Shawn Gholson

Professor Berkos

COM 491

11 September 2017

Chapter 1 Reflection

Many people believe that communication is very simple, however, that is not the case.

People think that communication is just the flow of information from one person to another.

There are nine different contexts of communication. There are cognitive, individual differences,

interpersonal, intercultural, persuasive, group, organizational, mediated, and last is mass

communication. The cognitive context involves how the way we think influences

communication. The individual differences context involves the nature vs nurture debate.

Interpersonal refers to two individuals who often have a relationship with one another.

Intercultural focuses on interpersonal communication with two people of different culture.

Persuasion context refers to how ones mind or mass media can affect communication. The

group and organizational contexts are both closely aligned with work. Mediated context involves

how technology comes into play. Mass communication focuses on the mediated messages. Each

of these contexts al have a number of theories associated with them. Some of the main ones that

stand out are attribution theory, cognitive dissonance, cultivation theory, social cognitive theory,

and media richness theory. Theories provide an abstract understanding of the communication

process. They can help you understand the communication process more clearly but can also

hide things from your understanding or distort the relative importance of things. There are three

types of theories, commonsense theories, working theories, and scholarly theories.

Commonsense theories are based on a persons experiences or from hinted passed by the people
around them. An example of this would be never date your coachs daughter because it will

never end well. Working theories are generalizations made in particular profession about the best

way for doing something. As a college football recruiter, you ask the head football coach how

the players grades are and how he is as a person before you contact the player. Scholarly

theories mean that they have undergone systematic research, therefore, providing more accurate,

thorough, and abstract information. An example would be agenda-setting theory; the media does

not tell us what to think but what to think about. Finally, there is a way to evaluate which

scholarly theories are the most useful. The five things on the criteria list are accuracy which is

does research support it, practicality which refers to can you apply it to the real world,

succinctness which means in the theory sufficiently concise, consistency which can be internal or

external, refers to the logic of the theory, and acuity which is basically the wow factor that

makes people think oh wow I never thought of that.

One way that this reading applies to me is through intercultural context. I have been in

several situations where my culture being different has created a barrier to communication. My

freshman in one of my classes first semester, I was in a group in which my culture was very

different than a couple of my group my members. The reason this was an issue was because our

assignment involved coming up with a plan that involved us expressing our own personal

experience to come up with a solution that we thought was the most appropriate. To make a long

story short, they thought things were okay that went completely against how I raised in my

household and it was very hard for us to communicate with one another and come to an

agreement.
After reading this chapter, I was able to come up with two questions. What theories best explain

how a difference in culture has an impact on communication? How should you go about

handling situation where there is a difference in culture?