Ch 8 Blog 2

Cellular Phones: One of my greatest pet peeves is having to listen to someone else speaking loudly on a cellphone in a public place that puts people in close range. Somehow, these loud one sided conversations are far more offensive than two people having a loud conversation. Maybe its because if we eavesdrop we can only hear half of the conversation?
Answering Machines: I don't care for talking on the phone, so leaving messages isn't high on my list either. I'd rather send an email or a text. My cell phone has the standard greeting that just says my phone number, its not even personalized. When i call other people, i hate listening to long greetings before i can leave them a message.
Keep it short and sweet.
Conference Calls: I've only been on a few conference calls, but i find them confusing because many people don't follow the rule of etiquette to announce their name each time they begin speaking so everyone knows who it is.
Faxes: I agree that its best to call before faxing any documents, that way they are expected and someone is looking for them.
Timing your communication: This is a major rule that should not be broken! I really don't like it when people call after around 8:30pm unless i'm expecting the call--and i would never call someone else that late without checking first that it's ok. People have kids sleeping, or they might go to bed early so they can wake up early. Unwelcomed calls too early or too late are just plain rude.
Screen names and ring tones: It's so important to have neutral screen names that are appropriate for the workplace. Ring tones should also be appropriate. The other day in my math class a woman's cell phone went off...."Pick up the phone B*#CH" over and over again. She was mortified, the class was speechless. I'll bet she changed her ring tone after class that day. 
Rules of etiquette are important and should be followed, in the workplace and most other social situations that require human interaction. :)

Ch 8 Blog 1

Organizations are tied to their environment the same way that a living creature is tied to the environment that they live in. The environment of an organization can be healthy or it can be toxic. Members of an organization determine if the environment is healthy or toxic through human behavior and communication. Schools are tied to their environment through their affect on the community. They supply a learning environment for the community, provide jobs, and influence the local population with an influx of young people. Organizations like colleges have an ethical obligation to encourage a healthy environment. They should be having a positive impact on the community through community relations and taking care of the campus. Hopefully that healthy environment will have a positive impact by seeing the organization grow and expand to further fulfill the needs of the community.

Ch 6 Blog 1

I think that rigid complementarity would be the most difficult pattern to change. If one partner is always the dominant role in the relationship, and the other is always submissive, it would be very tough to change. The dominant person would be too accustomed to having control and making decisions. The submissive partner may not feel capable of stepping into a dominant role, even if they were given the opportunity. This could be damaging to the self esteem of the submissive partner. I can see how this pattern may work for some interpersonal relationships, like parents and children as the text mentioned, but it would be a difficult pattern to follow in a long term romantic relationship or friendship. Eventually one party will become bitter at the one-up, one-down roles they play. For example, i dated this super nice guy while i was in the military. He was "too nice" in the sense that he forced me to be the dominant person in the relationship. I would have preferred a more symmetrical relationship, but he was incapable of making decisions for fear of making the wrong decision. In the end i felt more like his mother than his girlfriend, bleh, and i was bitter with the roles we played. Needless to say we didn't work out. My husband and i have a blissfully happy marriage today because we are constantly adapting and changing roles to suite the needs of our relationship. Sometimes I'm dominant, other times he is. At times we can get competitive, especially at the gym. We have blended complementary and symmetrical patterns to form a fantastic interpersonal relationship.

Ch. 12 Blog 2

I am with the majority of Americans that believe " that humans are, at heart, rational; that they are perfectible; and that human nature is highly susceptible to social and cultural influence." The rationality premise is the reason that we still use trial by jury in our justice system. Our culture still upholds the idea that average citizens can make good and just decisions. The perfectibility premise is mostly true, I believe we are sinners, but i also believe that it takes more than good decisions to have that forgiven. The mutability premise is one that i struggle with because while it makes sense that changing someones physical and psychological circumstances would improve them, there are too many people who grow up in the worst of circumstances but turn out to be great people. There are also people who are given everything and have an ideal environment but they turn out to be very bad people. I do think that universal education is an excellent way to attempt to give everyone a fighting chance at turning out to be a responsible, rational adult capable of making good decisions and being a useful part of society.

Ch 12 Intercultural Communication Blog 1

I do believe that anthropologist Ruth Benedict is correct, we are "creatures of our culture". Anyone with children can see that we raise kids to be creatures of our culture. I was raised in a Christian home, my mom didn't let us out of her sight, and we always had dinner together as a family. We celebrated Christmas with a tree and on Halloween we could trick or treat, but were never allowed in scary costumes. I learned that a man is the head of the household, that boys did outside chores and girls did inside chores. These are all things that my parents believed and so we grew up believing the same things. As an adult, many of the beliefs i grew up with I'm now passing on to my children. I caught myself telling my son that he couldn't be a zombie for Halloween because we don't celebrate anything scary about the holiday. He wanted to know why, and all i could come up with is that it's because that's how i was raised. I suppose in order to break through limits of our culture we have to be willing to challenge some of our belief systems and really decide if it's our belief or just what we have been told to believe. I'm having to do that as a mother, to decide if i want to raise my boys exactly how i was raised. I am a creature of my culture, and most of what i learned will be passed on to both of my kids. My husband and i were raised similarly, so that doesn't cause any conflicts. I can't imagine what it must be like for intercultural marriages to meld together two cultures and decide how to raise the next generation. Their belief systems will be shaped by their families.

Chapter 2 Blog 3 Contexts for Observing Communication

One are we didn't cover in Chapter 2 that i really enjoyed was ethnography of communication. There are four distinct contexts for observing communication in our text. The first, Speech Community, is a group of people with a common attitude toward speech. I thought of my time in the Air Force in a flying squadron. We were our own community, even apart from the Air Force. The next context is Speech Situations, or certain occasions that call for speech. This made me think of formal Commanders Calls, Thirsty Thursdays, Booster Club events, Pre-Mission crew meetings, and Tactics and Intelligence Briefings. Each of these, even though among our small squadron, required very different forms of communication. Some communication would be very formal, and others very professional. The best would be the casual "war story" time with a beer on a Thirsty Thursday where rank went out the window and everyone sat around and bonded. Another context is Speech Events, i related this to different portions of a Commanders Call. We would be addressed by our Commander, different section officers, weather, tactics, safety, and booster club personnel. The final context is Speech Acts which is individual and purposeful acts of communication, usually broken down within a Speech Event. This might be just my Commander's portion of the meeting, and he might have expressed anger for something we failed on as a squadron, or maybe it would have been an expression of pride for a mission well done. This is just one of 5 models of communication that we have covered in chapters 1 and 2.

Chapter 2 Blog 2 Pragmatic perspective

I think it absolutely makes sense to think of communication as pattern of interactions. Communication is very much like a game: it requires more than one person to be involved, and often our choices are influenced by the other players. What i like about the pragmatic perspective is that this model says you can't NOT communicate. Even a lack of communication can be counted as communicating with another person. If I'm in a disagreement with my husband, his silent treatment speaks volumes. I know that through a pattern of communication or interacts that we have gone through over the years. When he stops talking, that is when he is the most angry. He knows that he might say something out of anger that he regrets, so he waits until he cools off and can have a two sided conversation. Since I'm having a baby any day now, i can't help but think about how the text refers to crying as a communication game. Even babies can communicate using the pragmatic model. They cry to have their needs met, and their cries are different. As parents, we respond to the cries and that is our interact. As patterns develop, both babies and parents learn to communicate using this game. The baby knows that if they cry, the parent will come to them. If the parent chooses not to go to the child, for example at bedtime, then that to speaks volumes to the child. That new pattern may teach them that there are certain times which the crying game will not work, and therefore they stop using it and just go to sleep.