Cultural Communication Quiz

Culture

• Culture is communication and communication is culture.
• Learning culture happens through communication.
• Cultures provide members with ways of thinking and behaving.
• Key elements of culture include language, religion, values, traditions, and customs.
• Culture is a set of human-made, objective and subjective elements increasing survival probability and satisfaction.
• Culture is a shared worldview, the way a society organizes the world.
• Culture allows members to understand themselves, the world, and their experiences within it.
• Culture provides shared knowledge, identity, traditions, and behaviours, often distinguishing one group from another.

Transmission of Culture

• Culture endures by transmitting its core messages and elements to future generations.
• Values, norms, and behaviors are passed down from one generation to another.
• Cultural transmission includes processes like holding and touching infants, celebrating religious and secular holidays.

Culture Based on Symbols

• Cultural symbols, like gestures, wedding rings, dress, objects, and religious icons, carry a message.
• Memory chips, books, pictures, movies, and computers preserve and transmit the important aspects of a culture.
• Shared symbols bind people within a culture together.
• Language enables the sharing of thoughts, observations, facts, experiments, and wisdom.

Culture is Learned

• Culture is not innate, but learned in multiple ways.
• Babies learn culture via sense making process.
• Informal learning happens subtly through observation and imitation.
• Formal learning happens through structured institutions like schools, mosques, and churches.
• Much cultural learning is subconscious.
• Understanding beliefs, values, norms, and language occurs through interactions with other people.
• Cultural learning is reinforced and repeated, with learning from various sources.

Learning Culture Through Proverbs

• Proverbs convey values and beliefs.
• Examining proverbs offers insight into past, present, and future values.
• Proverbs highlight basic principles of a culture.

Learning Culture Through Folklore, Legends, and Myths

• Folklore, legends, and myths transmit important cultural messages.
• These narratives explain big questions about humanity, such as origins, purpose, and accounting for world existence.
• Folklore reinforces cultural lessons.
• Studying myths helps one understand a culture.

Bardic Tales

• Bardic tales (e.g., Penglipur Lara) include romantic stories of princes, princesses, and heroes.
• These stories often have elements of exaggeration and variations.
• The stories' value and wisdom should not be ignored.

Learning Culture Through Art

• Art mirrors a society.
• Destroying art is like destroying culture.
• Art conveys important messages about a culture.
• Art conveys values common to a group.
• Examples include African art portraying children and nature.

Learning Culture Through Media

• Media presents a significant source about culture and its entertainment.
• Media offers insights about people, events, issues, and cultures.
• The Cultivation theory argues that prolonged media exposure shapes one's idea of reality.
• The more a person watches media from one culture, the more their understanding mirrors the values depicted.

Dynamic Culture

• Culture is not static but constantly changes.
• New technologies, fashion, music, globalization, and immigration alter cultures.
• Immigrants and religion influence and reshape views on culture.
• Cultural changes include altered perceptions.
• The cultural changes include population growth and immigration.
• Changes in culture include innovations and diffusion.

Two Types of Changes in Culture

• Innovations involve new practices, inventions, tools, and ideas.
• Diffusions involve the spread of ideas and practices between cultures.

Adoption of Elements in Culture

• Adoption of compatible elements doesn't disrupt culture.
• The adoption of values that are compatible with a society, speeds assimilation when cultures comes into contact.
• Examples include Americans and Japanese commercial exchanges and practices adopted from each other.
• Culture has a deep structure that resists alterations.

Popular Culture

• Aspects like music, food, and hairstyle are examples of popular cultures that constantly change.
• More deeply learned values, attitudes, and cultural dimensions change gradually.
• This gradual change in values and culture is called cultural boundary maintenance.

Elements of Culture

• Culture includes many elements like food, shelter, work, defense, social control, perceptions of illness, and governing.
• Key aspects of culture are worldview, religion, history, values, social organizations, and language.
• Worldview shapes how people interpret reality.
• Religion provides values, beliefs, and guidelines for behaviour.
• History imparts lessons from the past.
• Values represent essential qualities of life.

Social Organization

• This includes institutions like family, government, schools, tribes, etc.
• Social organization creates patterned interactions and regulated norms.

Language

• Language is fundamental to social transmission between cultures.
• Language conveys meanings, grammar, and syntax that are specific to a culture.
• Language is how a culture expresses worldview.
• Language is a core method of social transmission.

Developing Intercultural Competence

• Intercultural communication competence is behaviour that is appropriate and effective.
• Key challenging features of intercultural communication include cultural differences, unfamiliarity, intergroup posture, and accompanying stress.
• A competent communicator analyzes the situation and chooses the correct behaviour.
• Motivations and knowledge are essential.

Basic Components of Intercultural Communication Competence

• Motivation: The communicator wants successful intercultural encounters, bringing positive attitudes. Extrinsic (financial) and Intrinsic (personal) motivations.
• Knowledge: Gathering knowledge of other cultures. Cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt your knowledge of other cultures. Intercultural awareness, understanding different cultural conventions.
• Skills: Specific communication behaviours (like listening), different communication styles. Cultural variations in how people talk, how they present themselves, varying tolerance for silence, direct vs indirect communication.
• Open-mindedness & Tolerance to Ambiguity: Accepting new cultures and new ideas, responding to the unique circumstances of each communication.