The Challenge of Understanding Diversity:
Noise in Communication between Nations and Cultures
It is undeniable that the 21st century is the age of information, which means that communication was never so agile and so important as it is now. It is also undeniable that today it is so much easier to cross long distances than it was before. With the facilities of fast travel methods, someone can easily arrive from any point of the world to any other point after just a few hours. This is a process that has been developed since the first navigator started to explore the oceans in order to find new worlds. As it was cited by Conrad Phillip Kottak in his book Cultural Anthropology:
...in the 15th century, Europe established regular contact with Asia, Africa, and eventually the New World (the Caribbean and the Americas). Christopper Columbus's first voyage from Spain to the Bahamas and the Caribbean in 1492 was soon followed by additional voyages. These journeys opened the way for a major exchange of people, resources, diseases, and ideas, as the Old and New Worlds were forever linked.
Since that time, and even more with the advent of globalization, these cultural connections became more frequent, congregating in common spaces people who come from different places and -- more important than that -- different cultures. Regarding communication, we can wonder what kind of difficulties these people can face throughout this process and how these difficulties can be avoided.
An emblematic example of problems unchained by international/intercultural communication was the publication of charges of Mohammed, the founder of the islamic religion, and the waves of wrath that they caused against some European countries. This fact happened 4 years ago, initially when the danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published twelve charges of the prophet Mohammed, including one where he appears using a turban with the shape of a bomb. After that, the polemic images were also published in Norway and France, causing a huge international conflict, especially because, according to the foundations of the islamic religion, any visual representation of Mohammed is forbidden. However, according to the freedom of press -- which is a strong principle of democratic nations --, anyone is passible of being criticized, and it doesn't exclude religious characters.
To clarify why this kind of things happen, it is important to understand how communication works. The most known model of communication always includes a transmitter sending a codified message through a channel to a receiver. If some anomaly happens in this process, noise can occur, and by noise we can understand everything that can confuse or disable the functioning of the communication process. After the reception of the message, the receiver decodes and interprets it. This basic model of communication was designed by the engineers Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in order to increase the efficiency of communication through telephone cables, which means that it is technical-oriented. In the telephone example, the channel would be the cable, and the noise would be just the crackling produced by the wire.
When this model is applied on human communication, the transmitter and the receiver can be individuals or groups of people, as nations or representants of different cultures, for example. The code is the language, and it is determinative to both the communication agents to be familiar with the same idiom. As it was written by Kottak, "speakers of particular languages use sets of terms to organize, or categorize, their experiences and perceptions. (...) Ethnosemantics studies such classification systems in various languages." But that's not all, since the language is not the only factor that contributes to the perception of the receiver. As Kottak afirms, "no language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else. Linguistics performance (what people actually say) is the concern of sociolinguistics." Sociolinguistic amplifies the study of communication, adding the social context to the mix (Eckert). In other words, when this model is applied on human communication, there is one more important aspect that can create noise between the decodification and the interpretation. This aspect is the repertory of the receiver, which is the package of previous information that he or she had before receiving the message.
The repertory is an important part of the process, because it works like a filter to the content of the message. It means that two receivers with different repertories can interpret the same message in two different ways. When the communication process happens between transmitters and receivers with different cultural repertories, the possibility of noise during the communication process is increased, because the social context, the protocols, the expectations, and the standards are different. As it was explained by the British anthropologist Edward Tylor, "culture (...) includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society," and all these factors are included in the respective repertories of the transmitter and the receiver. Consequently, if the repertories are too divergent, the communication becomes a strong colision of points of view and a source of misunderstandings.
In order to avoid that, the best solution is, at first, being aware of the existence of diversity, and also about the epistemological phenomena that makes diversity possible to happen. Epistemology (also known as Theory of Knowledge) is a field of study that belongs to philosophy, which is concerned to answer how and why people know what they know. If we apply epistemology to the cultural diversity, especially to understand the differences between the repertories of different communication agents, we will conclude that people have different standards because their knowledge comes from different sources. This is possible because of a process called enculturation. According to the author of Cultural Anthropology, "enculturation is the process by which a child learn his or her culture." It is a process that happens exclusively in groups, and, as the author explains, it is learned "by observing, listening, talking, and interacting with many other people."
As it was explained by Crichton in his novel The Lost World, which uses fiction to discuss evolutionism, educating children is the primary reason of the existence of a civilization. According to the author, this happens because, in order to have a bigger brain, the human infants must get out of the female bodies while the rest of their bodies is still fragile. So, unable to defend themselves, the human infants need their parents and a whole network of adults to protect and teach them. It is at this point that the enculturation process begins, and Kottak goes on, entering in the field of Semiotics: "Only humans have cultural learning, which depends on symbols. Symbols have a particular meaning and value for people who share the same culture." So, what happens is that different children who were born in different cultures will assimilate different cultural standards and develop different repertories throughout their lives. If they are aware of that, they can contribute to a smoother communication process when they become transmitters or receivers in an environment of intercultural communication.
According to Deborah Tannen (author of the book The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue, and many other books about gender issues and discourse), no one can deny that balance, debate and the act of listening to the both sides are, as she calls, "noble American traditions." However, she afirms that "yet today, these principles have been distorted." From this affirmation, she defines the argument culture as the United States' communication standard. The argument culture, as Tannen explains it, "urges us to approach the world, and the people in it, in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done." Therefore, if the senders and receivers assume an ofensive or defensive position during the process, which is the most probable hypothesis if they face communication as opposition, the possibility of dialogue is decreased.
After all, the solution for this kind of conflict is the spread of the concept of diversity and acceptance. People must understand that once we consider one's beliefs better than others', this is a new kind of Crusade. Although everyone's beliefs may differ, their values have the same weight than everyone else’s, and that is what equality is about: people do not have to be the same; they just have to be worth the same.
Works Cited
- Crichton, Michael. The Lost World. Ballantine Books, 1996.
- Eckert, P., and J. R. Rickford, eds. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
- Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998.
- Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958.
Noise in Communication between Nations and Cultures
By Guilherme Profeta
It is undeniable that the 21st century is the age of information, which means that communication was never so agile and so important as it is now. It is also undeniable that today it is so much easier to cross long distances than it was before. With the facilities of fast travel methods, someone can easily arrive from any point of the world to any other point after just a few hours. This is a process that has been developed since the first navigator started to explore the oceans in order to find new worlds. As it was cited by Conrad Phillip Kottak in his book Cultural Anthropology:
...in the 15th century, Europe established regular contact with Asia, Africa, and eventually the New World (the Caribbean and the Americas). Christopper Columbus's first voyage from Spain to the Bahamas and the Caribbean in 1492 was soon followed by additional voyages. These journeys opened the way for a major exchange of people, resources, diseases, and ideas, as the Old and New Worlds were forever linked.
Since that time, and even more with the advent of globalization, these cultural connections became more frequent, congregating in common spaces people who come from different places and -- more important than that -- different cultures. Regarding communication, we can wonder what kind of difficulties these people can face throughout this process and how these difficulties can be avoided.
An emblematic example of problems unchained by international/intercultural communication was the publication of charges of Mohammed, the founder of the islamic religion, and the waves of wrath that they caused against some European countries. This fact happened 4 years ago, initially when the danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published twelve charges of the prophet Mohammed, including one where he appears using a turban with the shape of a bomb. After that, the polemic images were also published in Norway and France, causing a huge international conflict, especially because, according to the foundations of the islamic religion, any visual representation of Mohammed is forbidden. However, according to the freedom of press -- which is a strong principle of democratic nations --, anyone is passible of being criticized, and it doesn't exclude religious characters.
To clarify why this kind of things happen, it is important to understand how communication works. The most known model of communication always includes a transmitter sending a codified message through a channel to a receiver. If some anomaly happens in this process, noise can occur, and by noise we can understand everything that can confuse or disable the functioning of the communication process. After the reception of the message, the receiver decodes and interprets it. This basic model of communication was designed by the engineers Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in order to increase the efficiency of communication through telephone cables, which means that it is technical-oriented. In the telephone example, the channel would be the cable, and the noise would be just the crackling produced by the wire.
When this model is applied on human communication, the transmitter and the receiver can be individuals or groups of people, as nations or representants of different cultures, for example. The code is the language, and it is determinative to both the communication agents to be familiar with the same idiom. As it was written by Kottak, "speakers of particular languages use sets of terms to organize, or categorize, their experiences and perceptions. (...) Ethnosemantics studies such classification systems in various languages." But that's not all, since the language is not the only factor that contributes to the perception of the receiver. As Kottak afirms, "no language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else. Linguistics performance (what people actually say) is the concern of sociolinguistics." Sociolinguistic amplifies the study of communication, adding the social context to the mix (Eckert). In other words, when this model is applied on human communication, there is one more important aspect that can create noise between the decodification and the interpretation. This aspect is the repertory of the receiver, which is the package of previous information that he or she had before receiving the message.
The repertory is an important part of the process, because it works like a filter to the content of the message. It means that two receivers with different repertories can interpret the same message in two different ways. When the communication process happens between transmitters and receivers with different cultural repertories, the possibility of noise during the communication process is increased, because the social context, the protocols, the expectations, and the standards are different. As it was explained by the British anthropologist Edward Tylor, "culture (...) includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society," and all these factors are included in the respective repertories of the transmitter and the receiver. Consequently, if the repertories are too divergent, the communication becomes a strong colision of points of view and a source of misunderstandings.
In order to avoid that, the best solution is, at first, being aware of the existence of diversity, and also about the epistemological phenomena that makes diversity possible to happen. Epistemology (also known as Theory of Knowledge) is a field of study that belongs to philosophy, which is concerned to answer how and why people know what they know. If we apply epistemology to the cultural diversity, especially to understand the differences between the repertories of different communication agents, we will conclude that people have different standards because their knowledge comes from different sources. This is possible because of a process called enculturation. According to the author of Cultural Anthropology, "enculturation is the process by which a child learn his or her culture." It is a process that happens exclusively in groups, and, as the author explains, it is learned "by observing, listening, talking, and interacting with many other people."
As it was explained by Crichton in his novel The Lost World, which uses fiction to discuss evolutionism, educating children is the primary reason of the existence of a civilization. According to the author, this happens because, in order to have a bigger brain, the human infants must get out of the female bodies while the rest of their bodies is still fragile. So, unable to defend themselves, the human infants need their parents and a whole network of adults to protect and teach them. It is at this point that the enculturation process begins, and Kottak goes on, entering in the field of Semiotics: "Only humans have cultural learning, which depends on symbols. Symbols have a particular meaning and value for people who share the same culture." So, what happens is that different children who were born in different cultures will assimilate different cultural standards and develop different repertories throughout their lives. If they are aware of that, they can contribute to a smoother communication process when they become transmitters or receivers in an environment of intercultural communication.
According to Deborah Tannen (author of the book The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue, and many other books about gender issues and discourse), no one can deny that balance, debate and the act of listening to the both sides are, as she calls, "noble American traditions." However, she afirms that "yet today, these principles have been distorted." From this affirmation, she defines the argument culture as the United States' communication standard. The argument culture, as Tannen explains it, "urges us to approach the world, and the people in it, in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done." Therefore, if the senders and receivers assume an ofensive or defensive position during the process, which is the most probable hypothesis if they face communication as opposition, the possibility of dialogue is decreased.
After all, the solution for this kind of conflict is the spread of the concept of diversity and acceptance. People must understand that once we consider one's beliefs better than others', this is a new kind of Crusade. Although everyone's beliefs may differ, their values have the same weight than everyone else’s, and that is what equality is about: people do not have to be the same; they just have to be worth the same.
Works Cited
- Crichton, Michael. The Lost World. Ballantine Books, 1996.
- Eckert, P., and J. R. Rickford, eds. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
- Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998.
- Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958.
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