Standpoint Theory

Life is all about status, social class, race and gender. But I feel that race is a person’s master status over all other statuses. For example, in the 1960s, race played a major role in how people viewed another person, especially in the South. Back then, to be racist was okay, and if you weren’t, you were considered an outcast to society. But all the situated knowledge the minority receives is from a weak objectively group (the characteristic of knowledge generated from standpoint of dominant group). George Hegel talks about the master-to-slave relationship, based on what group you are in, which determines who is the “knower”(the powerful) and also who controls who receives knowledge. What Hegel was saying still remains into today’s society. The government is the “knower” and it rations finds to public schools. The government knows which school’s funding to cut due to redlining— schools that always happen to be those in the inner city. The government gives inner-city children a basic education, which is just enough to get a job after graduation. But an inner-city education doesn’t even come close to those of other type of education, like those in the suburbs of America. In my opinion, the educational system is biased toward the minority, and for this reason the minority will always be oppressed and will never be the knowers in society.

Genderlect Styles Theory

When I first turned to read this chapter, I skimmed across the headline “Genderlect Styles” and the word genderlect stood out to me. It stood out because I had never heard of the word before. I soon learned that genderlect is a way of saying that men and women talk differently. The men’s communication type was call report talk and the women’s communication was call rapport talk. I agree 100% with Tannen's theory. I have a female friend and every time we talk, she tries to finish my sentences by saying what she thought I was going to say (Cooperative overlap). At times she can see the frustration on my face due to her constant interruption. Then she would say, “That doesn’t bother you? Right?” (Tags a question- to soften a potential conflict). I wish she would understand that I don’t like being interrupted and can speak effectively without her help.

Face-Negotiation Theory

My girlfriend and I argue all the time about nothing. Even though she is nine months pregnant, I try to be mindful and ignore her on-going mood swings. At times she gets so mean, she needs her friends to tell her that was rude of her (Third- Party Help). She feels that I don’t obliging enough toward her. But what I think is that she is always trying to dominate a relationship. I’m the one who always trying to avoid conflict by trying to compromise in situations that can be worked thought by using integrating. Now when we argue, I just use passive aggression to for solution to our problems. During the last past nine months my interactions skill have improved dramatically and so has her communication by telling me how she feels (Emotional Expression). I am glad the pregnancy is almost over and I can’t wait until she stops letting her emotions get the best of her.

Spiral of Silence Theory

Several decades ago, the majority of white people had pluralistic ignorance toward blacks. For a while, the African American community didn’t know Hard Core Nonconformists and black brothers or sisters could not really stand up and fight for what they believed in. Then came a man named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He spoke for the minorities, helping them to get speak their mind by speaking for them, by expressing their feelings and frustrations about racism through his mouth. The way Dr. King worked to get his point across, he would have been completely biased against the Spiral of Silence. In my opinion, Dr. King was the Quasi-Statistical Organ for the black community, because of the ways he spoke of equality and desegregation for African-Americans. Even though Dr. King was a minority he still stood up for what was right even if he was labeled a deviant (Train/Plane Test). Dr. King was a strong leader and did all he could to help people no matter how often he was threatened.

Anxiety/Uncertainty Reduction Theory

I wish I had read about Anxiety/Uncertainty Reduction Theory before I went to Jamaica a few years back. Things that Gudykunst talks about in this chapter, I have encountered. Myself and three of my friends went on a cruise to Jamaica and as soon as we got off the boat, we felt like strangers. We tried to use Anxiety/Uncertainty Management Theory while talking to the natives. They had very strong accents and broken English but we tried using hand gestures to explain what we were trying to say. But no matter whom we talked to, we couldn’t find any effective communication. Finally we just gave up and started walking, like we knew our way around Jamaica. We then we saw four underprivileged Jamaican boys asking for money on the path that we were walking on. They approached a white lady and I think she said something rude to them because they became very upset. They then took her purse and run into the woods (unconscious incompetence). After the boys took her purse, the lady ran up to us and asked her if we could help her catch them. I looked at her and asked her what she said to them. She told me that she told they boys to get away from her (conscious incompetence). I then knew why they took her purse, and I even though I wouldn’t have stolen her purse, I wasn’t going to run after children who she was rude to and obviously needed her help.

Agenda-Setting Theory

One day I was reading the newspaper, and an article caught my attention. The headline of the article read “Trans Fat” in big letters. The method to make the words stand out like they did is called framing, which the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration. Not knowing much about the topic, I had uncertainty about it so I read the article. After finishing the article, it had more relevance to me and applied to me life as an athlete. This is the first level of agenda-setting because it included the transfer of salience of an attitude object in the mass media’s pictures of the world to a prominent place among the pictures in our heads. Now every time I go out to eat, I always ask the server how much trans fat is in the meal I am interested in ordering. This is the second level of agenda-setting, because it includes the transfer of salience of a bundle of attributes the media associate with an attitude object to the specific features of the image in our minds. By reading the article, I now know that trans fat stays in your body for the duration of your life and you can’t work it off. Because of this, I always watch what I eat. In this case, the media was making people more conscious about what they eat, and without the media publicizing topics like this, I would have never known about the potential dangers of trans fat.

Dramatism Theory

When I was in high school, everyday at the lunch table, my friends and I would always try to find failures about people walking past so that we could make fun of the person. But if we couldn’t find things wrong, we would pick on our friends, two friends in particular. For example, we would call my friend Brian, “Black” because he was as black as night. We called my other friend Fats (a type of identification method), even though is real name was Mo. Everything we said about each other were more devil terms, or that summed up everything we said as evil, instead of god terms that is more positive. My friend Leonard would always go overboard when it came to talking about people, causing the person he was talking about to feel bad about himself, and very embarrassed. As soon as Mo would sit down with his lunch Leonard would immediately call Mo a “fat ass” and criticize Mo by saying things like, “Don’t Mo look like one of the gorillas from Planet of the Apes eating a bushel of bananas?” Mo would respond by saying, “That’s why I have more money then you.” Mo’s response is an example of substance, a term that is used to encompass a person’s personal characteristics. In this case, it was Mo having money, which to Mo, was a type of value. Even though we all made fun of each other, (something behavioral scientists call homophily because there was a perceived similarity between all of us at the lunch table no matter who was the speaker or listener at that time. In this case the similarity was us all talking about each other.) I think the ringleader of it all, Leonard was going through something called the Guilt Redemption Cycle, or a method that when a person strives for perfection, ends up hurting themselves and others.

Cultural Approach to Organization Theory

In high school I was on the basketball team, in which we had our own little culture where everything was somehow centered around basketball. Every year the coaches had a ritual where they would make up slogans to show people what the basketball team stood for. During my senior year, our slogan was doing good deeds to help someone else on the team. Every winter when we had tryouts for the team, the coaches made their cuts and additions. After tryouts were over, we had a team meeting and went over the team rules, an example of corporate stories, stories that carry the ideology of management and reinforce company policy (our company being the Spartan Basketball team). In the same year, we had to share a personal story (stories that company personnel tell about themselves, often defining how they would like to be seen in the organization) and collegial story (positive or negative anecdotes told about others in the organization) to the new guy on the team. I shared with the player I was teamed up with something that happened the previous year during basketball season. I told him that we got a new assistant coach who everyone thought was an asshole. He would try to enforce corporate culture on the new guys, always yelling at players for know reason at all. By him being that way, it hurt the established culture of our team and his presence seemed to make us a less organizational culture. I told the new player that in order to be successful on the court, we needed to be a professional family, staying above any drama and never letting what anyone else said bring us down as a team. When the season was over, the new guy told me that my story helped him during the season, and he never once forgot what the team stood for, and did not anything get in the way of what was best for the organization.

Cultivation Theory

As a kid, growing up in Philadelphia violence was everywhere, but as a child I didn’t realize it. I lived with my grandma who was a heavy television watcher. She knew we lived in a bad neighborhood, and her watching TV all day didn’t make things any better. Everything she saw on TV was real to her. I really was a light TV watcher because I played sports all day long. When I would leave the house, my grandma would watch me until I was out of her sight. She would not let me walk at night by my self, and she didn’t trust some of the people I hung around. She once told me, “If you’re not back in ten minutes, I will call the police. You know the station is just around the corner.” That is an example of cultivation differential theory. I thought she was so caught up in the mainstream of the media; it gave her a bad case of the “mean world syndrome.” In reality, it was just that we grew up in two different time eras. In the shows she saw on TV really happened when she was growing up, like in one episode of CSI Miami when a killer threw his victim in the swamp. That made her remember the gruesome death of Emmitt Till. I didn’t really realize how bad the world was until a few summers ago when over 100 people got killed in the area where I lived. I even saw a young man get shot and his insides were hanging out of him. So when I hear of people getting shot and killed on the news, I often think of what I saw with my own eyes, something I learned is called resonance, or the mechanism that affects heavy viewers who have already been victims of violence.

Elaboration Likelihood Management Theory

When I took Human communication class I had to do a persuasive speech. So two days before I had to present I put together a persuasive speech, so I thought. I went over my speech with some friends in they thought it was more informative then persuasive. That was and example of central route. So the night before MY speech i redid my presentation all over because they said it wasn’t persuasive enough, that’s and example of peripheral route. So the day of my speech I was very nervous, I came up there delivered like I was a drive for pizza hut, I give them the four Y’s. I felt I had a very strong arguments and lots of creditable resources that I stated, so that would be positive cognitive attitude if you liked what I was saying. If you did not care too much about what was said or if I didn’t sound very creditable that would be negative cognitive attitude. Or if you be leaved what was say but you didn’t agree on some of the things I was talking about that would be neutral cognitive attitude.

Adaptive Structuration Theory

In college, or any school setting for that matter, every class we attend has different sets of rules. Each class has it own unique type of communication. Each student knows the basic rules for each class he or she attends. Each student comes to class with the knowledge they were told to retain by reading the required material the night before. The teacher also brings his or her knowledge with them to teach the class —knowledge they learned while students themselves. A couple of days ago, I found out about a class that had little structure to it. The teacher relied on the students to make the class productive by bringing a new topic to class with them each day. Each student adapted to this method until one day a student asked the teacher “What if no body came to class with new topics. What would you do?” By him asking that question, it gave the class additional insight about the class. This was all about decision-making, and it would be the student’s choice not to interact with the teacher. Without the students communicating and bringing in new things to talk about, the class wouldn’t have had any stability and teacher would have had to change the class structure. It obvious that this type of setting is not good for all students and the teacher would have had to have had a back up way of learning. Hopefully the teacher realized that while it may have been nice to not have to come up with any lesson plans, it can come back to bite you in the butt, and maybe even cause the students to leave the class with nothing learned.

Constructivists Theory

I have a friend who recently broke up with his girlfriend. He called me, telling me the entire story. In an effort to cheer him up, I explained to him that in the world, the ratio of women to men is much greater, so why cry over one girl who obviously didn’t care about you enough to stop her from breaking your heart? I know what I said was very uplifting. After speaking to me, he called a female friend for a little woman advice. She was able to give him more comforting advice. I knew by calling someone of a different gender would play a major role in making him feel better. This situation is a perfect example of cognitive complexity. She told him let things die down before he tried talking to her, telling him “Don’t worry she will come back to you.” Her more sophisticated message offered him comfort in addition to him doing the right thing… my advice on the other hand was more of a person-centered message and would only help him for all of five minutes.

Functional Perspective on Group Decision Making Theory

I recently finished a class and as part of the requirements, we had to do a group researcher project. We met in the library every Tuesday night for the duration of the class. In our first meeting, we had conversation about who knew what to see what the focus of our project would be, engaging in what communication experts call promotive communication. Promotive communication enables people to set goals they want to accomplish. We later chose to take the traditional successful path of researching through problem analysis, goal setting and evaluation. It seems like with every research problem I’ve done, there has been that one person in the group who always shows up late, if at all, or doesn’t do their fair share of the work. This time did not prove to be different. This guy would always come late and be disruptive by talking n his cell phone. The other group members, including myself would tell him to get off the phone so that we could finish our work and be productive, an action known as counteractive communication. Once he finally realized that we would not let him continue to disrupt our progress, we were able to get back on task and finish the project.

Relational Dialectics Theory

I have a wonderful girlfriend but there is always seems to be some sort of tension between us. At times it seems like a game of tug of war, than a loving relationship. We are always having contradictory pulls that affect the way we talk and treat each other. The main thing that affects our relationships is connectedness, certainty and openness. These are all of the things she says I need to work on. She says that I am not open enough with her regarding my feelings, and believes that I am going to break up with her. I try to reassure her that I want to be with her and have no plans to leave her. (I actually want to be with her and get married, something I never saw myself doing before.) We talk about getting married some day but some of the things she says make me optimistic about it. She is very uncertain about the length of our relationship and says hurtful things from my past to make her points seem more “valid”. Every time we talk about spending the rest of our lives together, and make sure the things we need to work on, including areas of connectedness - separateness, certainty - uncertainty and openness - closeness are more toward the first term before the hyphens so that our relationship will continue. Even though it gets very difficult at times, with the all the arguments and doubts, I hope things will work out for the better.

Social Information Penetration Theory

When I first met my girlfriend I only told her the basic things about me like my name, age, and where I was from. As we got closer, we began to share our likes and dislikes, which made us a little more closer. We soon started talking about what we want to do after we graduate and what we want to do with are majors. As time went past, she started to become more open with me then I was with her. I have always had a problem with opening up to people. I don’t know why but I could never allow myself to let people know everything about me because I didn’t want to get hurt or let the other person think they had enough information about me that they could use it against me. But my girlfriend made me open up to her because she said she felt I was hiding something from her. But, even though we have been together for two years, she still has not totally figured me out yet. In the movie Swim Fan, a guy named Jonnie got to know a particular girl too fast and they exposed too much personal information too soon. Within two days of knowing each other, they had sex, and this action led the girl to believe they had something more than what Jonnie thought it was. She would stalk him, threaten him and do whatever it took to learn everything about him. She even tried to kill his girlfriend so that her and Jonnie could be together. I’m not saying that I have experienced this type of crazed relationship, but nowadays, you really don’t know what people’s motives are. To prevent anything like what happened to Jonnie from happening to me, I am very cautious about how open I am.

Expectancy Violation Theory

In the hit TV show Family Matters, Steve always violated Laura’s personal space by coming near her even when she didn’t want him to. Steve broke all of the person space expectations rules. I have experienced this type of uncomfortable feeling that you get when people violate your person space. One day, I was in the laundry mat sitting at a table waiting for my clothes to get finished drying. I was sitting at a small table with my girlfriend, and an older woman sat down with us. There were many other tables available, but for some reason she sat next to us. I didn’t understand why she sat so close to me, let alone at the same table as me. It felt weird because I had no idea who she was. For all I knew, she could have been close to me so she could pick pocket my wallet or something. It made me feel a little uncomfortable but I didn’t want to be rude. I tried to give her nonverbal clues to let her know I wanted her to move, but she still stayed there. I guess my fake smile wasn’t enough for her to get the hint.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory

When I first met my best friend I didn’t know what to disclose because I knew if I told to much it could hurt me in the long run if this relationship did not work out. So, we just started off with simple verbal communication to see what we had in common. Then we started to hang out more and eventually were inseparable. We would go out everywhere together. We started using are own language that nobody could understand but us. Out of comprehensive theory the positives out weighed the negatives because he was the perfect friend. In the movie Mean Girls, the majority of the girls at the high school were not really friends because they all backstabbed each other. They would tell each other’s business to get the upper hand on their other friends who didn’t tell secrets, in order to become more popular, even if it did mean hurting the girls they called friends. However, it was just breaking down all of their relationships with reach other because they could not trust each other. Luckily, my relationship with my best friend and all of my friends are not and never were like the girls in the movie, so I didn’t have to worry about the backstabbing and lying.

Social Information Processing Theory

I have met people on-line, and it is very different from meeting people face to face. Ever since I became familiar with the Internet, I became fascinated with chat rooms, and recently Web sites like www.facebook.com. These Web sites sort of entranced me and hurt the face-to-face communication I had with certain people. CMC is growing at fast rates and it gave me the opportunity to meet people that I would never meet in my life. Face-to-face communication limited the people I could meet, but getting to know someone took less time. But with CMC I could put my best attributes forward but at the same time, limit the things I wanted people to know about me. CMC took 10 times longer for me to get to know people and to be more hyper personal. In the movie Perfect Stranger a woman met a man on-line who was married, but was cheating by talking to other women online. He met one of the ladies he had an on-line relationship with, and soon after, she was killed. One of the women he had a relationship with thought he was a killer. There are many movies that play on the theme like that of the Perfect Stranger, but this type of thing has happened to many women and men in real life. I have watched many episodes of America’s Most Wanted and have seen women open themselves up to men on-line and eventually in person; only to have that man be a killer… the rest is a sad, but deadly history. Having relationships on-line can be a safe route to prevent a previous hurt heart, but if taking too far, can end in tragedy. It’s sad but some people are actually sought out to be killed, and engaging in tragic on-line relationships are to blame for many deaths. Now, I don’t communicate on-line like I used to, and seeing how things are going in the world of Internet, I am glad I slowed down.