Lecture 3. Active communication
3.1. Communication elements
3.2. The sender
features
3.3..
Culture, communication and personality
3.4. Interview between two persons
Objectives
·
To become familiar with the elements of an efficient communication.
·
To define the receiver and to assume the qualities
necessary for a communication strategy
·
To realise the importance of culture and of life
experiences in an effective communication.
Applications
·
Show to the participants in the course an object which
might be part of the props of a show ( if necessary even a kitchen object).
·
Ask some participants in the course (two or three) to
describe them.
·
The other participants must write down what was
important and was not in order to figure out what object it was about if they
had not been present.
3.1. Communication elements
Gary Johns,
specialised in organisational behaviour, takes over from Families and Work Institute a poll showing that the main factor in
influencing the subjects’ decision to employ within a certain company was the
open communication. Other elements contributing to the communication
appreciation were:
- General
competition
- Activity
specialisation
- The high level of
the organisational changes.
The importance of
the communication was also highlighted by the analysis of the manner in which
the organisation members spend their time at work. „Detailed studies on the
productive workers show that they participate in 16 to 46 communication
episodes an hour. Even the previous figure - 16 – proves the existence of a
communication episode at each four minutes. Climbing the hierarchical scale,
the time for communication is longer and longer. For the direct supervisors of the
production points the studies show that between 20 and 50 % of the work time is
spent on verbal communication. When the
written communications are added the figures go up to 29-64%.
At the average and
upper management level it is revealed that between 66 and 89% of the managers’
time is spent communicating – face-to-face and on the phone talks. Since these
figures exclude other types of communication – like reading and writing
letters, notes and reports – it is obvious that the obligation to communicate
represents the content almost exclusive of the tasks of many managerial
functions. For instance, during one year, the president of Honda company made
99 speeches to his employees on the subject they need to excel in the fight for
diminishing the exhaust gases emanations.[1]
The information may
not be sent if there is no communication, and the process during which this
transmission is carried on, named communication process, although essential,
starts from a simple, elementary action – speech. However, despite the easiness
to communicate and the chances generally human to be able to transmit signals
to the people around us, it is an illusion which the pupils and students
develop when they think that they know
the subject to an exam or the answer to a question, but they cannot utter it, they cannot find their
words. Having the native opportunity to communicate, is one thing and being able to communicate, having something
to communicate and knowing how to do it in other way than uttering some
sounds, syllables, words, sentences or phrases, is a completely different
thing. We only know something the moment when we can express that something.
The idiom De omni re scibili et quibusdam
aliis seems to clearly explain the dilemma and the confusion. Its first
part, de omni re scibili, belongs to
the Italian scholar Pico della Mirandola,[2]
which was highly confident in his knowledge, and for a good reason it seems.
The wise expression I know everything and
something more is also thought to have been said by him. But Voltaire,[3]
more lucid than him, added to this expression the words, with an ironic value, et quibusdam aliis – and about many others, meaning that
beyond the things a person thinks it knows there is also an infinity of other
knowledge.
A truth, an information, a feeling become ours the moment we utter them or we are able to name them in
your mind. Our ancestor Adam only knew what kind of animals, fish, birds had to
deal with the moment he named them. In order to know them he saw them passing
in front of him, analysed them and then said which was his impression on them
...
The elements at the
base of a communication process are the following:
·
The sender
·
The receiver
·
The message
·
The communication
channels
·
The encoding
·
The decoding
·
The feedback
As previously
shown, the communication requires each time, at least a sender and a receiver,
irrespective of the number of persons involved in this activity. Any type of
communication is made of the simple succession of the following stages:
Sending – the sender wishes
the real receiver or its assumed receiver to understand something, preferably
exactly what he considers that it must be transmitted that very moment under
the form of a regular message. The sender may be a person, a group or an
institution. The sender is the source of the message, is somebody who has a
certain reason for sending the message. The sender is the only person able to
encode the message which he will send, this being afterwards subject to some
changes. But from this right of encoding, which he assumes by himself, it
derives however a series of obligations and risks, which, the receiver must
assume as well. We mention this because many senders consider that their task
ended as soon as they have sent the message, they launched it, they spoke, they
said what they had to say, and from now on it is no longer their business what
the others understood, and if they did not understand it means that they were
not able. This attitude is called anti-communication and it shall not
contribute in any way to the communication or the creation of a communication
climate. Let’s take an example. Somebody utters the words: ”I am penniless” and
he is convinced that he said all he had to say, then he wonders why the persons
around him do not react in any way. If the above words are uttered within a
family, after a longer discussion, then they might express something correctly,
but if they are uttered in general, they may mean:
-
I have no money in
my pocket, so I must fill my wallet,
-
I really don’t know
what to do, I have nothing to eat today,
-
I cannot answer for
your request for money,
-
Today I must give
up going to the market,
-
Today I spent a lot
of money, I wasted all my resources,
-
I shall have to
borrow some money.
And so on. If we don’t know to whom
and for what we address, the mere above information may raise severe
misunderstandings, if, for example, we said it thinking that mother, being
around, shall miraculously intervene offering a large amount of money on
hearing that our pocket is empty.
Encoding – the message is encoded by the sender and
logically structured – in our case under the form of language. It is important
that this code be known both by the sender as well as by the receiver. If
otherwise, no matter how valuable it might be, at a theoretical level, the
message, without a correct reception from all the points of view ( logical,
practical, temporal) becomes useless. There is nobody among us who has never
sent an important information, but which proved to be useless due to the fact
that we spoke a language unknown for our interlocutor or the other way round.
Equally, it is useless to have a correct information, if it was not received in
time. For instance, it’s no use knowing the winning numbers for the lottery,
since the drawing took place and since we hadn’t bought any ticket. The same
goes for a cry, a moan, a look. The child sends them, but if they are not
understood by the person who can and must interfere, the message value becomes
substance-less.
Sending – when the sender is satisfied with the message
encoding the latter is sent. The sending form may be: verbal, written,
graphical, visual etc. The moment of its accomplishment is relaxant. Each of us
has seen faces radiating happiness when they managed to say it, to take somebody down
a peg or two, to say on the phone what they had to say, afterwards being
disappointed because the anticipated effect had not been achieved: the person
who has been told the plain truth did
not hear, did not understand, did not become upset, the phone number was
wrongly dialled etc, etc. Therefore the job is not ended and we may not say
that we are satisfied until we are sure that the message reached the receiver,
and the latter perceived it correctly. It is useless to write a note and leave
home quietly, knowing that we have told some friends not to bother us anymore,
we must also make sure that they received the note. It is incorrect to think
that we did our job by writing on a bottle in the kitchen, careful, do not touch, contains chlorine, if we did not make sure
that persons who cannot read won’t have access to this vessel. Finally,
somebody who works on the radio and broadcasts a show may not be calm if the
specialised personnel wouldn’t be sure that the broadcast pierces the ether and
the signals may be intercepted by those persons owning devices with certain
technical characteristics which form our objective.
Receiving – the message passes the point
of transfer, from the sender to the receiver. This is usually achieved by means
of the communication channels. No sender may excuse himself for not being taken
into consideration laying all the blame on the sending channel. For this
reason, in order to be efficient, but also in order to establish an adequate
psychological climate, the sender must continuously wonder whether his message
is taken over and not communicate before being sure of the transmission channel
function. The specialised institutions are aware of this thing, and for this
reason whenever we send an e-mail to a wrong address we are informed on the
error, we are not left with the impression that we have communicated, when in
fact the receiver does not exist or we gave him a wrong name. Even in the most
common daily activity we must make sure that we transmitted the message
correctly or that we received it correctly, because we are almost sender and
receiver at the same time. And because most of us speak easily than we listen,
apostle Iacov urges us to listen more and speak less: You should know, my
beloved brothers: any man should listen more, speak less and very rarely get
angry”.[4]
Decoding – the receiver decodes the message received
using a code for processing the message. The code is usually the same with the
code used by the sender. The receiver is the decoder of the message, the one
who transforms the message into ideas, thoughts, after the decoding process.
The decoder must also verify if he is the receiver, if he received the message
correctly and if he understood exactly what the sender intended. The auxiliary
verbs have the most complex senses: to be, to have and many more may be real
traps. For instance, to go needs to
be decoded in many situations, because it is one thing to say that mother went, in a context known by the listener
meaning she went shopping, and it is
a completely different thing to add the words she’s gone after telling an acquaintance that my mother was very
ill the winter she was gone …
Comprehension – In order to achieve a
correct communication the receiver must understand the idea transmitted by the sender. Thus, the announcement made by
a driver saying what station is next, the announcer from the train station, the
air hostess in a plane, the television star etc. becomes a simple lips movement
or something noisy tickling or disturbing the ear. „The informational transfer
becomes communication when the information contained in the message is
understood and an adequate action is taken. The researchers think that the
informational transfer is a necessary but not sufficient condition, the
comprehension being also necessary. Maria Cornelia Bârliba signals „an
amplification of communication both relative to the means (the introduction of
the computer) as well as to the forms mediated by it. The result becomes
obvious at the level of the content which modifies its nature.”[5]
In this case, the communicative support bears the following metamorphoses:
a)
transmission by means of technical channels;
b)
product of the data banks;
c)
combination between the natural and artificial
message;
d)
huge volume; confrontation to a series of
communicational barriers characteristic to the computerised period.
Action – the receiver starts acting as a consequence
to the message. Robert Escarpit thinks that the process of communication does
not consist only of sending and receiving, but also of participating, at all
levels, to an infinity of different changes intersecting between them.”[6]
The moment the communication is perceived as also containing the comprehension
component, the latter becomes „a means for an active, practical attitude of the
subject, in order to formulate some purposes of the human action.”[7]
However, the receiver coming into action
must not be mistaken for the concrete action. It is unproductive and out of the
essence of the communication act to pompously ask what did you gain that you’ve heard, found out, seen …
This way of
thinking is the result of an ignorance of the formation and education process.
The human is not a living being who can immediately react to the stimuli as the
Russian Pavlov’s dog does. After hearing, seeing or smelling the human takes
the time to think, to choose. He
receives the information and takes attitude, by reacting. The refuse to act is
not always a sign that he hasn’t received the message. He received it but he
refuses to play the game. In this case, those who ask what is the radio good
for, what is the book good for what is the music good must rather ask
themselves what are they living for, what are they doing with their life.
The results of communication cannot
be seen cyclically, just like reaping the wheat and harvesting the corn, not
even periodically like melons or cucumbers. The results of the communication
and the actions appeared as a consequence to the transmission of a message can
be seen in time, and only those who trust the human being know and can wait. In
fact, the essayist Mihai Ralea thinks that postponement is the most significant
feature which differentiates the man from the animal. Waiting, the Romanian
psychologist writes, taking over the ides from Pierre Janet, assumes a series
of psychical abilities. ”The normal waiting consists of preparing during a
period as long as possible the separation between excitement and the end of the
act. Any psychological act involves a stage, be it very short, of preparation.
A series of other stimulation which gather add to this stage, are convoked and
together may lead to relief. It brings a plus of energy to the psychological
act which is about to take place”.
3.2.
The sender features
Motivation
One
needs a reason to send a message. One must also have a purpose. And one sends
it due to a certain cause. For instance, the child cries because he is hungry
or because of pains he cannot utter orally yet. When he is a few years old the
child pulls his granny’s skirt to show her a dog crossing the street. He can
speak now, but he discovered that there is also a body language: jerking the
hand of the accompanying person. A young man writes a poem to a girl, because
he fell in love, otherwise neither would he waste paper nor would he know that
he is the descendant of Dante Aligheri as regards writing or of Romeo Montaque
as regards feelings. And we can give further examples, but they would only
prove the same thing, meaning: a normal person does not talk so as not to get
bored he only talks for a certain reason. Given the situation of the verbal
language, we can extend the statement over other types of communication too.
For example, nobody shall write on the walls of his house We sell fish, if they wouldn’t actually sell it. And if he is in
the mood for jokes and he has no reason to do what he promised, the pitcher
might not go so often to the well that it comes home broken at last, and
somebody might even get really mad he is not offered what he was promised.
Speaking of the proverb from the above sentence, our folklore is rich in
proverbs which establish a relationship between the message and the motivation.
For instance, here are a few proverbs: A word flew from your mouth, but you had
better coughed; Many words will not fill a bushel; Say the right word at the
right time; He who gives fair words teaches right; To talk non-sense; To talk
tripe; She talks to waste her breath, etc, etc.
When
sending a message, we must also know whether we do it to signal our presence,
to gain somebody’s sympathy, to show that we are available, to give help, to
gain something or take something and send forward the information received. All
these components are honourable; we must however gain the confidence and
motivate the others to receive the message too. Because it is better to
remember all the time that it is difficult to gain the confidence of somebody,
but it can be very easily lost, and once lost it needs huge efforts to win it
back, and the capital which was so hard to obtain is still fragile, subject to
suspicion precisely due to the former experience.
the sender quality depends on
the social level on its education and culture
It is
difficult to persuade somebody that he has nothing to say, it is maybe the most
difficult thing in the world. Man suffers, has been through a lot, has thought
of a lot of things, has seen and has heard about a lot of experiences. He
witnessed an infinity of circumstances in which men like him, be them young or
old, rich or poor have been carefully listened to, the listeners’ eyes remained
astounded fixed on the speakers, but he was not saying something from the other
world, he was talking humanly and it seemed as if he was talking about things
he could have said as well. Why isn’t he being listened to now? In most of the
cases we are not being listened to because, we don’t know how to communicate.
We don’t even know how to communicate. We don’t take into account that before
communicating we must first think. Not much, a little, but efficiently. For
instance, it must be clear where and to whom we must communicate. As against
this we choose our clothes, we shave or not, we choose expensive clothes, the
best clothes we have, or the clothes we wear at work. We shall take off our hat
or not, and if we shall take it off we shall keep it in our hands, crumpling
it, or we shall give it to the host which received us standing in the door not
wanting to let us in.
And
we haven’t said a word yet. And the person we are visiting and we need is
waiting. But she won’t wait till the sunset, she is about to close the door to
our face. We have at least a minute or two at our disposal. The education we
received, the way we were formed, the
observations we made looking around influence enormously the quality of our
communication. It is useless to draw the conclusion that other people succeed
because they are lucky, this is not true: people succeed because they trained
themselves to succeed. The impulse could have been given by the parents, the
teachers but it is them that followed the advice, chose and reached where they
wanted.
A writer,
an inventor, a high performance sports man, a famous surgeon are not what they
are because they simply had an opportunity, but because they trained themselves
and have been trained in a certain manner. They have seriously communicated to
the others their intention to become something, they have been treated as such,
and they have never let somebody down. But above all they told to themselves,
within the intrapersonal speech, which we mentioned in another chapter, that
they have an objective set and that all their efforts are concentrated on this
aim. As it is well-known, due to the social economic changes in our
contemporary society, changes which underwent much alertly than during the
ancient times and societies, „[8]very
differentiated social structures appeared.” The persons within these societies
form social categories which are not only numerous, but also very different.
Instead of the classical differences – man-woman, rich-poor, young-old,
differentiation criteria appear nowadays which are absolutely necessary to be
taken into account: the ethnic group, the majority or minority, the political
orientation, the number of the urbanised generation, religious affiliation,
occupation, education level.
It is
quite easily forgettable that the individual is mostly the product of the
cultural environment. Trying to be original, or to prove our personality, we do
not take into account that we are the product, or the creation, if the first
predicative bothered you, of the environment, time, our will but also of the
cultural environment we come from or where we agreed to live in.
The cultural background motivates us in the
first place by means of the language. If we accept this truth, the other
components of the culture go without saying. The mother tongue influences the
speech, the voice is the first intermediary through which we may establish a
relationship. The way we dress is influenced by the cultural environment. The
same goes for the gestures. We eat as we have been taught, we laugh noisily or
we express our joy discreetly, due to the group education or culture. Culture
is not the privilege of the persons dedicated to schools or libraries.
According to S. Mehedinţi, it represents the
sum of all the soul creations (intellectual, ethical, aesthetic) which make the individual’s adaptation to
the social background more easy. Just like a leaf with two sides: one
bright, turned towards the sun, the other one darker, turned towards the earth
(but very important, because through it the plant breathes and feeds every
day), the humanity has two aspects : a tellurian one – the civilisation, meaning the material technique; another one
celestial – the culture, the sum of
all the soul products, through which man searches a complete equilibrium with
the rest of the creation and, in general, with the moral universe comprising
it.”[9]
Since the culture is the real connection between terrestrial and celestial,
between man and Good and since it may contribute that much to the vertical
communication, between human and the Great Spirit it is not very difficult for
us to deduct its role in the horizontal, man-to-man communication,.
Reality
is indeed, more complex than some people’s will to introduce it in simplified
schemas, and when it is a question of culture several opinions and a nuance are
necessary. For instance, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, thinks that not all the
people can have a national culture, thus becoming even more obvious the fact
that not even all the individuals would be asked to bring their contribution to
its assumption and development. ”There are, he wrote in 1937, people who live
for thousands of years without the institutional characters to take roots deep
inside their souls. They live in an eternal youth, their souls being influenced
either by the biological heredity, or by the geographical environment. The
people with national culture may crystallise their historic experience into
institutions of spiritual nature, institutions which, once rooted, take over
the guidance of their spiritual life. These people manage to guide, according
to norms they will dictate, both the manifestations under the influence of the
hereditary factor, as well as the manifestations under the influence of the
geographical factor.”[10]
The individuals may be easily characterised in the same way.
Even this requires talent
Be it
a reporter at a newspaper, a novelist, but especially, just a human being
(without intending to leave something behind him, as those mentioned above and
who wish to become immortals through to the facts of their lives), the
individual wishes to communicate a previous experience. What he saw, heard,
felt or thought before. Aware or not, he does it feeling that he understood
that experience in a unique way, and the interlocutor must share the same
original experience, because otherwise … Otherwise, we even wonder how can
somebody live without listening to us, how come he cannot understand from the
beginning that we wanted to say something extraordinary. It is interesting the
fact that if we had had the patience and we had known to listen, if we had
cared for our fellows and we had had the ability to feel like them and for
them, the above pretensions wouldn’t seem absurd to us anymore. It’s true, not
to seem more altruistic than we actually are, that our fellows have their share
of guilt too: they didn’t learn to communicate! They don’t have the ability to
start their presentation from the very beginning, they cannot summarise the
experience, they do not manage to transmit the essence of the message. When
this ability in sending the message, the ability of the former experience
exists, there are plenty of listeners, moreover, they can’t have enough
listening or reading. It is the case of The
Thousand and One Nights. One can fool death if he can tell stories.
The
most able persons to transmit the previous experience are the writers and it
wouldn’t be bad at all if we learnt from them how to talk about us and about
our past, if we knew how to grade the original in its combination with the
imaginary, if we could make the difference between the truth and the credible,
between what has been and what was about to be, or wasn’t meant to be, as Constantin Noica
would have said. And from all literature genres, the novel is the most elevated
in speaking about the character’s previous experience. Or the author’s. Or of
the two, if there shall be any essential difference between the author and the
character. Because if we listen to what Flaubert says, and we tend to listen to
him, when he admits he is Madame Bovary, then we are not even interested in who
the author is and who his hero is. And maybe we won’t be surprised to find out
that the writer does nothing else but to tell his previous experience as a
child. „If he doesn’t accept to go back into his first childhood telling
incredible fairy-tales for himself, he cannot be however that absorbed in his
thoughts so as not to evoke even in his dreams the progresses of his
observation; and no matter how much he would want to isolate himself from the
world which deceives himself, at the same time he cannot help himself trying to
get to know it and to master it the more so as this is his only hope to win
over the concrete things at least a part from the power he feels frustrated by.
For, here, reality has two faces, one that hurts and must be annulled; the
other one promising power and interesting him at the highest level, for this
reason the child never succeeds in his small sentimental and social education
creation if he takes into account this duplicity, making an ingenious
compromise between the antagonist tendencies which dominate his thoughts.”[11]
For us, when communicating the most important thing is to make the difference
between real and imaginary.
Many
people wonder why they are not being listened to when they tell different
stories of their lives. The answer is more than simple: they don’t know how to
narrate. The writer Marin Preda was, probably, one of the most appreciated
Romanian writers. He was neither a good speaker nor a pleasant interlocutor,
however, despite all these, when telling a story the form he was giving to that
story was remarkable, just as remarkable as the answers or the observations
related to the behaviour of some artists he knew.
a)
personal
relationship
Thousands
of years ago Socrates advised us to get to know ourselves. Unfortunately,
although we are aware of his advice we do not put it into practice: we are
interested in us, we are selfish, egocentric and hypersensitive, but we don’t
actually know ourselves. It seems that there is something even worse than this:
we wouldn’t admit that we do not know ourselves. And if things are in this way,
and it seems to me that they are in this way, the lesser we know the others.
For this reason we shall never manage to communicate adequately if we shall not
know what is the relationship between us as senders, and the others in their
quality as receivers. Knowing what is his relationship with the receiver is one
of the first obligations of a message sender. Ignoring this obligation leads
not only to the message perturbation but even, to its annulment. Let us imagine
what would happen if a radio broadcaster, in an interactive show, wouldn’t take
into account, let’s say, the age of his interlocutor, the sex characteristics,
the social condition, the needs. The individual called to complain about the
economic condition of the pensioners, while the producer wanting to show that
he is young and cheerful, he knows how to live his life and he can recommend to
others too his own lifestyle, he would say:” it’s Saturday afternoon, think of
what you shall do this evening, forget about your daily problems, call a
girlfriend and plan a night in the disco. Nothing is more beautiful than
holding tight the friend you have just met, lighting her cigarette, and dancing
after drinking together a brandy. Let the alcohol get you high, soon you will
find a taxi too, don’t worry where it will take you, just remember to give the
right address of your apartment or hers …”
But
maybe you think that if you are not a reporter you can manage on the spot and
you needn’t establish your position as compared to the others. This is again a
mistake, because if you don’t know who you are talking to you have all the
chances in the world to put your foot in it. It is much better to prepare your
appearance by means of an adequate documentation. Try to deduct who is the
message receiver from the clothes, from the way the person you address has had
her hair cut, and combed, from the make-up, from the perfume used, from the way
he smiles, from how insistently he looks at unknown persons, whether it is
interested in what you are saying or not.
It
is, also necessary to verify whether the relationship established at a certain
time with a person means for her what we think it meant, it is necessary to verify if the memories we
keep in our minds overlap the receiver’s memories. A first element which must
be taken into account, when he haven’t seen that person for a long time, is the
rhythm of the social evolution. If, for example, the acquaintance from five or
ten years ago climbed the social scale and became a high official, we shouldn’t
remind him that we once theed and thoued each other or that we travelled
together in a miserable broken car. Nor other details are recommended: the
money which were not enough to pay for the breakfast, the rumbled clothes
during a voyage by train at the last class, the torrential rain which caught us
without an umbrella, the taxi driver reproaching us that we didn’t give him any
tip. Our excuse, when noticing that our former friend doesn’t like these
memories, such as for example, he forgot
that it was me who pulled him through won’t compensate your rumble.
If we
want to boast that we know very well who he once was and draw his attention
that we met his former wife a few days ago next time we have all the chances in
the world not to recognise us even for a few moments.
Let’s not fool ourselves: people avoid talking
to us or they pretend they don’t hear us not because they are ungrateful, but
because we don’t know how to address them. And we don’t know to address them
because we do not establish correctly our relationship with the receiver. The
most striking is the lack of communication abilities within a family, between
parents and children: each generation is convinced that it is not being
understood and that the split is so major that a communication way wouldn’t
even be possible, and for this reason, with an easiness seldom irresponsible
all the possibilities are annulled. Nothing worse and more serious. We can
communicate in a simple manner: starting from the premises that it is you who
doesn’t understand, and not that you are not being understood. I remember I
sometimes asked my elder son to talk to my little son, as he wouldn’t listen to
me anymore. I was surprised to hear his answer: I cannot even speak to him, nowadays young people don’t know how to
listen … And it was only a difference of five years between them! As the
time passed, I understood that it is not the age difference that makes
communication impossible, but the attitude, the incapacity to learn to speak
for others and to listen to the others, not just to make sure that the others
are not right.
b) psycho-physical attributes
Look
who’s talking!, is an astonishment characterising our reactions whenever we
don’t want to take into account the message content. In other words, instead of
paying attention to what we are being told, we only take into account the
receiver. After such an exclamation, it is clear that we want to say that we
don’t need such a sender. The sender plays, whether we like it or not, a
primordial role in communication. The newscaster is not indifferent to us,
although we try to fool ourselves that we only opened the TV to find out what’s
new under the sun. It’s true that for this reason we sank into the armchair,
but if the broadcast host is ugly or disagreeable, if the newscaster speaks
through his nose, if the sound is disturbed, if the light falls on the neck of
the editor instead of on his face, his clothes are two sizes bigger or their
colour is in contrast with the background, if, if…then we shall look for
another channel, no matter how interested we would be in the political news.
At
the same time, neither the above-objection, related to the person who is
talking is senseless: the persons issuing opinions on behalf of some institutions,
organisations or representing the public opinion must be out of any suspicions
that it wouldn’t be fit to be expressed in the subject in cause. If this
requirement is not observed, instead of seeing or hearing what we want the
receiver shall think about the sender’s deficiencies.
The
physiological features must be also very carefully dealt with: nobody shall
accept a fat woman speaking about rational food nor shall accept a commercial
for a mineral water whose protagonist is a man with a red nose on whose face
can be easily read the despatch note to the detoxification just signed by the
doctor … Similarly, it is not advisable to put persons with jobs known to be
usually well-paid, such as surgeons, lawyers, public servants working directly
with individuals who need approvals, talk about poverty, moderation or the
current needs which overwhelm us.
3.3.
Culture, communication and personality
Not a few times we judge people according to the way they
speak or they are dressed. And we are not always wrong, because these
components introduce us in the value system of the one studied, they tell us
where it comes from, how he thinks, how much of what he is belongs to him or is
borrowed. A man is what he wants to be and the first component he refers to,
whether he wants it or not, is culture. In its turn, this is a „configuration
of the assumed behaviours and their results, whose elements are shared and
transmitted by the members of a given society”[12]
As Jean Caune also notices, in the definition the emphasis falls on the
features of a built personality, coming from a group and facilitating the
individual’s integration into the group. Called by the specialists main
personality, this abstract model is manifested by means of a certain lifestyle,
by means of certain ways of acting, so as the „main personality is the
translation in psychological terms of the group’s culture, representing the
matrix in which the individual personalities are shaped”.[13]
Since culture, as we stated before, is related to the macro components of the
society, but also on the group micro specific, the communication phenomena may
be analysed at several levels. Among them:
1.
The group level. This can be
visible in exchange, dialog, leadership situations.
2.
The
individual-environment relationship level. Here the term environment is
perceived as including the representation of the individual on it.
The essential is
the truth that in the communication process it is compulsory to take into
account all the factors which define the individual or the group it belongs to,
without overlooking the position the receiver holds the moment of the
communication itself or at a social-cultural level. Likewise, it is of major
importance to admit the fact that in any society there is a serious or hidden
conflict between the different social groups, and these conflicts are the main
cause of the changes. Even since 1958, Ralf Dahrendorf analysed the problems
raised by this situation and suggested a type of society including the conflict
and the change as essential problems. After him, the mass communication
theoreticians have drawn up the following synthesis:
1.
It may be considered that a society is made up of
categories and groups of people whose interests are clearly different one from
each other.
2.
All these society members try to follow their
interests in competition with the others or to preserve their interests,
opposing resistance to the competitive efforts of the society.
3.
A society thus organised shall permanently experiment
conflicts, because its members try to obtain new advantages or to preserve
their interests: in other words, the conflict is omnipresent.
4.
From this competition and conflict process it derives
a permanent change process; the societies are not characterised by a state of
equilibrium, but by a process of continuos change.
In the United
Stated of America, for example, but the case is not isolated, this reality
generally characterises any society of a western type, „the communication means
are represented by competitor organisations, whose aim is to gather a profit.
The competition and the pursuit of their interests are carried on in a complex
network of constraints, imposed by courthouses, federal agencies, moral codes
of the society, own organisational structures and, last but not least, by those
who support them financially. Furthermore, the press and the government are
known as old and irreconcilable adversaries”.[14]
Obviously, the conflicts do not take place only in this framework. There are
daily tensions among the press that needs to know everything and the citizen
who needs intimacy and wants to be protected in his home, in his relations with
the neighbours, colleagues, wife and secret lovers. There is also a bitter
conflict between the state, as holder of secrets of national importance for its
safety and the press that considers itself as part of the state salvation
process.
This being the
reality we should not wonder why the press is loved and hated at the same time.
Why are there so many honest foreign citizens among us willing to require their
disappearance or, at the best, to give their consent for the apparition of only
one newspaper, this being supervised by … police. The reaction is not new and
is not characteristic only for the Balkans! In the wonderful country of
freedom, America, Samuel Clemens wrote, even from 1873: „That terrible power,
the public opinion of this nation, is formed and shaped by a clique of ignorant
and infatuated foolish persons, which are not good for digging ditches and for
shoemaking and yet they stopped at journalism on their way to the poor men
shelter”.[15]
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And the gains are crowned by
the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where error marks the player’s
victory
While the other’s abilities
are gained by death.[16]
But let us see
Eminescu’s opinion on … a certain part of the press: ”Lately, the press from
Bucharest had started to write articles that are one more insignificant than
the other on the public instruction, so that a man who can partly understand
scholastic issues had to admire the easiness with which our people discuss
things that they don’t understand.”[17]
Along the years,
the press, coming into contact with its force, has sometimes become out of a
defender of democracy, the tyrannical force itself. The sensation journalism,
mainly derived from a desire to increase the publication print run, insulted
people, destroyed marriages, created complexes, pushed certain persons to fatal
acts. The press magnates were faced with threats of losing the readers’ trust
and with the even worse possibility to receive orders from outsiders. For these
reasons, a number of well-known editors have been forced to “clean” their own
offices. The conflicts settlement led to new arrangements and social
agreements. Gradually, the press has become less sensational and more
responsible.[18]
Which we hope will happen as soon as possible in the Romanian press, so that
the news in the newspaper be true and trigger at the same time researches and
decisions at the level of the involved competence.
Applications
Closed questions – open questions
Characterise each of the questions below by circling the right answer: C
– closed; O – open:
1.- How are you? C O
2.- Do you like being here? C O
3.- Do I know you? C O
4.- Is it today very hot or is just my
impression? C O
5.- Do you like our town? C O
6.- Have you been here before? C O
7.- How long will the draft last? C O
8.- How shall you spend your holiday? C O
9.- Why did the previous statement bother you? C O
10.- If you were me, how would you act? C O
11.- Do you think it is expensive? C O
12.- Why do you think it is expensive? C O
13.- Will you come to see us again? C O
14.- When do you think you will come to see us
again? C O
15.- Did it offend you? C O
16.- Why did it offend you? C O
17.- When could I contact you? C O
18.- You like the prime minister, don’t you? C O
19.- What do you think of the current government? C O
20.- Do you like dogs? C O
21.- Do you regret having interrupted your
studies? C O
22.- What would happen if your daughter got
married now? C O
23.- Why do you think that old people are
underprivileged? C O
24.- Are Romanies mistreated? C O
25.- Where do you think I have exaggerated? C O
26.- Do you think I am not right? C O
27.- Are you a foreigner? C O
28.- Why do I have the impression that you are
a foreigner? C O
29.- You don't like modern music, do you? C O
30.- Are you tired? C O
31.- Did you have a hard day indeed or is it
just my impression? C O
32.- Do I find a cinema down the street? C O
33.- Could you tell me where the cinema is? C O
34.- What bothered you most at your boss? C O
35.- You did not get along with your boss, did
you? C O
36.- You have woke up early, haven't you? C O
37.- Why can't you come at the scheduled time? C O
38.- Is your salary enough? C O
39.- What's your idea of a decent income? C O
40.- Do you have problems with your colleagues? C O
Think how to change
the closed questions into open questions, to which one could answer giving more
details and facilitating the continuation of the conversation.
d. Interviews between two persons
Purpose: Interviewing other person, in order to get to
know that person well enough to be able to introduce it to the others.
Introduction:
Each of us is the
centre of its own world. As I am not able to entirely transpose myself in your
world, you are not able to transpose yourself in my world either, and if we are
going to communicate, we have to define a mutual world for us. Even in
possession of this mutual world (or mutually accepted), my answers to you are
dictated by my perception about myself. When I talk to you, I actually talk to
an image I have created about you, which, most probable, is not the same with
the one you have created about yourself. Then, how can I discover the real you?
I ask questions. Yet, as questions are based on my own perceptions, they cannot
offer me an accurate image about the way you see yourself. What kind of
questions should I ask in order to get an accurate perception about you?
Procedure:
1.
On a separate sheet of paper, draw up a list with 10
questions you would like to be asked by somebody else.
2.
Choose a partner and exchange the lists of questions with that person.
3.
You have 30 minutes at your disposal, and during this
period of time you have to interview each other. Write down the answers of your
partner to the questions from his own list. Your partner has to do the same
thing while asking you the questions from your list.
4.
Afterwards, you and your partner have to form a group
of six persons with other two couples. Introduce your partner to the rest of
the group, by using the information obtained during the interview. Each partner
has the right to correct or modify the impressions made to his interviewer,
during his presentation to the group.
[1] Johns, Gary
[2] Pico della
Mirandola, Giovanni (1463-1494), Italian humanist from the Florentine Platon
Academy
[3] Voltaire,
Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French thinker and writer. Famous
representative of the Enlightenment. The author of the tragedies Zaira, Mahomet. Philosophical novels: Zadig, Micromegas, Candid. He elaborated
the famous Philosophical Dictionary. Among others, he wrote History of Charles XII and The Century of Ludovic XIV.
[5] Maria Cornelia Bârliba, Paradigmele comunicării, Bucureşti,
Ed. Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, 1987, p.52.
[6] Robert Escarpit, De la sociologia literaturii la teoria
comunicării, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, 1980, p. 128.
[7] Maria Cornelia
Bârliba, Op. cit., p. 55.
[8] Melvin L. DeFleur,
Sandra Ball-Rokeasch, op. cit., 187.
[9] S. Mehedinţi, Civilizaţie şi cultură, Bucureşti,
Editura Trei, 1999, p.119.
[10] Constantin Rădulescu -
Motru, Psihologia poporului român şi alte
studii de psihologie socială, Bucureşti, Editura Paideia, 1998, p.12.
[11] Marthe Robert, Romanul începuturilor, începuturile
romanului, Bucureşti, Editura Univers, 1983, p. 88.
[12] Ralph Linton, apud Jean
Caune, Cultură şi comunicare,
Bucureşti, Ed. Cartea Românească, 2000, p. 54.
[13] Jean Caune, Op. cit.,
pag. 54.
[14] Melvin L. DeFleur, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Teorii ale comunicării de masă, Iaşi,
Ed. Polirom, 1999, p. 46.
[15] Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain`s Speeches, apud Melvin L. DeFleur, Sandra
Ball-Rokeach, Op. cit., p. 135.
[16] Milton Ellis, Louise Pond şi George W. Spohn,
A College Book of American Literature,
apud Melvin L. DeFleur, Sandra Ball - Rokeach, Op. cit., p. 135.
[17] Mihail Eminescu, Opere complecte, cu o prefaţă şi un studiu introductiv de A. C.
Cuza, Iaşi, Librăria Românească, 1914, pag. 457.
[18] Melvin L. DeFleur, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Op. cit., pag. 67.
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