The cycle of culture, communication and identity

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1.3, Charles Darwin University, language: English, abstract: When human beings are in the company of relatives, friends and neighbors,

they might take it for granted that communication is a complex continuous

process which has many nonverbal as well as verbal components. It is in the

encounter with a stranger or being in a strange situation which inherent uncertainness.

Having expectations how a stranger may act or how to act in a

strange situation can help to reduce this uncertainness. These expectations

are based on particular social convention, which are part of what is vague

called culture (Payer: 2011). If a situation cannot meet the expectations, people

become suddenly aware that, because all customary behaviors convey

information, they struggle to understand the happening until they know the

particular cultural code (Leach:1996:9p ). A cultural code describes the system

of representation by which signs and their meanings are arranged by cultural

convention to temporarily stabilize significances in particular ways

(Barker 2005: 436). Traffic lights are coded in a sequence: red for stop, orange

for pause and green for go.