DR MAIZURA MOHD NOOR

CULTURE & COMMUNICATION ALS455

THE USES OF COMMUNICATION
Communication &
Identity
• Self is not innate
• Acquired in the process of
communication with others (Wood,
2011)
• Identity is multi-dimensional
• Self
• Emotional ties to family
• Attitudes toward gender
• Beliefs about one’s culture, etc
Communication &
Person Perception
• Judgments (of verbal and
nonverbal messages) help in
deciding how to present
yourself to the other speaker

• Topics
• Preference
• Decision to continue or
terminate the conversation
Communication & Interpersonal Needs

• Communicating with others satisfies a

basic social need
• A sense of inclusion and affection
• Communication is a way to fulfill a
social component within you.
Communication
& Persuasion
• Transmission of verbal and
nonverbal messages that can shape
the behaviour of other people
• It has instrumental goals
• Innumerable interactions to
influence others
• Selling products
• Soliciting a higher grade from a
professor
• Rallying a group of friends to work for
a charitable cause
COMPONENTS OF COMMUNICATION
 The
Components Of
Communication
• Source
• Encoding
• Messages
• Channel
• Receiver
• Decoding
• Feedback
• Noise
CHARACTERISTICS OF COMMUNICATION
Communication Is
A Dynamic Process

• Ongoing activity with no beginning and

ending – not static
• Once a word or action is produced, it
cannot be retracted
• Sending and receiving messages involves
a host of variables – all in operation
simultaneously
Communication
Is Symbolic
• A symbol is an expression that stands for
or represents something else
• Through evolution and cultural
development, humans are able to
generate, receive, store and manipulate
symbols
• Although all cultures use symbols, we
assign our own meanings to the symbols
Communication Is Contextual
• Communication does not occur
in a vacuum
• Variables of the
contextualisation of
communication:
• Location
• Occasion
• Time
• Number of participants
Communication
Behavior Is Learnable

• The brain is an open-ended system

• The ability to learn any kind of
information and numerous behaviours
patterns has resulted in your knowing
how to communicate
• Note: Not all people and cultures have
gathered the same information
Communication Has A
Consequence
• What we say and do affect others
• How they perceive themselves
• How they think about themselves
• How they think about others

• Hence, one needs to carefully think about

ethical guidelines for communication
CULTURE
Culture Is Shared
• Your culture is shared with others
who have been exposed to similar
experiences
• Culture is a group worldview
• Allows members to make sense of
themselves, their world and
experiences
• Gives members a common fund of
knowledge, a sense of identity,
shared traditions and specific
behaviours distinct from other groups
Culture Defined
• A set of human-made objective
and subjective elements that in
the past have increased the
probability of survival and
resulted in satisfaction for the
participants in an ecological niche,
and thus became shared among
those who could communicate
with each other because they had
a common language and they
lived in the same time and place.
(Triandis, 1994)
Functions Of Culture
• Cultures exist to serve the vital,
practical requirements of human life –
to structure a society so as to
perpetuate the species, to pass on the
hard-learned knowledge and experience
of generations past and centuries to the
young and inexperienced in order to
spare the next generation the costly and
dangerous process of learning
everything all over again from scratch
through trial and error – including fatal
errors. (Sowell, 2009)
 Elements Of
Culture

• Some of the cultural elements

include:
• Religion
• History
• Values
• Social organisation
• Language
Characteristics
Of Culture
• Culture is learned
• Culture is transmitted from generation to
generation
• Culture is based on symbols
• Culture is dynamic
• Culture is integrated system