes necessary to learn how to act in these cultures.  If the new culture is very different from the one you’re used to, this can cause a lot of cognitive dissonance, which can be very stressful, and can lead to culture shock.

Professor Meraz and Gender in Computer Science

In professor Meraz’s guest lecture, she discusses inequalities for women in the computer science field.

She starts her lecture with some food for thought about the idea of gender.  She says that no men notice gender until a woman steps into the room.   This is just a way of saying that gender is topic of concern when people of different genders are placed together, but when they are segregated, neither gender really thinks about it.  This idea relates to “cognitive dissonance,” because it shows that when people are with peers of the same gender, they are generally more relaxed, but when someone from another gender arrives, they dedicate thought to the differences they have between each other, which can sometimes be hard to understand completely.  She then introduces the term “the incredible shrinking pipeline”, which is used to describe the ever shrinking number of women in the computer science field.  Professor Meraz then explains that computers are generally perceived as a “boy toy”.  Diner Dash is a video game she shows the class.  It’s a game where the main character is a waitress and the objective of the game revolves around multi-tasking for the restaurant.  She uses this game to point out that games for women tend to revolve around “work”, while games for men or more "leisurely".  I disagree with this, because male games can be just as stressful and demanding as female games, even if the objectives are different.

The next subject in her lecture is blogging, and how women are differentiated here as well.  She gives reasoning from both women’s and men’s point of view for how and why this is, and then she gives factual reasons.  Some women believe their blogs only receive male attention if the girls talk about sex or post revealing pictures, while some men say that women are actually at an advantage, because guys tend to favor a women’s post over a men’s, even if the content is very similar.  This discussion is then tied into political blogging, and some of the women who have been successful at it.  Meraz then explains that the real reason most women in the field are only designers, and not programmers or other high-ranking positions, is because men dominate the field, and rarely invite women to hold these positions.  One explanation she offers is because men think women are too focused on feelings, and not firm enough in their opinions.  This is an example of stereotyping.  This also brings questions about ethics.  Is it ethical to exclude women from positions like these? Probably not…  Finally, she concludes by saying that one of the reasons she covered these topics is to show that sexism is quite prevalent on the internet.

Gender is an example of a diffuse status.  This whole lecture was a discussion about what effects the diffuse status of women has on computer science.  Apparently, these effects are very great.

Professor Barnhurst's Lecture

Professor Barnhurst’s guest lecture was about storytelling and some of the elements of it.  The lecture begins with an activity.  He first tells the students to get into pairs and tell each other the most recent story of a pivotal or important moment in their life.  While they do this, they take notes about each other’s stories.  After this, Professor Barnhurst tells every group to find another group to team up with and make a group of four.  In these groups of four, they share their stories again, observe their notes, and try to find patterns or consistencies between all four stories.  Some of the similarities that students found were that they tended to be brief stories with not very much detail, they tended to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why, and they tended to tie their stories into what happened in the future.

From here, the professor starts to explain the elements of storytelling.  He introduces a theorist named Lebob (or at least that’s what it sounded like) and explained some of his findings about storytelling.  He claims that before every story, there is an announcement that a story is about to be told, because if there wasn’t, people would be caught off guard and confused about what the speaker is talking about.  This kind of relates to “code switching” from our textbook, a term that describes when people use different kinds of communication styles to get a desired response from someone.  Introducing and beginning a story is a form of code switching.  The next part of the story is the “complicating action”, or the problem.  As we all know, the problems are what creates a story, because it is something that must be resolved.  Even in the studies that we have read for this class, they begin by introducing what they set out to learn from their experiments, so this is a form of introducing the “complicating action.”  Next comes the response to the problem, and the resolution of the story.  Among all of these elements, he placed another element into its own category; interpretation.  Interpretation takes place during every part of the story from the listener’s perspective, so it isn’t in a specific part of the order of the story.  Interpretation relates to what we learned in our own class because we are constantly trying to interpret the actions of others, through their intentional, unintentional, verbal, and non-verbal cues.

Finally, he mentions judgment, but this is when the video cuts off.  I wonder how the lecture actually ended because the beginning was pretty interesting, but I guess I’ll never know.  I assume that he would say that judgment is an accumulation of all of the interpretations of the story put together at the end.  Storytelling is one of my favorite ways of communicating, so it’s a shame the video was messed up.

Andrew Rojecki's lecture

I chose to watch the video of Andrew Rojecki’s lecture.  The subject of his lecture was political communication, and some of the topics he discussed were globalization, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and media’s role on all of this.  To begin the lecture, he asked what the students were worried about after college.  The obvious answer most of them had was finding a job.  He then asked how well and through what sources they followed politics and asked if they thought that politics affected their chances of getting jobs out of college.  Most students seemed rather indifferent about politics, but Mr. Rojecki went on to explain that politics are very important to everyone that lives in this country and that it is very easy to be misled by the politicians that supposedly represent us.  As the lecture went on, he shared his views about how he thought the Tea Partiers are people that still believe in segregation, and he explained that since the 70s, liberals have become more fragmented, while conservatives remained united.

The media’s role of our political views is related to what we’ve learned in class in a couple different ways.  For one, we discussed the Acta Diurna, which is essentially the earliest newspaper.  Also, the media relates to the framing activity that we did in class.  As we learned from the activity, different sources about the same story can lead people to notice certain facts more than others.  For instance, Fox news might say that drug crimes are increasing because of irresponsible parents, but other sources would probably say that drug crimes are a result of drug laws.  News media and other sources are also able to convey stories that can possibly reinforce stereotypes depending on how they report stories.  Those who choose what stories to share, and how they are reported have a lot of “power”, because they are able to exert control through things that others don’t have.

All of the issues regarding the media and the general public bring up questions about ethics.  Journalists and other employees of news agencies constantly face questions of what is ethically and morally right.  Sometimes, things that some people might like can do harm to others.  For instance, the decision about whether or not to include the picture of the Muhammad cartoon that many Muslims found offensive can be argued in either direction; putting the picture on the paper will inform the most people of the controversy, but could cause violent outbreaks.  On the other hand, not including the picture can be seen by some as an act that is unpatriotic and cowardly for not utilizing their freedom of the press to the fullest.

Personally, I believe that many media that report the news do a bad job of reporting the stories and facts that are truly pertinent to our country’s problems.