Week 4 Obstacles of Intercultural and Intracultural Communication Discussion

I’m working on a psychology discussion question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

• What are potential obstacles that may prevent intracultural communication and intercultural communication, and how do these obstacles differ based on cultural differences? Include an example of obstacles to intracultural and intercultural communication from your life.

Although the expression ‘intercultural communication’ frequently appears in a wide range of scholarly writings, its meaning remains either vacuous or inscrutable. Most statements which seem to be offering a definition of it amount to no more than circular explications. For example, in the foreword of Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, it is said, “Intercultural communication generally involves face-to-face communication between people from different national cultures (Gudykunst & Mody 2002:ix; my italics).” Here both the term ‘communication’ and ‘culture’ re-appear in the very sentence supposed to be an explanation of the expression ‘intercultural communication’. Would it be possible to say anything substantial regarding the signification of intercultural communication without using the two key concepts of the term which themselves call for clarification? The authors of the first chapter of the afore-mentioned Handbook define intercultural communication as the study of “forms of culturally heterophilous communication (communication that takes place between unalike individuals) and thus deal with the difficulties that come with cross-border/culture communication (Rogers & Hart 2002:1; italics and bracketed illustration original).

The bracketed illustration aims to elucidate the term “(culturally) heterophilous”, that is, the individuals involved in intercultural communication are “unalike”, coming from supposedly different cultures. The implication is that individuals from different cultures are unalike simply because of the difference of culture. But this supposition does not have firm ground to stand upon. Whether people are alike or not depends on various judgments according to different contexts and criteria. Besides, such terms as alike/unalike are very vague and ambiguous: completely alike/unalike or only to a certain degree? Alike/unalike in all respects, in some unspecifiable respects, or in some relevant respects? Adding the latter expression (relevant respects) may seem to have resolved the vagueness, but in fact, this merely pushes the problem at stake a step further.

Underlying elucidation of intercultural communication by other authors is a particular model which can be called the ‘code model’ of communication and culture. For example, Richard E. Porter and Larry A. Samovar explain: “Intercultural communication occurs whenever a message producer is a member of one culture and a message receiver is a member of another (Porter & Samovar, 1988:15).” This proposition, together with another one which says that “Culture and language are inseparably intertwined” has been regarded as the two fundamental propositions on which the field of intercultural communication has reached consensus (King 1988:220). The above quoted article by Porter and Samovar was published sixteen years ago. All the same, they continue to hold the same code model conception of communication. This can be found in one of their more recent publications in which even the diction they choose remains almost the same. It is said, “intercultural communication occurs when a member of one culture produces a message for consumption by a member of another culture (Samovar, Porter & Stefani 1998:.48).” I

n other more recent publications the wording becomes more sophisticated, but the same messenger-receiver model remains in the foreground. For example, intercultural communication is characterized as “a transactional, symbolic process involving the attribution of meaning between people from different cultures (Gudykunst 2001:165).” In another place, it is described as “involv[ing] the exchange of symbolic information between well-defined groups with significantly different cultures (Barnett & Lee 2002: 277).” Such characterizations attempt to delineate the conceptual contours of intercultural communication by employing a picture of communication as message production followed by message reception. Notwithstanding its widespread adherence in many disciplines, this is a highly questionable conception of human communication. I will first deal with this problematic picture of communication, and then come to the issue of culture, where we will see that the same code model still plays the crucial role.