Speech Communication > Issues in Communication

1. Physical Appearance: Physical appearance has a huge role in how we evaluate others. It helps us form those extremely important first opinions about another person. Just remember that whenever you met a new classmate or friend, you described it by his/her appearance. “There is a new girl in my Bio class. She’s too tall, and maybe a little too skinny. She has short blond hair. She’s not pretty at all. I don’t understand why all the boys want to talk to her.” I think we all made or make this kind of comments whenever we want to describe somebody. First of all we notice obvious physical attributes, and then we tend to make judgments. Some people comment mostly negatively, while others mostly positively when regarding to a third party. I think we all know both of these types. Another way of describing or evaluating a person would be by his/her personality. We could say that person is kind or rude, but these attributes usually secondary when we give a description. In our culture physical appearance has a very high status. Different cultures have usually different values as to what is considered to be attractive and what is not.

2. Haptics: Haptics is the study of nonverbal communication involving touch. Touch is the first of our five senses to develop. Touches by our parents at an early age are extremely important to a healthy life. Parents in a happy and healthy family tend to touch their babies more often and more warmly. In dysfunctional families mothers handle children more harshly, sometimes pushing them away, nonverbally signaling rejection. These kinds of behaviors have a long lasting effect on the person’s mental state even in adulthood. Touching also symbols power and status. People with higher status more often touch others then people in lower status. Culturally women considered to be more touchable then men. I personally can’t stand if someone other then my closest friends touches me, even if it’s just a tap on my back. The manager at the place I work likes to express his satisfaction with my work by touching my arm or back, which I find intrusive. This is consistent with the above mentioned facts. He’s a man in a slightly higher status who thinks that women are more touchable.

3. Artifacts: Artifacts are personal objects we surround ourselves to express our identities or territories and to personalize our environment. When we move to a new house at first we feel like everything is strange and then we begin to decorate it with our objects from our old house and we feel more comfortable at once. We also wear clothes and jewelries in a way that is unique to us, or at least we hope it is, only to differentiate ourselves from others or to express our moods. The way we dress influences our mood and vice versa. If we wake up in a bad mood we’re more likely to dress in sloppy clothes. Or if we put on a nice dress we are more likely to behave in a different manner, because we feel good about ourselves.

4. Chronemics: Chronemics is the study of how individuals perceive and use time to define identities and interaction. We use time to express status. For example people with higher status feel that they can keep others waiting. I know people who are never able to get anywhere on time. I was always wondering what might be the reason. Is it because they never start getting ready on time, or is it something else? I realized it is because they feel that they have the right to make other people wait. I noticed that often times, when a couple wants to go out, the wife makes the husband wait for her even when they’re obviously late for somewhere. The reason is that the wife wants to show that she’s the boss, and everybody else has to comply with her.

5. Silence is another type of nonverbal behavior. Silence can also communicate powerful messages. It can express anger, discomfort, intimacy, awkwardness. My mother used to not talk to me for days if I did something she didn’t approve, and I know that this was the worst punishment ever. I used to do the same thing if I was angry with somebody, but I realized that talking about what bothers me is a lot more effective way to solve problems. If we meet a person we feel awkward if our conversation pauses because we don’t really have anything to talk about. We feel pressured to avoid these kinds of gaps in our communication.

 

The presenting and perceived selves have to match for a realistic person. By the time we turn twenty, I think we all know ourselves that much that we all have sensible judgment as to who we present ourselves to be. If I perceive myself as a shy or confident person, then my presenting self will be either shy or confident. If I select a couple of my attributes to show to other people, then I think others will see me according to those attributes. The selection process works not only as to how others perceive us without us influencing it, but by how we want them to see us. We can present just a few characteristics of ours, and so others will see and perceive these, and only these stimuli. Others will notice my most obvious attributes at first, which might or might not be the ones I want them to notice. They will probably note the external factors, which are that I’m not quite as young as the others, but otherwise I look normal in a college environment. My speaking voice is neither too loud nor too soft, but my accent might draw attention to me. Luckily there are so many foreigners in this country, that it’s really not too odd if someone speaks with an accent. Even if I would sometimes like to forget that I’m a foreigner, people will instantly remind me if we began a conversation. It is too exhausting to give explanations all the time. This is one thing where my perceived and presenting self differs. I perceive myself as an average student, but my presenting self shows that I’m not.

As to my presenting self, I try to be as confident as possible but I don’t think that’s what others see. I try to seem knowledgeable about the subject I have to present, and try too choose an interesting subject to redirect attention to the topic from myself. I think this is a good trick that an insecure speaker can utilize. My presenting self is a little different from my presenting self. I think I’m pretty confident in life, or at least try to be confident. I just don’t like to speak front of several people. However I don’t have a problem talking to one or two persons, even if I don’t know them, or they’re in a higher status, like professors. I try to look at them as they are average person, like they were my friends. I think my current job as a bartender helps me a lot in this self-enhancing process. I have to talk to all kinds of people without knowing their backgrounds. Whether they CEO-s of a big company, or just 9-5 workers, I don’t know anything about them, they’re all the same for me. They order dinner, have a few drinks and go home. While standing behind the bar I know that some customers have nothing to do but to try to have a conversation with me or just watch whatever is happening in the restaurant. I know that people watch me too all the time, but it doesn’t make me as nervous as it used to a couple of months ago when I started this job. I think that it helps me improve my presenting self in this class as well.

When I was about 14 years old, I got to a stage when I started to rebel. I think many young girls have a time in their lives when they think that they are different from others. They want to differentiate themselves by dressing, behaving in unusual ways. I tried to express my “difference” mostly in the way I dressed. I don’t think my behavior changed at all, I was still the cute 14 years old girl. I wore torn jeans, 10 size bigger T-shirts, all kinds of unusual jewelries. One day one of my teachers saw me wearing my favorite ripped jeans and started to ask me questions. Questions like how did my jeans ripped, did I fell, and when did it happened. Don’t forget it was back in 1988, when we still had communism in Hungary, and this man was a Russian language teacher. The way I was dressed on that day somehow didn’t fit in with his communist worldviews. No one else noticed it however as an extraordinary thing. After I answered all the questions of my teacher, telling the truth of course, he told me to go home and change. I cut the holes in my jeans without my mother’s knowledge, and it was too much for him. He got really mad at me, saying that how dare I ruin my clothes, my mother will now have to buy a new one. I told him that it was a very old jeans, and I didn’t realize that I was doing something really horrible, and I don’t want my mother to get herself into huge expenses. You have to know that back then a new pair of jeans was very expensive, and my teacher knew that my mom was a single parent with a very little money to support two children. That’s why the teacher made such a big deal about it. Even my mother didn’t mind, because she knew also that this was an old pair of jeans.

The principal of the school walked by just in time to ask my teacher what was going on. He explained to her that I was a terrible kid because I ruined my clothes, and that this is unacceptable behavior and I have to go home and change. The principal of course didn’t agree with the teacher, and told me that I don’t have to go home. She was a younger woman who understood that by wearing ripped jeans I just wanted to be a little different from the majority of the students, and it didn’t mean that I became an evil kid. My way of dressing had an ambiguous meaning for that older teacher. He thought that I was a bad kid, a bad student and that there is no stopping for me. I will become a bad communist and an awful person. Everybody now would laugh about this incident, but back then there were very strict dress codes in the schools. It was only less then fifteen years ago, but things have changed a lot since then. Kids can dress in ways that it expresses their personalities, and don’t have to think that if they want to be different they will have to be punished for that.

I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am. This statement has to do with the notion of self -fulfilling prophecy. This concept explains how individuals perceive themselves in the mirror of their surroundings. A person acts in a way that is consistent with how others describe them. The first step of creating our self-image has to be however how the person perceives his/herself. If you believe that you’re something whether it’s true or not, others will see you in the same way. If you know that you’re smart, others will believe that it’s true. A person’s self evaluation process usually begins in an early age. Let’s say the parents of a child keep saying to her/him that she/he is not smart enough, she/he never knows how to do something properly. The parents will make the kid believe that she/he is not good enough for them. Or the other extreme is when the parents keep saying to their children that they so smart or so beautiful. The kid will believe what the parents say, and maybe later, when they realize that they’re far not as perfect as they earlier believed, they will suffer.

Race, ethnicity, religious commitment, age also shapes our perceptions of who we are, or who we’re perceived to be by others. If I identify myself as a Hungarian, others will see me as a Hungarian. But if I identify myself as a student, people will see me as a student. The first group of people remembers my nationality, while the second group doesn’t. It all depends how I introduce myself to them, or how I want them to perceive me. Self-fulfilling prophecy operates when we act in ways that it brings about expectations or judgments of ourselves. The prophecies we act to fulfill usually communicated by others first. We tend to label ourselves in the others’ mirror, and then we act to fulfill our own labels. We continuously form and refine our self-image based on how we compare with others on various criteria of judgment. This is necessary if we are to develop realistic self-concepts. If our self-concept is realistic, others are most likely to believe us, and respond the way we desire.

The process of seeing ourselves through others’ eyes and words is called reflected appraisals. It means that we ourselves see in terms of the appraisals of us that reflect in others’ eyes. This is the so-called looking glass self. When I started school for the first time, my teachers thought that I was a smart girl, and throughout elementary school I had no problems even if I didn’t study that hard. In middle school, we started to learn new subjects with new teachers. I realized that I have to start working hard again if I want them to consider me as a good student. I believed in elementary school that I was a smart student just because the teachers treated me that way. I guess this means that every time we get in contact with a person who we don’t know, we have to make them think the way we want them to. If we think that they think about us the way we want them to, then we are successful.

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