Do You Know Your “Culture”?
After a while, I managed to get some inspiration to blog on something. While being stressed out in sitting for one of the lectures I’m currently attending, and whilst there is a constructive need for me to somehow assimilate this information, I decided to scribble something interesting about Culture.
Culture is broad and it can be explained through different areas. Thus, it can be well understood by its relation to communication. How does culture affect communication? Like me, this will probably give you a slight idea in imploring ways to deal with people of different cultures aiming to achieve effective intercultural communication and understanding.
Not to mention the differences in language, do you ever wonder why, quite often in some countries in the world, our message is being misunderstood because of our cultural differences? It can be true that for us to be able to communicate effectively with peoples of different cultures, it is important to understand how one’s culture affects our way of communication.
One popular concept regarding intercultural communication is further by anthropologist, Edward T. Hall. He explains culture in relation to communication. According to Hall, people communicate depending on their culture which he classified it into two forms; the High context and the Low Context culture. These two forms can also work along within a continuum.
High Context Culture exhibit high context messages wherein information is internalise within the person or in physical context. This means that the information they process may already have an established message perceived through contexts- actions and/or signals, in itself and the information is understood even with a very little verbal information explicitly used with it. People in this culture emphasises interpersonal relationships and trust to one another in understanding the message. Their way of communication is also determined by the degree of the relationships and their trust to one another. People in a high context culture are more governed by intuition and feelings and less by reasons in making decisions. The gestures, tone of voice, facial expression, posture or even social /family history and status is more important than WORDS. One example can be seen on some countries where people show a pronounced social respect and importance to the views of old people within their family and in their society just by considering their age. Countries included in high context culture are that of the Middle East, Southeast Asia (Japan, Korea, China , etc.) , South America, Africa, and some degree, India.
Low Context Culture, on the other hand makes use of low context messages. In here, massive information are based on “explicit codes”. Direct statements and causal explanations are used to explain logic. In short, people from low context culture value logic, facts, and directness. Decisions are made based on facts and not intuitions and discussions often end with actions. Countries cited belonging to this culture would include North America, Australia and much of Western Europe.
A Japanese Manager explained his culture’s communication style to American: he says, “We are homogenous people and don’t have to speak as much as you do here. When we say one word, we understand ten, but here you have to say ten to understand one.”
