Further discussion needed

Although the book did a great job with covering many scetions in quite a lot of detail, I wish the section on group communication had a little more oomf to it.

The table on page 7.4 does a great job at explaining the usual roles for groups who are working in a professional atmosphere. It does not talk about groups that are purely for social visits or even sports teams. When those groups come together the roles are very different and many of the roles noted are not even covered. There are many types of groups which I wish would have been discussed a little bit more to allow everyone more knowledge.

On sports teams there is the team captain and coach. Everyone else are usually just players and have a very important role, working well with others. In this instance a coordinator is not needed nor is a recorder. I feel the group roles will change depending on the type of group it is.

For groups which are strictly social, like a group of friends, the roles are also different and usually are more relaxed and perhaps may the group may not even have specific roles.

Other than this small part,  the book and the discussion posts did a great job of covering many topics in detail and allowed myself to understand the topic better.

The many things I have learned

I have only taken one communications class before this one and it was public speaking. Needless to say, I learned so much in this class!

One of the topics I am very happy to have learned about what on managing interpersonal conflicts. That whole section allowed me to reflect on previous fights with my girlfriend and analyze what had happened and how we acted. I learned we always have the same routine in our fights, at least we are consistent though. It helped both of us learn how we should be acting in certain situations rather than the way we actually act. It has definitely helped us and since we have not had a fight since then (knock on wood) I feel as if i am better prepared to handle future problems.

I also learned the different types of group discussion formats and how to notice one when I see one. In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, the group participated in a panel discussion. Although it did not go according to plan with the topics they had in mind, they still discussed back and forth while the audience just sat there and witnessed the most non science science panel discussion.

I thoroughly enjoyed this class and the many different posts we had to make. It was a lot more informing and helpful to retain the information in the book. I hope everyone else had a great summer session!

Ohh...Very Interesting

What I found most interesting in the book would be the whole chapter on intercultural communications. I think this is because I am from another country and have played on a water polo team with guys from all around the world, i was able to relate to this section the most. We had a very diverse team where we all had certain stereotypes of one another, but they always ended up to be wrong. I watched and experienced anxiety from being away from home and the norms I was used to. Within the chapter I enjoyed reading the section on Ethnocentrism. I witnessed this concept time and time again. Being on a team, the guys are very proud of their countries and occasionally made their culture and country appear to be superior to others. This happened a lot with the guys from countries in Europe thinking they were better than the American  guys. We all got a long great, but being together all the time and training, we did tend to get on each others nerves and that is usually when they thought they were superior. '

The other section I found interesting was the one on interpersonal communication. The journal we wrote about a fight between someone close to us really helped to see how we act. I had my girlfriend sit down with me and read the section and the journal I wrote so she could also see how we act during a fight with a fresh view.

Social Constructive Perspective

This post was rather challenging for me to write. After reading the example on page 29 many times I was starting to fully understand this concept. I am not sure If my example is an accurate example of it but I think it is. In my culture I speak Spanish all day everyday, we have words and ideas that do not translate over which is confusing for those who are just learning to speak Spanish to understand what is going on. Huevos for example directly translates into eggs. For people just learning to speak Spanish and does not come from a Spanish speaking culture, they would only say huevos when talking about breakfast foods or ingredients in baked goods. However, in my culture and other Spanish speaking culture we throw around the word huevos in another context. When we say it, we could be talking about eggs or we could be frustrated and saying darn it or say it as "balls". This is a direct thought which can cause common misunderstanding between two cultures. It is words like these which can lead to success in my culture but can lead to miscommunication for others trying to be part of this culture. These are words and thoughts which is not common knowledge to everyone and can contribute to a lack of success to those who are not familiar with these words. 

Observing Communication

Figure 2.4 on page 37 contains elements I would have never thought to look for in communication. Before this class I didn't give conversations, emails, and other type of communication forms any thought about how complex they can actually be. When I was looking over this figure I was intrigued by S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G
which is all of the elements contained in communication. The S and the P made sense to me, what the situation was and where the interaction was and who were the participants. the E which is for ENDS was a little more unusual. It states that the ends is for the goals and the outcomes of the interaction, well for me I never thought of a goal on what I wanted out of a conversation. Thinking about it now it makes more senses.

People talk about making plans, the ultimate goal is the when and where they plans are to be held. That was the total goal and the point of the conversation.

Coaches talking to their team before a game, the goal there is to pump them up and explain what needs to be done.

I never noticed how a lot of conversations have an ultimate goal. This was a good figure to really look at.

Games and communication

Thinking of the pragmatic perspective believing communication is a patterned interaction makes sense to me. When someone walks in a person already there says hello, then the response could be hey how are you, and so on. This way of communication happens daily which creates a communication pattern. Each time someone new walks up the first words spoken are almost always hey how are you, or words with the same feeling. Greetings are made of patterns.


Communication being compared to playing a game also makes sense. Some games require more than ones person, just like communication. One person makes a move then the next person gets to go. In a conversation or communication through email, one person always starts off and when the time is right the other person will jump in with a comment or reply to the email.


It is different from a games because the games which go person A then person B then person A then person B are not the only games available. Sports do not follow this particular pattern, in water polo it is not one person shoots then we all wait our turn. We fight the whole game for the ball, if that were to be communication it would be considered as yelling or interrupting everyone. Not all games follow the neat pattern which is how communication can differ from games.

Performance studies

I found the section on performance studies to be interesting. What text says is true, we perform everyday. I never realized how much we as people actually perform until I read this section. We perform when we tell a story of something funny that happened at the store.

For some, performing can help relate to the subject better. Those who perform in rituals are learning more about their ancestry. Performance can also help remember an important time in history, it can be difficult to remember facts from a book, but when a student becomes part of those words and reenact it, this can help them remember it much more clearly. Performance can help boring things comes alive which is how some people prefer to learn. Performing is also an activity, a great example is the Olympics going on right now in London. So many athletes are performing because that is what they love to do.

I did not realize that performing was more than acting on a stage, it is all around us and we take part of a performance everyday whether we realize it or not.