21st Century Communication: Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Understanding 21st Century Communication

• Communication is an inevitable part of human interaction, expressing both thoughts and feelings verbally or non-verbally.
• The communication process involves meaning-making through a channel or medium, originating from the Latin "communicares," signifying to share or make ideas common.

The Components of the Communication Process

• Source: The sender who crafts the message such as an author, public speaker, or traffic enforcer.
• Message: The meaning shared between the sender and receiver, which can take various forms like poems, songs, essays, news articles, road signs, or symbols.
• Channel: The means by which a message is conveyed, such as a phone call or a letter; both sender and receiver are responsible for choosing the best channel.
• Receiver: The person who receives the transmitted message, expected to listen or read carefully, be aware of different senders, jot down information, provide responses, and ask questions.
• Feedback: Essential to confirm recipient understanding, and expressed in varied forms, such as written, spoken, or acted out responses.
• Environment: The place, feeling, mood, mindset, and condition of both sender and receiver, involving the physical set-up and space.
• Context: Involves the expectations of the sender and the receiver along with common or shared understanding through environmental signals.
• Interference: Also known as a barrier or block, that prevents effective communication from taking place.

Kinds of Interference

• Physiological barriers are thoughts that hamper the receiver's correct interpretation of the message.
• Physical barriers include competing stimuli, weather, climate, health, and ignorance of the medium.
• Linguistic and cultural barriers pertain to the language and its cultural environment; words may have different meanings across cultures.
• Mechanical barriers are raised by channels like cellphones and laptops that are used for communication.

The Nine Principles of Effective Communication

• Clarity: Clarity in communication makes it understandable, avoiding jargon, clichés, euphemisms, and doublespeak.
• Concreteness: Reduce misunderstandings with facts like research data and statistics, avoiding abstract words.
• Courtesy: Builds goodwill by being polite in approach and manner of addressing others
• Correctness: Avoiding mistakes in grammar as misuse can damage credibility.
• Consideration: Messages must be geared towards the audience, considering their profession, education, race, ethnicity, hobbies, interests, passions, advocacies, and age.
• Creativity: Involve crafting interesting messages through sentence structure and word choice.
• Conciseness: Achieving simplicity and directness, avoiding lengthy expressions that may confuse the recipient.
• Cultural Sensitivity: Recognizing the importance of empowering diverse cultures, lifestyles, and races.
• Captivating: Creating interesting messages to command attention and better responses.

Ethical Considerations in Communication

• Ethics focuses on issues of right and wrong in human affairs.
• Respect the audience, consider the result of communication, value truth, use information correctly, and avoid falsifying information.

Lesson 2: Communication and Globalization

• Globalization involves communication and assimilation among individuals, ethnicities, races, and institutions, supported by technology and international trade.
• It increases exposure to diversity, valuing differences in gender preference, color, age, religion, ethnicity, education, social and economic status, and political beliefs.

Concept Grounding

• Communication continues its global increase, blurring national boundaries.
• Effective communication in a global context requires understanding differences in communication from one country/culture to another, which helps avoid miscommunication.
  • Background experiences influence people's views and assumed values, beliefs, and behavior patterns.

Potential cultural barriers to effective communication:

• Cultural relativism
• Lack of knowledge of others' culture
• Discrimination and harassment
• Language differences

Strategies to become an effective global communicator:

• Review communication principles.
• Analyze the message receiver.
• Be open to accepting other cultures.
• Learn and apply knowledge about cultures.
• Consider language needs.

Lesson 3: Local and Global Communication in Multicultural Settings

• Living in a globalized world involves encountering people with diverse cultural backgrounds in social, educational, political, and commercial settings.
• It is imperative to have intercultural competence to live harmoniously, despite our differences.

Concept Grounding

• Intercultural communication refers to interaction with people from diverse cultures.

Forms of Intercultural Communication

• Interracial communication involves communicating with people from different races.
• Interethnic communication involves interacting with people of different ethnic origins.
• International communication involves communicating between representatives from different nations.
• Intracultural communication involves interacting with members of the same racial or ethnic group or co-culture.
• Communication styles vary among cultures, and are sometimes high-context or low-context.

Improving Intercultural Communication Competence

• Recognize validity and differences of communication styles among people.
• Learns to eliminates personal biases and prejudices.
• Strive to acquire communication skills, which are necessary in a multicultural world.

Lesson 4: Varieties and Registers of Spoken and Written Language

• Spoken mode is associated with everyday registers; Written mode is strongly associated with academic registers.
• Everyday and academic communications contain multi-modality, including spoken, written modes, images, music, videos, gestures, etc.

A. Varieties of Spoken and Written Language

• Language varies when communicating with people within (local) and outside (global) a community.
• Language varies depending whether you're speaking and writing.
• Language varies everyday and specialized discourses.

Different Domains

• Different domains that language varies is dependent on the combinations of different values on the three dimensions (field, tenor and mode) of the context of communication.
• The first four variations reflect local usage and are done in 1 or more local language which varies through:

Local everyday written

• A poster that shows local everyday usage can be found on a neighborhood poster.

Local everyday oral

• May occur in local communication with neighbors.

Local specialized written

• The usage can be found in publications and local societies.

Local specialized oral

• Computer shops involving language-related games.
• The other four domains involve global usage which requires participants to engage with people not sharing the same language.

Global everyday written

• The language/texts are accessible to wider communities of readers-this is found in international newspapers and magazines.

Global everyday oral

• Involves the interaction between people coming from different parts of the world, when talking about casual topics.

Local specialized written

• Refers to a wide audience, avoids colloquial expressions.

Global specialized oral

• Relates to discussing specialized topics in spoken form.

Lesson 5: Evaluating Messages and/or Images of Different Types of Texts Reflecting Different Cultures

• The Key Concepts of Media Literacy framework helps develop critical understanding by revealing the content of mass media.
• "Text" is any form of written, spoken, or media work conveying meaning to an audience. Text may use words, graphics, sounds and images in presenting information-this could be oral,print,Visual,electronic forms.

Key Concepts of Media Literacy

• All media messages are constructed.
• Media have embedded values and points of view.
• Each person interprets messages differently.
• Media have commercial, ideological, or political interests.
• Media messages are constructed using a creative language having its own rules.

Lesson 1: Preparing Multimedia Presentation

• In today's digital society, communication is mediated by technology.
• Know how technology works, what purposes it can serve and how it can be used efficiently

Characteristics of Multimedia Presentations

• Visually oriented; displayed on a monitor or projected onto a screen
• Allow different modalities, such as-Text, Graphics, Photographs, Audio, Animation, Video

Special features of computer based information

• Custom navigation(linking) between slides,to other media and the internet.
• Can be made into hard copy printouts or transparencies.
• Can be uploaded to the Web.

Steps in Making Effective Multimedia Presentations

• Know the purpose and the audience of the presentation.
• Use a variety of resources such as textbooks, digital resources,etc
• Gathered information must be cited

DO NOT FORGET TO CITE SOURCES

• Write the author's name, title of the work and date of publication.
• Include the website or the Web pg address of the source.
• Always have graphic references for all citations.

Organize the Information

• List the main points and only limit 1 main idea per slide
• Present ideas in a logical order.
• Place important info near the top.
• Check technical elements.
• Can use transitional phases to introduce interest

Lesson 2: Preparing Pecha Kucha Presentation

• Pecha Kucha is a 20-slide power point presentation which moves every 20 seconds

Lesson 3: Blogging

• Blogging has become one of the effective ways of communicating and networking among students, professionals, businessmen, public officials, etc.

Blogs are:

• personal journal websites where you can type an entry and add images, videos and links to other websites(readers can post comments)
• Ways include being short,direct,asking thoughtful questions,sharing personal stuff,etc

Chapter 1; Informative, Persuasive & Argumentative Communication

• Communication is made for numerous purposes and the messaging is based on intention of sender
• informative communication has the audience pay attention without changing their behavior, shares to eliminate ignorance.

Informative Communication

• Seeks to expand our awareness and become more competent
• When exchanging information ask what the receiver knows, if the topic is important, and if one is knowledgeable enough.

Persuasive Communication

• Art of gaining fair and favorable consideration with a point of view.

Persuasive Communication Includes

• Providing a choice among opinions
• Advocates something through a speaker *Uses supporting material to justify advice
• Appeals to feelings
• HAs a higher ethical obligation

Argumentative communication relies heavily on sound proof and reasoning

• Golden age of Greece has improved through line
• Logos, Ethos and Pathos are the 3 forms of proof-our time whoever many scholars have confirmed the Presence of the fourth dimension of proof which is mythos.

Lesson 2; Public Speaking

• Public speaking is a process of speaking in a structured, deliberate manner to inform
• Speech is the term used to refer the body spoken expressions of information and ideas.

Speech Modes

• Reading from a manuscript is appropriate when the speech is long and when details are complicated and essential.
• Memorized speech requires a speaker to commit everything to memory--excellent for short messages although it is also used for long pieces in oratorical
• Extemporaneous speaking may have a short or long prep

Lesson 3: Making Inquiries

• an inquiry letter is written when a person needs more information about products, services, internships, scholarships, or job vacancies offered.
• letters require correctness of spelling, punctuations, capitalizations, indentions, margins, etc., while interviews require clarity of words, correct pronunciation, intonation and pauses, spontaneity, pleasing personality, and confidence.

Content And Organization Of Letter Of Inquiry

• Header, Inside address, salutation,Body if the letter, Complimentary close, Signature.

Emails

• Emails gained popularity because of speed and convenience-- generally, email messages are less formal than letters, although there are still expectations for appropriate and effective email communication.
• From, sent, To, CC/BCC.