Communicating Across Cultures

Abstract

“Culture” is one of those expansive terms that we use most always without an explicit definition. Like “freedom,” “love,” and “common sense,” culture seems to be intuitively understandable. But, grasping its meaning gets mentally slippery when we attempt to saddle it with a cut-and-dry definition. Imparting culture can be thought of as the same as education, though then we are using another concept that is larger than any definition. Undergirding the upkeep of culture is communication. The integration and transmission of the intangibles that make up society must involve messages. Lots of them. So, how can we consider culture and use any insights we gain to communicate better? Clearly, communicators deal in big ideas. Lots of them. Thinking back to the communication model in Chapter 2, we need to consider the concepts of encoding and decoding of information. Even when an audience has been well characterized, there still exists the “noise” that occurs because the audience cannot clearly decode the message. Multicultural aspects can cause receivers of the message to perceive things differently than was intended by the communicator. Culture and communication are interdependent. One cannot exist without the other.