Tiêu đề PREPARATION FOR MIDTERM.docx ✅

CROSS COMMUNICATION CULTURE  You “learn” your culture via communication and that, at the same time, communication is a reflection of your culture.  Cultures are ways of thinking and ways of behaving, it consists of how we relate to other people, how we think, how we behave, and how we view the world. There is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture.  Culture is difficult to define. Cultures are always changing. We can define culture is a set of human- made objective and subjective elements that in the past have increased the probability of survival, became shared among those who could communicate with each other because they had a common language and they lived at the same time and place. Moreover, cultures are the importance of language as a symbol system that allows culture to be transmitted and shared.  Features of culture are human-made, values, beliefs, attitudes, norms, and foundational behaviors.  The heart of culture involves language, religion, values, traditions, and customs.  Characteristics of culture: - Culture is shared: + Most distinctive features of culture are that it is shared. + Culture is a group worldview, the way of organizing the world that a particular society has created over time. This framework of web of meaning allows the members of that society to make sense of themselves, their world, and their experiences in that world. + As a shared set of ideas, values, perceptions, and standards of behaviors, culture is the common denominator that makes the actions of individuals intelligible to other members of their society. It enables them to predict how other members are most likely to behave in a given circumstance, and it tells them how to react accordingly. - Culture is transmitted from generation to generation: + Our culture determines what it means to be a husband or wife, child, work colleague, acquaintance, or even a stranger. + So strong is the need for a culture to bind each generation to past and future generation that it is often asserted that a fracture in the transmission process would contribute to culture’s extinction. - Culture is based on symbols: + Without the capacity of humans to think symbolically and express those symbols, culture could not be passed from generation to generation.

 Learning culture through art - Art also heightens cultural and social integration by displaying and confirming values that members of a culture hold in common. - Art has provided a reflection of how people lived in and perceived the world. - Much of the art of Africa reflects the important social value of having children. - Such ego-oriented thinking is completely alien to Eastern life, thought, and religiosity.  Learning culture through media - From TV to online discussion to blogs social networks to the hundreds of other outlets, people share themselves and their culture. - Another powerful institutional agent of socializing is the media. - Newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, film, and the Internet transmit persuasive messages on the nature of reality. - The power of those messages. He asserts that they “help constitute our daily lives by shaping our experiences and providing the content for much of what we talk about (and how we talk) at the interpersonal level. - The theory avers that, over time, television shapes the viewers’ notion of reality. - The location of your birth sets the tone for what you learn and what you will not learn.  REMEMBER: Culture always changes, but the deep structure of a culture is resistant to change.  Culture is dynamic: - Outsides forces, be they armies or missionaries, “determine the cultural priorities of those whom they conquered. - Innovation: refers to the discovery of new practices, inventions, tools, or concepts that may produce changes in practices and behaviors for a particular culture. - Diffusion: is a mechanism of change that is seen by the spread of various ideas, concepts, institutions, and practices from one culture to another. - The deep structure of a culture resists major alterations. - “Popular culture” changes constantly while backstage culture changes very little or very slowly. - “Backstage culture” changes very little and very, very slowly. - Cultural boundary maintenance is the manner in which a culture maintains its distinctiveness that in the end strengthens its cultural traditions. - Societies insisted on adapting the religions to their own cultural traditions. - Traditional change is not welcomed and at times is greeted with hostility.  The elements of culture - Worldview: is the way a people interpret reality and events, including their images of themselves and how they relate to the world around them. It provides some of the unexamined underpinnings for perception and the nature of reality as experienced by individuals who share a common culture. The worldview of a culture functions to make sense of life, which might otherwise be perceived as disordered, accidental, and meaningless. - Religion: is used by people to help them understand the universe, natural phenomena, what to die for, and how to dwell among other people, means that to understand any culture, we must also