Reading between the lines

In the reading, Barna says, ”One answer to the question of why misunderstanding and/or rejection occurs is that many people naively assume there are sufficient similarities among peoples of the world to make communication easy. They expect that simply being human, having common requirements of food, shelter, security, and so on, makes everyone alike” (Barna 1994). I experienced this exact situation a few times throughout the semester.

One of the first days I was here (in the beginning of January), students were talking about the Duke vs. UNC men’s basketball game that was coming up on February 18^th and how excited they were. Surprised by how into basketball everyone was, I said, “Oh, is it a big game? Are they rivals or something?” Well, apparently, Duke and UNC are the biggest rivals in all of college sports. And apparently I should have known that, considering I got scolded for not knowing. But coming from Pittsburgh, where basketball isn’t nearly as big of a deal, I had no idea. And yet, the students here still assumed that I knew each Duke player, their number, position, height, graduating year, class schedule, and favorite food…because God forbid someone isn’t a Duke basketball fan.

I’ve experienced a similar situation in an academic setting. When I was conducting research during this last block of classes, my mentor was throwing out words and names of computer programs that I had never heard before, like “orthomosaic,” “ArcGIS and ArcMap,” “densification,” “point cloud and ray cloud,” and so on. I wanted to run out of the room I was so intimidated and scared of how hard this research was going to be. I wanted to escape the situation and go back to somewhere where I was comfortable. But, thankfully, I didn’t let myself do that. I built up the courage to ask what all of those words meant. Luckily, this time when I asked, I wasn’t scolded. Instead, he took the time to show me exactly what he was talking about so that I would be able to apply it to the research that we were working on together.

My mentor and me in the field using drones to conduct research

Although both of these scenarios are examples of “assumption of similarities,” they both ended very differently. Not everyone will react the same when interacting with a “newcomer”– these two scenarios elucidate that. This just goes to show that even though I am “only” studying away in North Carolina, there have still been "stumbling blocks in intercultural communication."

Barna, L.M. (1994). “Stumbling Blocks in Intercultural Communication.” In L.A. Samovar and R.E. Porter, Intercultural Communication: A Reader, 7^th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. (pp. 337-346)