Archive for the 'Cross-Cultural Communication' Category

Continuously Communicating

Imagine a nanny texting her young ward in the next room to ask, “Juice or Milk?” Imagine a young girl awakened in the middle of the night by her father’s video-chat invitation from Mumbai. Imagine a young man so isolated that the idea of being in the same city as his girlfriend is considered too much commitment. Shocked yet?

Probably not. Still, these are some of the tidbits from our wacky wired world that take center stage in Continuous City, a recent multimedia piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music created by the tech-savvy Builder’s Association. According to its marketing tagline, the play “explores our accelerated relationships in a sprawling multimedia world.” J.V. (Rizwan Mirza) is an internet entrepreneur trying to strike it big with a new social networking tool, XUBU, by tapping into markets in expanding cities around the globe. He has enlisted Mike (Harry Sinclair), an urban anthropologist, to trot from metropolis to metropolis, attempting to drum up financial and popular support for this revolutionary (and potentially lucrative) new tool. At home in the states, Mike’s daughter Sam (Olivia Timothee) grows distant and depressed while her nanny Deb (Moe Angelos) works on her new video-blog. Poor Mike begins unraveling as the stress of travel and distance from Sam begins to gnaw away at his faith in the power of the product. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the director’s note mentions both Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and Mike Davis’ “Slum Cities” as inspirations for the piece.) Here’s the trailer:

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In theory, there seemed to be a lot in this performance that would be of interest to students of communication, which is why I brought my COM 1010 class to see it. And the play earnestly tries to raise questions about our faith in digital communication (particularly in connecting “global cities”) and its limits. There are two conventional stage spaces (depicting the Xubu office space as well as Sam’s bedroom), and, thanks to a dizzying array of video screens, we jump between cities with a pace that would probably wear out even Bill Clinton.

Within this media mess, some genuinely fun innovating goes down: J.V.’s videochats with his family are actually live and unrehearsed videochats with the actor’s family members, and the video blogging done by Deb changes with every city the show tours. Perhaps coolest of all, there’s a phony website for Xubu.cc where anyone can record a message that might be used in the show as an example of Xubu.

My students were unexcited by the prospect of recording their own Xubu video messages, and they claimed to be confused by the frenetic non-linearity of the performance. They seemed to be more attracted to the slickness of its screens than anything else, and at one point during the show I turned around to find two of them sharing i-pod buds; a strange confirmation that perhaps some of the themes of the play both resonated and didn’t.

It is true that, as my friend put it, some of the conceits behind Continuous City felt a tad cliché (“We can’t communicate! Or remember our daughter’s birthday!”), even while it would seem that this is a company on the cutting edge of exploring the uses of this technology in performance. All of the miscommunication seemed to fudge up the rhythm of the dialogue in a way that was more distracting than anything else— the frustration that motivates many of us to just hang up on someone when we have a really bad connection is the way I would explain the emotional response that the play elicited in me. As an audience member, watching other people unsuccessfully multitask or attempt to navigate the impossibilities of time zone coordination tended to alienate more often than engage.

Along with all of this, Continuous City also allowed me reflect a bit on my own relationship to video chatting, as I’ve very recently become acquainted with this weird plane. While it of course hasn’t been a perfect experience, it’s made a tough long-distance communication situation better, not worse. (I couldn’t help wondering if Mike would have been a crappy father even if he lived in the same city as the neglected Sam.) Trying to sustain a meaningful conversation over video chat can be strange and self-conscious; at one moment it feels like an invaluable alternative to the tinny-ness of cellphone, and at others it feels boring and fractured.

For all its benefits, my v-chat experiences have also made me dubious about people actually doing business over this thing, which was also exposed in J.V.’s frantic video-conferencing; video chatting seemed to reveal itself as a horrible way to try to be productive and/or efficient. It didn’t surprise me to see that the video chatting done by the characters in the play was most successful during the simple moments of visual playfulness—like when Mike puts his computer camera on the grass in a park and plays virtual hide-and-go-seek with Sam. In its current incarnation, it often feels like a blessedly unproductive medium somehow, maybe because it creates intimacy by forcing you to sit down and focus on someone (on a screen) in an engaged, patient way; there’s no masking of any other activities, and, most of all, you need to really work to catch the freaky rhythms of the conversation. All of which, of course, we don’t necessarily manage to do even when we happen to be sharing time zones.

Misunderstanding about Cultural Misunderstanding

Some of you probably know that Baruch College has been ranked as the most ethnically diverse campus in the U.S. by this year’s Princeton Review. Working at the campus that has the most diverse student body in the nation, we often come across difficulties in cross-cultural communication, the topic which Szidonia’s last posting illuminated beautifully. I also have been working with many international students in Great Works, who make their extra effort to cope with the linguistic and cultural predicaments that they face. Having come from Korea, I can particularly relate to Asian students with their nervousness and discomfort in the classroom where they are expected to engage in discussion by challenging other people’s opinions and where they find a dissent sometimes valued more than a consent. This can be quite a novel idea to those who had different cultural upbringings. On the other hand, I have to confess that I felt perplexed the other day when a faculty member asked me why his Chinese female student is not vocal in class and whether it is because of her cultural background. I wished to give him a better explanation than just blaming it all on culture, but didn’t know where to begin.

I think the issue of cultural difference/misunderstanding/stereotyping is all the more compelling because it raises the kinds of questions that can’t be resolved easily, including those which Szidonia and Yukiko already brought up. In what occasions should we give a person the “cultural baggage bonus” or grant a cultural easy-pass? How can they be unjustly given or not given? In miscommunication, at which point does cultural difference stop playing a major role and others such as sexual, regional, generational, disciplinary, and individual differences factor in? One thing I’d like to add is the fact that people change, things move, and “culture”, like everything else, continuously evolves.

Seniors and Communication Technology

A few weekends ago I schlepped to Florida to celebrate my grandmother’s 99th birthday.  Being almost a century old, her vision and hearing is just not what it used to be, which makes communicating with others quite difficult for her.  However, I was amazed by how much technology is available for her and other seniors (and other visually- and hearing-impaired folks).  She had a hearing aid, which is pretty standard, but also a special phone with large numbers and a light that flashes when someone calls in case she doesn’t hear it ring.

The two pieces of technology that really blew me away, however, were a printing device called Presto, and an enlarger.  The enlarger looks like a combination TV/overhead projector.  If there is something my grandmother wants to read, she places it on the machine, and it appears enlarged on the screen.  This enables her to read everything from the directions on prescription bottles, to her favorite philosophical texts, to emails from her grandchildren.

That’s right–my 99 year old grandmother loves email!  My grandmother is unable to use a computer, but we can send her emails through the Presto machine, which looks like a regular HP printer.  Over the weekend that I visited, daily horoscopes arrived, and several birthday wishes.  After the emails are printed, all she has to do is walk them over to her enlarger and boom–she is able to remain connected with friends, family, and the outside world.

The best communication I have with my grandmother, however, is decidedly low-tech.  It is face-to-face, looking her directly in the eyes, squeezing her hands, and telling her that I love her.  However, because we live a thousand miles away from each other, and the phone has become an impossible barrier, email has to suffice.  As soon as I got home from my trip, I sent her an email filled with photographs of our visit.

You know, it’s cultural….

I am not saying this just to make Mikhail happy about assigning me the Accounting Department in my first year at Schwartz, but I really am enjoying working there. I had my misgivings early on, especially about the students treating me as a second-class citizen, a “fellow” who apparently has no clue about accounting, thus no need to pay attention to her. What I have been experiencing, however, is a great deal of gratitude on their part and a sense of appreciation that, at times, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, I tell them, I am only doing my job helping them with their presentations.

Maybe it is because of their responsiveness to me that I become a softee when it comes to the evaluation of their performance. Luckily I do not have to grade them, but I talk with their professor about how they did, and, more often than not, I find myself taking their side. I want the professor to be more generous, more understanding of how nerve-wracking a presentation can be, more embracing of the students’ individual skills and needs, etc, etc. On the professor’s side, I am facing a set of extremely well organized grading scale that breaks down final grades to the smallest percentage. This is how grading should really look like, I tell myself, envying the social sciences for their apparent efficieny that messy humanities people, let alone literature buffs like me, tend to miss. Yet, I feel like a coward when the professor mentions a student’s way of being too “soft-spoken” and I let it go saying only that her “softness” comes from her cultural training as a Japanese woman. (Apologies if this comes across as relying, yet again, on stereotypes about Asian women. Obviously not all Japanese women are low-key, but I just finished reading Kyoko Mori’s memoir, Polite Lies, and I think I got at least a better appreciation of Japanese cultural normativity than I had before reading the book.) Evidently, the professor, who has earned all my respect for his superbly organized way of doing his job, cannot let himself bogged down by my remark since he has to evaluate the final product, but I am left with a sense of failure.  I wish I had a way of giving more time and space to the process, of being able to assist each student individually while I do not run around myself trying to finish up my dissertation. In my dream-world, I use a grading rubric that includes “cultural baggage” as a big bonus point because I know how heavy it gets at times and how important it is to keep carrying it on in spite of all.

Dr. What?

My Jamaican sister-in-law shared this with me. The Real McCoy, a British sketch-comedy show that aired on BBC in the early 1990s, offers up one example of cross-cultural interpenetration… Dr. Who translated into Jamaican.

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How about using this as a model for an assignment on mash-ups, taking advantage of Web 2.0 to explore processes of translation/cultural exchange? Taking students inside the productive process, getting them to exercise knowledge in creative ways? It could work for anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, language, or sketch-comedy classes.

Making the Process Work

Inspired in many ways by Luke’s post, I asked students in my Great Works tutorial whether they would want to share their thoughts and questions on our Blackboard discussion board.  To my slight surprise (this class is already very demanding of their time - they come to the 90-minute tutorial every week and often attend the Writing Center) they overwhelmingly agreed.  I see that despite the product-oriented writing instruction or perhaps because of it, students long for a safe space to share their thoughts in.  They really seem to understand the need for a process to take place before any product can be put out.  For this reason, I think it’s a great idea to have the tutorial in the first place, as it provides plenty of room for that process to develop.  In a similar way, the Writing Center with its “I Write” campaign, which seeks to give student writers a sense of empowerment, is also a comfortable Baruch venue where academic professionals serve as facilitators not judges of their writing efforts.

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

Do You Speak International?

Gill Corkindale, writing in Harvard Business Online, has authored this interesting post on the development of communications in global business. Corkindale has a considerable amount of experience and is worth the read.

If an objective of our educational system is to produce students who survive, thrive, and make a difference in the world, then we must (as I believe I have argued before) be cognizant of the target environment and make sure that we do all we can do to prepare the student to “make it there.”

Postcard from Berlin

An Ampelmann on Bernauerstrasse (formerly East Berlin)

Ampelmann, or “street light man”, is a figure that appears on street lights in East Berlin, in green or red. He wears a wide brim hat and seems to be freeze-framed in the midst of a jaunty stride.

While the nostalgia for all things East German (Ostalgie) seems to have passed, Berliners vociferously opposed a project to homogenize all the street signs with the more boring looking West German design. The Ampelmann not only survived, but became an icon of the city and a popular tourist souvenir.

It seems that the street signs represent not only the right of way for pedestrians but also a way of life, a collective memory and a need to preserve a cultural heritage. Even though the street light man is a remnant of the old regime, he is also a part of the collective identity of East Berliners. People don’t necessarily associate the Ampelmann with the Stasi secret police or the DDR government but with their city and with their everyday lives.

Certainly Germany is in a very particular situation because the country had been split in two. After reunification, there was a trend to erase all remnants of the old regime and create a united national identity. Unlike the countries in the rest of the Soviet block, East Germany simply stopped existing. The people who lived there became Germans, but yet they are not simply Germans, not entirely. They had an entirely different history for the past fifty years and there was a feeling that a lot of the changes were imposed by the west. The Ampelmann is, in a sense, a way for East-Berliners to hold onto a part of their identity and resist the rush to erase the past as quickly as possible.

In Poland, the country found different ways of dealing with its past. Most of the Soviet era street names have been rapidly changed, and many monuments to the Soviet solders or prominent communists were destroyed. There is now some remorse for this rush to erase so many memories.

A Spoonful of Sugar

This spring, the New York Times offers a series of blogs written by students graduating in the class of 2007: The Graduates, Eight College Seniors Face the Future. I actually haven’t read many, because facing what I assume will be the optimism of new graduates feels a bit unmanageable in the face of my own struggles to make it in the real world! :-) However, yesterday’s post by Juliet Moser addresses something we all attend to when working with students. The question of praise. She responds to an article in the Wall Street Journal “The Most Praised Generation Goes to Work.” I can’t read the WSJ article, since it is not free online and the internet is my sole source of news, but her discussion and readers’ comments to her blog are worth reading. Are students today more narcissistic? Do they demand more praise?

As a CUNY Writing Fellow, I recall learning a method for responding to student writing: First, tell the student what you see happening in their work, in a neutral fashion; second, comment on what they do well; and third, propose a question that will help the student make improvements in their work or think about it more deeply. I wonder, is this instruction to fellows (and faculty) at least partially aimed at offering positive critique that won’t damage students’ self-esteem or stir up their defenses? I actually do think it’s a useful technique for responding to student writing. Commenting on student presentations can be a bit more difficult though, because there are a lot of “no-no’s.” I find myself saying: “Don’t cross your legs, don’t hold your arms, don’t lean on the furniture,” along with other positive commands such as “Stand up straight, Project your voice, or Look at the audience!”

In the two years I have worked with students at BLSCI, I have started to think the Mary Poppins school of teaspoon-full-of-sugar-making-the-medecine-go-down, is not a bad pedagogical strategy. I find myself framing my comments to students in terms of what I know they are doing well, and how they can improve their presentation further. I think of my sister, training two new puppies, and how much positive reinforcement in the form of praise (and Cheerios) shapes their behavior. Some time ago, one of the most e-mailed articles from the Times was from the Modern Love section “What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage” by Amy Sutherland who, in studying animal trainers, learned a new technique for dealing with some of her husband’s behavioral quirks that irritated her most. She began to ignore his negative behavior and reward the positive. I would say there are things students need to be told not to do. But I wonder, are students today more sensitive to criticism? What about cross-cultural differences? In sum, what are good strategies for responding to student presentations today?

The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why

I came across this will browsing Harvard Business Online. I’ve not read the entire article, but the notion that

“There’s only one problem with this process: We all speak different “languages.” We assign different meaning to linguistic behaviors such as questioning, apologizing, and being indirect. Result? We misjudge one another—ignoring or outright rejecting someone’s ideas because we’ve decided he lacks competence.”

seems to me to merit some additional thought.

More grist for the communications mill.