The forms of communication today are bewildering. Especially to digital immigrants, but perhaps also for my students, lest not forget we, the teachers. We have started this year with setting up a wiki, but we have also set up a class blog for info regarding homework, which is also shared in a calendar online (Google Calendar). The sources of information are plentiful. What I attempt to teach is purpose and responsibility. How to use the tools at hand in an appropriate way.
I realize I have changed my work habits dramatically compared to how I organized my work 10 years ago. There are more interruptions and distractions. I often skim a text, getting the gist, rather than reading it. The short message wins over the long message. Getting across messages are important, moreover getting things done.
Communication in the 21. century can be a balancing act of high and low contexts.
Cultures can be divided into two different spheres in terms of how they view time. The monochronic “stress a high degree of scheduling, concentration and on one thing at a time” (Hall and Hall, Understanding Cultural Differences), whilst on the other hand in a polychronic culture it is the opposite: “human relationships and interactions are valued over arbitrary schedules and appointments”. More interestingly “Many things may occur at once (since many people are involved in everything, and interruptions are frequent.” Sounds familiar? Monochronic cultures tends to include Northern Europe, like Scandinavia, but also the USA, and polychronic cultures are traditionally Latin countries and cultures in Africa, Asia and Latin-America.
On a persol level I feel I have moved from a monochronic life, where I enjoyed reading a long novel or writing a long piece of text exempted from mobile chirps or any other interuptions. Not anymore. I find myself twittering, reading three books at the same time, discussing online in forums, texting others, surfing, eclectic music taste, organizing things and being present in my own life. I don’t think my students are any different. They are many places psychologically at the same time (not different from when I was a student daydreaming in class), and does it threaten concentration or does it enhance it? Is multitasking a goal in itself? Does it sharpen one’s focus? Yes and no. There are contexts for long stretches of focus and short ones.
Context
Culture can be likened to a giant, extraordinary complex, subtle computer.
The Internet is a very complex context. Hall and Hall introduces high and low contexts and the world is divided into different cultures which are either high context cultures or low context-oriented. In a low context communication the listeners know very little, but in a high-context communication the participants know a lot already and are “contexted”. How about Internet then and the culture online where all the world’s cultures meet? How does this apply to this environment?
Twitter is often likened to a dinner party, and entering this “cultural sphere” can be daunting and chaotic. It’s a high context communication that requires a polychronic approach. For outsiders, and particularly people who are monochronically inclined, it’s just meaningless babble.
My students’ work with the class wiki is also a polychronic activity as all the students are collaborating simultaneously and communicate in a high context as they all know the common goal – to complete the wiki by adding and editing content – through mediums of sharing links, discussing in a chat and conversing if they sit in the same room. What skills are required for these activities?
One might argue that it is a skill to determine whether the medium is a high-context or a low-context, and usually I find that it is a low-context, but it can be hard to decipher. Furthermore, it is a important to develop skills for both monochronic and polychronic situations.
One of the great communications challenges in life is to find the appropriate level of contexting needed in each situation.
Disclosure: This is an excerpt from a log reflecting on literature and concepts presented in Cultural Competence, which is a course I attend in relation to my masters’ degree in language didactics at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. I intend to blog a selection of my log entries for two reasons; mainly for my own reflection, blogging lends a sensation of focus and secondly for sharing and archiving.
