Presentations Review

For our presentations, we spoke and delve into intercultural communication and why it is important to our society and communities. This includes the basis of Culture, Ethnicity, Sexuality, Religion and many other properties of such topics. 

Introducing Chapter 3, the speaker talks about most of the main properties of cultures and global traits such as shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and norms. These are all things that both divide and bring closer the people of our society, whether we like it or not. These first two slides also delve into Dominant cultures and culture shock, which is when a culture is way more adapted than others around the world, and when someone struggles to adapt to a new culture being a popular or unpopular one. The way the slides is presented is simple with a couple of images to show the point, though I feel it could have been more stylized.

For Culture and Communication, the speaker goes into what culture actually is, and how different culture co-exist in places like for example, The United States, where we live. The speaker also shows us how complex this is, as in a multicultural society, different customs and traits are bound to collide, and how we as humans should strive to have smoother communications across cultures rather than try to ignore each others beliefs, customs and traits. These two slides go into more detail on the topics presented in the first two slides, giving us a more complex view of how wide these things affect our world.

For the next three slides, the speaker talks about things like Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, an ever growing topic in modern society, as the world still finds conflict in these differences. The speaker went into good detail about patriarchy and gender roles and how they affects us. Also explaining to us the differences between Gender, or social communication patterns by males and females, and sex, or the biological characteristics of a person. In the final slide, the speaker makes a great point about how different sexual orientations have been mistreated in the past, and still are today, although we keep progressing towards everlasting sexual equality, its always been a challenge, as many religions and beliefs goes against alternative sexual orientations, such as homosexuality or sex change. Although I feel that these slides lack some sort of styling, they are very simple to read and the speaker did a great job getting the point across.

Now the earlier mentions of religion brings us into my topic, Religion and Socioeconomic status. In these two slides, I spoke about how especially in the United States, where many cultures collide, religions never seems to get along. This is always due to overlapping beliefs of different deities controlling different things, or just people that have no tolerance for other beliefs at all. I also spoke about Socioeconomic Status, and how people of different classes struggle to get along or find some sympathy for each other. I do feel that I could have done a better job about talking Religion, and also designing the slides, otherwise, I am satisfied in the state which I presented my slides. 

The next speaker talks about a wide variety of topics, such as Age, Disabilities and Indulgence. The speaker begins by explaining to us which generations have which names and when were they born, giving us more perspective into the topic at hand, and explaining a bit about how different generation always run into language or cultural barriers, as they were raised differently. In the second slide, the speaker only really shows us what different disabilities are and explains to us the concept. Though I would have liked a more detailed explanation, the speaker does redeem this by giving us examples of films starred by characters with disabilities, and how they overcome certain challenges in their lives. For the final slide, the speaker talks about a topic I find very important myself, but personal thoughts aside, they talk about Indulgence, or the focus on living a fun life as one would like it. The speaker did a great job explaining how different cultures have morals and customs so strict, it prevents people from enjoying some novelties of life. I loved how the speaker went into this topic, and how organized the information on the slide was. Overall, the speaker did a very good job with these three slides. 

The speaker that follows spoke about how many cultures are very closed to new ones, or Uncertainty Avoidance, and how different cultures see rewards for their efforts. The speaker also included videos of herself explaining the topics at hand with more detailed perspectives, which is always very good to have. She spoke about how different cultures react to uncertainty in their populations with laws and customs, such as Greek cultures being more closed to itself, as they would rather avoid uncertain cultural situations. On the opposite hand, you have Scandinavian and North American cultures, that are always lawfully open to uncertain cultural issues, like to take risks and embrace new ideas in their nations. She makes reference to the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" and how the two characters are culturally different in that previously explained sense. To end things off, this speaker talks about how different cultures expect quick rewards for anything that gets done quick, such as American cultures, while Asian cultures for example, focus on taking things slow, and expecting far future rewards. I had never actually thought about this, about how for example us in the United States always want things fast, and some cultures are very much not like that. The way the speaker explained it, I'd say she agrees there must be some sort of balance between these things, and we as a society should be open to waiting for rewards on the long term as many others do. Overall, these four slides were explained in very grand detail, though I do feel as there was a lot of telling and not showing, the topics were handled with a lot of care by the speaker.