IV. Improving Your Competence Online

1. Online communication provides important benefits: (a) allows us to meet and form friendships and romances with people we would have never met; (b) helps us maintain established relationships; and (c) bolsters our sense of community.

2. Online communication norms are looser than in everyday life. We encounter online disinhibition, when people disclose and communicate much more openly online; this helps foster new relationships by asking more open and personal questions. However, this also gives way to flaming, inappropriately aggressive messages that people would not usually say face to face.

3. John Suler: To improve communication competence online: (a) make the gravity of the message medium; (b) don’t assume that online communication is more efficient; (c) know the code; (d) presume your audience is much larger than you intended, (e) practice making drafts of your messages; (f) be wary of the emotionally seductive qualities of online communication; (g) talk to new people.

DISCUSSION STARTER 4: Have you ever shared personal information during an online encounter, only to regret it later? What information did you disclose? What consequences did you suffer? What lessons did you learn about the risks associated with online disinhibition?

V. What is Intercultural Competence?

1. Intercultural competence is required, given the increasingly more intercultural world.

2. Donald Rubin: In intercultural competence, the same rules as in interpersonal competence apply: the speaker must be (a) appropriate; (b) effective; and (c) ethical.

3. World-minded people demonstrate acceptance and respect toward other cultures’ beliefs, values and customs. World mindedness is practiced in three ways: (a) understand that your interlocutors’ interpersonal communication is just as natural for them in their culture; (b) do not judge other cultures as being better or worse; (c) consistently show respect to people of other cultures.

4. Jolene Koester, Myron Lustig add more characteristics of world-mindedness (Michael’s Sound Bite 8-1): (a) get to know more; (b) perform the roles you are offered in a different culture; (c) follow the relationship rules that are offered in a different culture; (d) smile, show respect and provide friendly gestures.

DISCUSSION STARTER 5: How do you perceive people whose beliefs, attitudes, and values appear to differ from yours? What challenges do you face in trying to empathize with such people? How might you communicate with them in a nonjudgmental and respectful fashion?

5. Judith Martin, Thomas Nakayama, Lisa Flores: The opposite of world-mindedness is ethnocentrism, when people believe that (a) their system of attitudes, beliefs, rules, norms and customs is better than that of other cultures; (b) their culture is central to the civilization; (c) their form of communication is competent, while other people’s is not.

6. To overcome ethnocentrism, develop attributional complexity, the ability to: (a) view your interlocutors’ behavior from different angles; (b) analyze all forces influencing the person’s behavior; (c) check your perception for attributional errors; (d) consider all positions; (e) consider motivations underlying communication and relationship choices; (f) examine decision-making patterns in other cultures; and (g) ask other people for explanations.

7. DIE Model (Michael’s Sound Bite 8-2): when you encounter something you believe is very strange: (a) Describe it in neutral terms; (b) Interpret it in several ways, (c) Evaluate it as suitable to you in several contexts.