Culture Shock

The lecture Adriane Stoner gave to the class about her research on studying abroad and the use of new technology was interesting. I want to study abroad but probably will never get the chance to but I have traveled and been away from home for almost a month except I was with my family. We traveled through Europe. Even thought I was with my family and not staying in the same places for very long I did go through a little culture shock on that trip. I went with my aunt, uncle, cousins and sister. So having them with me to not lose all communication helped me out and looking back on it now I guess I had it pretty good. The cultural shock came from how I was treated. Everywhere we went, especially in Croatia, they treated us differently because they could tell that I was American. My cousins and I actually got kicked out of a couple stores in Croatia after walking in and saying hello. Maybe they were just having a bad day or they had some pretty bad stereotypes against Americans and were not going to change it, and I am also pretty confident it is not a rude thing to do anywhere. So dealing with that on top of the language barrier times were getting a little weird. That was right around two weeks of being away from home and the Honeymoon phase of my trip definitely kick started the whole shock of being away from home.

Even though the new media of the time was not that far off from where it is now with Facebook and cell phones, I did not take advantage of them and started missing my parents and friends pretty fast. I have friends that studied abroad so I asked them about their travels. They both told me they were good for about a month and a half to two months and then they started to get home sick and the culture shock set in pretty hard. They both told me they would do it all over again if they had the chance because of all the benefits that came along with it. The things they learned, the people they met, the opportunities they had that many of the people they know did not, and they opportunities it has provided them and the doors it has opened for them in the future. I wish I had the opportunities and means to go through with studying abroad but I guess I will have to settle for short vacations. 

Professor Barnhurst

Professor Barnhurst’s lecture is the most interesting lecture to me because the fact that it applies to everyone on an everyday basis no matter whom you are or where you are from. We are always telling stories and I have never really noticed all of these patterns.

Professor Barnhurst led off his lecture with an exercise called speed narrating where you tell a story for one minute about something important that happened recently to a partner taking notes on the story. Then switch and repeat. Two groups then debrief compare notes and look for patterns from the stories. Some patterns found were the stories were not very detailed, about school or family and the notes were short among others.

After the exercise professor Barnhurst informed everyone of the recurring pattern that happens with storytelling. It always starts with an abstract like, “that reminds me,” to let people know that you are going to start telling a story. The abstract leads into the setting to get the other person to understand the who, what, where. The complicating action then tells what you thought about what happened and what mindset you are in. after telling what happened comes the resolution or the response. The more important part of what always happens is the interpretation. This is because the interpretation happens throughout the story. How someone starts the story can trigger a response of “here we go again” and can also change throughout the story.

The storytelling outline can be compared to the basic model of communication and more so the in depth Schramm’s model of communication. With the encoder sending the message to the decoder who interprets what was heard and responds and continues in this cycle.

The interpretation of the story can also be compared to the class topic of perception. The third step in perception, interpretation, attaches meaning to what is being heard and also plays into the cultural differences. This also connects to code switching where you shift to different styles or dialects in order to match the communication style of the other person. For example I will tell my mom a story a different way than I would my friends and even my sister. By code switching the interpretation and also the judgment will change by your wording and how you are telling the story.

I wish I could get more into the judgment and the difference between judgment and interpretation but professor Barnhurst’s lecture cutoff early. It is too bad because I was really getting into what he was saying. 

Prof. Rojecki

The lecture “The Tea Party and the Politics if Insecurity” given my professor Rojecki. In the lecture he covers topics that include globalization, the Tea Party movement, and the negligence of the American youth to keep up with what is going on in the world, especially with our government.

In the beginning of the lecture he starts out by asking the class what their worries are for after graduating which was answered by the majority by the job market. This lead into the fact that people, especially the youth, are not interested in what is going on. The most news that is being read by the youth sadly is what happened to Justin Bieber today and not what is actually important. This makes me think of the topic we talked about in class about the cultural gatekeepers because that is what people are used to seeing now instead of the real life situations. The students said they do not follow politics and the news because it is stressful and gives them anxiety. This leads into professor Rojecki’s research, over 2/3 of the Americans feel pessimistic about the future of our country. This has a lot to do with globalization, mostly losing jobs to China. His example was the Apple products, which the job of making the products were outsourced to china which is making out economy weaker.  

Another point that was made is most people get their information from someone else instead of getting it from the source. When this happens people put their own twist on things because of their beliefs and how they understood what they heard. I am guilty of this also because I get most of my information from my father who does keep up to date with the current affairs. One news network that does this is FOX, which has had a ratings boost of 50 percent over the last ten years, compared to others like CNN which stayed about the same. What is happening when you do this is framing and salience, making one piece of information more meaningful to the audience. This relates to the exercise we did in class about the rat biting the baby. Depending on whom you asked or what news paper you read you got a totally different story. In the issue of the housing crisis, the Tea Party thought it was the peoples fault that were not able to pay back the “ninja” loans that they were given by the banks. Others think it was the banks fault. So depending who you ask, some parts of the story will be more salient to make you think how they think or how they want you to think.

Peter D.

The lecture I chose to watch was Dr. Steve Jones’s lecture on the evolution of how information is and has been spread. I knew before this lecture that the internet has changed how everything was done before its creation, but I guess I have just not thought about how fast it has changed. There was a crazy graph explaining how news and messages come into our homes and you could barley ready it. Dr. Jones explained about his research project that is ongoing that is recording the use of internet in peoples’ lives. This shows me how much I am taking for granted I was not born about ten years earlier, for the fact that I most likely would not have internet. I knew it before from hearing all the stories from my parents and from class how things have changed but I think listening to the lecture and seeing the numbers really hit home, and it was only ten years ago. I was also unaware of the type of technology that UIC has on campus. It blew my mind that the computers of tomorrow are being developed on campus. With him talking about the avatars that are becoming possible it made me think of how it would work. He brought up a couple valid points that need to be worked out like the time differences in the world, but once again things are going to be changing. Every single type of communication will be changed; inter personal, inter cultural, interviewing, small-group, public, organizational, and mass communication will again all be changed. It will be crazy to have someone standing in front of me that is actually on the other side of the world. With the type of 3-D technology that was brought up, there is no saying what can be done. If there is someone away at war or on business they can still be there for the birth of their child. They can be home and also have a job in china or be giving lectures in different places at the same time. That covers all of the different types of communications. This will also affect people’s non-verbal codes. They might be more comfortable around people and change their proxemics and territoriality. The new technology will for sure change their hapics and olfactics. There will be no smell and there will also not be any touching so it will affect the non-verbal codes of the ones using the new technology.