 Let me ask you a couple of important questions. If I were to ask you what do you call a carbonated sugary beverage that sometimes comes in a can and what would you call a beverage like that? Just in general, not a specific product or brand, but what would you call something like that? I mean, hopefully you said pop, which is the American answer. If you said soda, you may be a communist, something to examine about yourself. But hopefully you said pop, but we know that there are different variations of that across the country and in different places. What about this? What if somebody sneezes? What do you say in response to somebody who sneezes? Do you say God bless you? Do you say gazuntite? Do you say salut? Do you say, you know, don't sneeze on me ever again? What is it that you say to that person? And again, will vary from person to person and depending on what they learn growing up, right? What about this one? Another key question here. Have you ever been to a tractor pole or, you know, where you've known somebody who pulled in a tractor pole or, you know, participated in a tractor pole in any way? That's another kind of regional variation in some ways. There are some areas where you're like, well, yeah, of course I've been to a tractor pole and maybe even pulled in a tractor pole and there are others who are like, what is a tractor pole and why would you do that? So these are all examples, though, of just different things that may seem totally normal to one person, but totally abnormal to another person that really are identifiers of a culture and ways that we can look at culture, just examples of culture and culture impacts and influences every aspect of our life and certainly intersects and influences our communication. And that's really what we want to look at in this brief mini lectures, defining culture and then examining where it kind of intersects with communication, how it impacts and influences communication. So let's start off by getting on the same page with what we mean by culture because sometimes there's some misunderstandings or misnomers about culture and how it comes about and what it means. So let's get on the same page here and let's define culture. Culture is the learned and shared set of symbols, language, values and norms used to distinguish one group of people from another. That's all culture is really not all it is. It's a lot. There's a lot of complicating factors in here, but it's the learned and shared set of symbols, language, values and norms used to distinguish one group of people from another. So let's take a look at this in pieces and examine what this means, what implications this has for us. So first of all, we need to understand that culture is learned and shared. It's not something that's genetically predisposed. It's not something that we're born with or born into depending on our nationality or where we're born or anything like that. Culture is quite simply learned and shared. There are things we pick up from our family, from our community, from our peers that establish what is normal, what is expected, what is appropriate for us and what is not. You know, what is considered none of those things, but those are things that we learn over time. They're not, again, not a genetic predisposition. That's not something we're born with. Culture is learned and shared by definition. So what is it that we are learning and sharing? Well, we're learning and sharing these four different components of culture that we identified in that definition, but let's take a look at each of those then individually here. The first is symbols. Every culture is going to be made up of different symbols that are important to that culture and have specific meaning for that culture. So if we just take, for example, the culture of the United States, the culture of America, the symbols that are present in American culture include things like the flag, right? The flag is an important symbol. Now, in reality, the flag is a piece of fabric of specific colors and different patterns on a specific pattern. So it's just really a piece of cloth or pieces of cloth that are put together. But the symbolism behind that, what it represents for us as individuals, for us as a country, is really, really powerful. So the American flag is a powerful symbol that we hold here in the United States. And others, baseball, for example. You could throw football in here, too, if you wanted to. But these national pastimes, these sports, you know, baseball is considered America's pastime, right? Although that, you know, again, could be changing, I don't know. But still, as far as right now, baseball is still considered America's pastime. So baseball is a very American thing. It's a symbol of America. Apple pie, and when you throw all these together, right? Because American is apple pie. But also, how much more American can you get than an apple pie sitting with a baseball and baseball bat on an American flag, right? I mean, those are things that are prototypically American. They symbolize America. They have meaning. They represent things for us and for our culture. So they're symbolic of American culture and the things that we hold important. So culture is made up, first of all, of symbols. Every culture is made up of these different symbols, different types of symbols. Things that represent specific ideas and have particular meaning for that culture. Every culture is also represented by a language, by a particular language. You know, again, sticking with the American theme, our language, not technically officially, we don't have an official language in the United States, but predominantly in the United States, we speak English, right? There are lots of languages that are spoken here, but English is kind of the predominant one. The common language that most people speak here in the United States. So we share that language. But in any culture, whether it's your place of business or your group of friends, you're going to have a specific language that goes along with that, even if it's all English. Everybody in your organization, where you work or where you go to school, may speak English, but there's a particular shorthand at times, right? Or abbreviations that you might use, acronyms that you might have. So there's a language that is specific to that culture as well. And so that's part of a shared component of culture, is that they have these symbols that are represented, but also the shared language that is shared and learned throughout the members of that culture. And you also have this idea of values. Every culture shares a set of values. All the members of that culture share those values, theoretically, right? So again, if we go back to the United States, what are some of the important values of the culture of the United States and of America here? Well, you know, liberty, freedom, independence, those are all things that our country was really founded on, the idea of liberty and freedom and independence of the individual. And so those are important values for people in the United States that we hear a lot about. And this value of justice, this fair and equitable justice, and that justice is blind in the United States. Again, theoretically, or aspirationally, I should say, that justice would be blind and that it would be fair and equitable. And that's something we strive toward and something we purport to be working toward and hope to. Equality, the idea of equality that every person has an equal opportunity here in the United States, or at least an equitable opportunity, theoretically, to be successful, to have the life they wish and at least the opportunity to work toward that as much as possible and without discrimination based on religion and race and color and those types of things. But equality is a value that we espouse here in America. So we have those different values that we share as part of our culture. Now, we also have norms, things that are, you know, considered, quote unquote, normal for a particular society. And in the United States, we have those as well that vary from other cultures around the world, maybe. For example, we are prolific meat-eaters in the United States, right? Of course, there are vegetarians and vegans and so forth. But for the most part, we eat meat and specifically we eat meat from, typically from cows and pigs and as opposed to other animals, you know, or what we hunt, deer, rabbit, those types of things. But we're big on hot dogs and burgers off the grill. So we're big meat-eaters here in the United States. That's a norm here that we would eat those types of foods here. It's a norm for us to drive on the right-hand side of the road and not the left-hand side of the road. That's typically where we find ourselves driving, hopefully, ideally, is on the right-hand side of the road. We live in usually single-family dwellings. These homes that are intended for one family, maybe an extended family, but and have larger yards as opposed to other parts of the world where they, you know, an apartment or a flat would be more typical for even a family of any size as opposed to a single-family dwelling with a larger yard. Just in terms of space constraints and things in the United States, we tend to have more space. So we have these different types of dwellings. So that's the norm here in the United States. So, you know, again, these four things make up every culture. And it's not just based on, you know, countries we'll talk about, but any culture. I can think about the school where you attend or the business where you work or or any, you know, group of friends that you have. And I bet you can identify symbols that are important to that to that culture and a language that is shared amongst that culture. Even, again, going beyond just, you know, whether you're all speaking English or all speaking Spanish or whatever, there's a language that will be kind of a shorthand or an acronym that, you know, may apply to that specific culture. There are different values that you spouse and norms that you would have for any culture that you're going to be a part of. So a culture is a learned and shared set of these four things. Symbols, language, values and norms. In addition to the components of culture, one of the things that the definition we looked at identified was that culture is a way that we distinguish one group of people from another, that culture is used to distinguish one group of people from another through these different components. But until this creates what we call then co-cultures, right? And co-cultures, we all have multiple co-cultures in essence, right? We think of ourselves as one person and we are, you know, as part of one culture, maybe the culture of the United States or the culture of our community, whatever, but the truth is we have multiple co-cultures within us. As to other people, everybody else has multiple co-cultures that we belong to. We espouse all those four things for. So if we think about it, for example, in a broadest context, we think about the United States in the place of the world, right? In our place in the world, then we think, well, the United States is different and we are, we have different, as we talked about, different symbols, language values and norms, maybe then other parts of the world. So we think, OK, well, America is a culture then, right? The United States is representative of a culture and it is. The United States has its own sort of culture. But then we know that within the United States, even though there are various regional differences, right? That the people from the Midwest say things differently than people from the South or the West or the East Coast or something. So, for example, just to reach back to the very beginning, we talked about you call it a pop or a soda and hopefully again, hopefully you're saying pop, but I can tell you somebody from the Midwest, we say pop or I say pop, at least in my community, that we said pop and people who say soda are weird to us. But or that, you know, that I grew up growing to tractor poles and doing different things like that. So because I'm from a very small town and that was a part of our world. And so people who didn't grow up doing that group doing other things that would be a part of their culture that's different. So even within the United States, we have multiple cultures just regionally, right? And you can keep going down to where different states have different cultures and different different co-cultures exist within different communities. And all you have to do is walk into the lunch room of any high school across the country to see that there are cultures that exist in there, right? There's a table over here at lunchtime of the jocks and the table of the theater people and the table with the band people and so forth that are really representative of different co-cultures. And the truth is, if you think of any hobby that you have, whatever hobby that you have, for example, just pick, you know, any hobby, that hobby or that interest or, you know, that has a is really a co-culture. It's representative of a co-culture. Whatever it is that you're into is representative of a co-culture. And presumably you're interested in more than one thing. Each of those things then has a different co-culture or represents a different co-culture. So you can see we're all made up of these different co-cultures. Individually as well as a society. So it goes from the very broadest sense of being, you know, the culture of the United States, for example, down to the culture of that specific individual and whatever hobbies and interests that they might have. And again, cultures, the point of co-cultures, this is how we distinguish one group of people from another. It's how we kind of separate and not in a bad way. We're not we're not separating necessarily in terms of culture in terms of right or wrong or good or bad, which is identifying differences. And so within that, we any culture that we would belong to or co-culture that we belong to, we call an in group. And others that we don't belong to are called out groups. And we identify simply as in groups and out groups. And in group is anything where we would say us and an out group would be any group or any, you know, interest or activity where we would say them that doesn't involve us, right? That's an out group. So for us, our in groups are anything where we would say us, anything that we are involved in, interested in, where we would count ourselves as part of that and say us, that's an in group. All the others are out groups, what we call out groups. So we would refer to them as them, for example. Now that we have a sense of what culture is, the learned and shared set of symbols, language, values and norms used to distinguish one group of people from another. Let's identify a little bit what culture then is not and clarify a little more based on what culture is not. So culture undefined, for example, is that culture is not the same as ethnicity, race or nationality. Those things are not components of cultures we've talked about. They're not. Those are all things that you are genetically born into or that are passed down through your DNA or as a circumstance of where you're born. But those are not things that are learned and shared. And as culture is something that has learned and shared, we know that they are different. So culture is not the same as ethnicity, race or nationality. However, culture does oftentimes follow along with those things, just as a matter of circumstance, right, as a matter of human nature. So, for example, just to give you an idea of what I mean by this, again, I'm from Indiana, that's my home state. And so Indiana is an interesting kind of area because it's really almost two different states. It's really kind of very different. The northern part, you could almost draw a line through the kind of lower third of the state. And it's really like a different state, the accent is different. The interests are different, the kind of values are different. I mean, it really is a separate culture from the rest of the state, almost. And not in a good or bad way, it just is different. And interestingly, a few years ago, there was a study done at the Graphics Study of what is it that makes up Indiana. And they identified, if we look at the topographic map here of Indiana, you can identify, I mean, that blue line, there's a river, right? It really kind of divides right where that line runs. And you can see below that, it's a very hilly, I wouldn't say mountainous because they're not mountains, but there's very much a hilly area as opposed to the northern two thirds of Indiana, which is more flat. A lot of farmland, a lot of corn and grazing pastures and things. The southern part of Indiana is very hilly and very different topographically and really has a lot in common with the topography and the geological area of Kentucky. If we look at where Indiana rests in the rest of the United States, we can see that it's right near Kentucky. It has a lot in common with the area of Kentucky. The accents are very similar because the topography is very similar. And this ethnographic study showed that really that part of the country, meaning the Appalachian area of the country, was heavily founded by or heavily inhabited by immigrants from the, for example, Scotland, from the highlands because it reminded them of their home country, that the topography, the hills and things like that reminded them of their home country. So it was heavily immigrated to by people of Scottish descent. And so you have a lot of similarity, a lot of cultural values that you carried over from the highlands with that. Whereas opposed to the northern two thirds of the state was really largely inhabited in terms of immigration and had been inhabited by people from heavily German descent and Scandinavian descent. So really just kind of a different philosophy in different cultures. And so you have this kind of split personality almost between the northern two thirds of Indiana and the southern two thirds because culture tends to follow people who are of a similar, you know, people when you grow up again, cultures learn and shared. So people who grew up in the same type of area tend to congregate with one another, even when they come to a new country, which is why, for example, like if we look at the map of New York City here and specifically that area identified at the bottom there, we blow that up a little bit. We can see that it's why you end up with areas of a city like New York called Chinatown, called Little Italy, called Little India because people who come from those those areas tend to congregate because they find comfort in being around people who share their cultural values, share their language, share their their their symbology, right? And so they congregate in these specific areas of a city or of a country. And so their culture then tends to follow them there. And so culture is not the same as ethnicity, race or nationality. However, people of the same ethnicity, race and nationality tend to obviously be around each other more. So who do you learn and share these things from? People who are of a similar ethnicity, race and nationality oftentimes, right? So while they're not directly connected to culture, they do oftentimes share that common sort of DNA, so to speak, of culture tends to follow those groups in some ways. So so culture is not the same as those things because it is learned and shared. However, it does tend to be learned and shared in those very similar areas. Culture is also not the same as ethnocentrism, right? There's there's there's nothing wrong with being having a national pride and and being proud of your culture and those types of things. But ethnocentrism, by definition, is the belief that your culture is inherently superior to another culture or cultures, right? That yours is the best. And sometimes in the United States, just like anywhere else, we tend to follow, we can fall into this trap of ethnocentrism where we start to look at the world based on when the United States is the center of everything, obviously, and everything else is supplementary or or just, you know, secondary to the United States and and so they ought to fall in line and and why don't they want to be more like us? And we see ethnocentrism a lot, for example, in maps but because people who control things tend to do that. So this is a map you're probably familiar with. It's the map of the world, right? That most of us grew up with in our classrooms. It's called the Mercator Projection map. The problem with this map is that it's wrong, proportionately speaking. It's wrong. Things are not where they seem to be here. This map is a couple hundred years old and and was developed at a time when Europe was the center of the world, so to speak. And so Europe is placed directly in the center of this map and it's given a larger proportion than it than it actually has in real life. Obviously, now we have access to satellites and different things and we can accurately measure these things in proportion. So it may shock you to find that this is an inaccurate map that has a very much an ethnocentric European slant to it, making Europe and to some extent the North America bigger and in a more predominant position than other parts of the world, which we're seeing a secondary or less important. So just to brace yourself, I'm going to show you what is an actually an accurate projection. This is called the Gall Peters Projection map and it really is an updated and more accurate map of the world. So this is what we see now. This is the actual size of things in proportion. You can see that Europe is much smaller than it was in the Mercator Projection map. Africa and South America much larger than they were. So things were just put in their accurate proportions. And just for comparison sake, you see the difference. The blue is the Gall Peters projection map and the yellow is the older Mercator projection map. And you can see the big differences and that the yellow is not really accurate and represents an ethnocentric view of the world placing Europe in a central position, placing Europe in a larger position than it actually inhabits, at least geographically speaking. So and there's some case to be made that even by virtue of being on top of the map gives this impression that Europe and North America and places like that are superior and everybody else is at the bottom. So some people say, well, we ought to turn it upside down. So here you have the world turned upside down in the inverted Gall Peters projection map, which will really blow your mind a little bit, right? But that's a topic for another day. But you can see that ethnocentrism really can be represented in a variety of different ways. We need to be cautious of the idea that when we talk about culture, we're talking about different than, not better than or worse than, but just different than different. Other cultures are different than ours and that's OK. Doesn't make them inherently better or worse than our own culture. So how does culture then influence communication? Well, there are a variety of things that we can get into here. But just in the briefest sense to give you an idea of some ways that culture influences and intersects specifically with communication. First of all, the idea of individualism versus collectivism or this individual versus group mentality. Should we be looking out for number one as an individual or should we be looking out for our group as a whole, our society as a whole? In the United States, we tend to be very individualistic where we're really kind of looking out for ourselves as much as anybody. And the idea of individual successes is trumpeted and individual achievement is placed over a group, a cohesion and group, you know, equilibrium, I guess you would say. So this individual versus group mentality is something that's different from culture to culture across the world. We call individualism versus collectivism. Also, the idea of have attention to context in communication. You have what we call low context cultures and high context cultures. The United States is a very low context culture where we take people literally, we take them at their word and so we just accept things at their word as opposed to other cultures where they read more into different aspects of communication. They look more at context overall. They look more at some of the nonverbal communication or what that person has going on in their life right now and so forth. So they, you know, yes is not necessarily yes and no is not necessarily no as opposed to the United States where they literally are. Yes and no, that's what we expect. We don't expect beating around the bush, right? So this attention to context as a part of communication is greater in other in some cultures than others. Again, advantages and disadvantages to both sides of that. So just something to be aware of. Once I have this idea of deference to power or authority through what we call low power distance cultures and high power distance cultures in the United States is very much a low power distance culture. That is that nobody is inherently superior. Nobody is inherently better. I mean, your boss may have authority over you in certain contexts, but that doesn't make them a better person overall or somebody that we should never question or challenge or even they need to speak to as opposed to other cultures where that is very much the case. People at different levels of society are not people that we would sort of be allowed to speak to because of that high power distance culture relationship and in terms of communication, you just wouldn't cross that boundary. So, yeah, there's a difference there and that deference to the power authority. There's also our comfort level with ambiguity or what we call uncertainty avoidance. Some cultures are very comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, other cultures are not. In the United States, we're not as comfortable with that. We don't like ambiguity as much. We want certainty and other cultures are much more comfortable with this sort of lack of clarity in communication that's kind of baked in or built in. Achievement versus nurturing. I mean, in the United States, we tend to heavily favor achievement. At least traditionally, we have individual achievement and achievement as a country and that's very important to us as opposed to nurturing. Other societies are very much interested in nurturing as opposed to acclimations of achievement. And then just another aspect is this view of time. Do we view time as this very specific or what we call monochronic situation where people have time as money, time as a resource, time as you show up on time, things start on time, things end on time, or is a little more fluid in context there in other cultures? In the United States, we're very monochronic, very much that specific regimented view of time whereas in other cultures, it's a little more fluid. It's a little bit, things aren't quite as wrapped up in time in the same way. Time's not considered this commodity that it is here in the United States. So again, none of these are right or wrong. We have to remember that these are just differences in the way that different cultures approach these things in a broader context. And so as we approach any of this really from a large context, from a more narrow context of an individual or any of that, we need to remember that culture is just different. We need to have an appreciation for other cultures that there are other cultures and that they may have different viewpoints and different ways of doing things and that that's okay. That we can adapt as effective communicators part of our job is to adapt to those situations and do the best we can to be more competent communicators even in these intercultural contexts. A few questions about intercultural communication or any other aspect of communication specifically as it relates to the media and which has caused a shrinking world of course where encountering people from different cultures more than we ever have before. And so if you have questions about any of this, please feel free to email me and be happy to chat with you via email and discuss this even further. In the meantime, I hope that you will give, you know, first and foremost consideration to culture and think about how that might be impacting any communication situation that you are in that you find yourself in because I promise you culture is an undercurrent that exists in the context of communication regardless of the situation or scenario and is very much worthy of your consideration.