Class Assignment (Personal)

Warning: This is Solely For a Class Assignment 

Woman Seeking Man Friendship or maybe more, 19 years old

Relationship: Long Term

Body Type: Athletic

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Religion: Catholic

Other: Doesn't Smoke

     Doesn't Drink

     Doesn't Have Children

     Wants Children in the FAR Future

Description: I am an easy going person who generally gets along with most people. I love anything that has to do with sports and competition. I generally tend to stress myself out with school work, but always find fun ways to relieve my stress with my friends. I am from Phoenix, but looking to meet people in Omaha. I am looking to meet someone who has a great sense of humor and loves to have fun. However, this person also needs to be very intelligent and very up to date with news and what is going on in our world. Often times I struggle with this, so it is nice to have someone to discuss these things with to help stay updated. The person I am seeking must love playing sports and attending sporting events. I would hope to find a respectable man, who is very compassionate and caring. I am not looking for someone who I have to attend to or who has to attend to me, but someone who will be there to have fun with and talk to! :) 

Check Your Location (Applied)

There are many unspoken rules that exist in communication. The unspoken rules are set up by societal norms through roles each person plays in society. Social norms are "rules, whether implicit or explicit, about behavior" (Tubbs 273). With these rules people developed ideas about how best friends, family members, lovers, and strangers should act towards one another. When people step out of their societal norms and act differently to certain people, it throws off the roles each person represents in the circumstance. 

To begin, when people have had a stressful day they tend to just ramble about their problems to just about anyone they meet. For example, a bus stop or local coffee shop are prime locations where people can easily be taken out of the role as a stranger and instantly turned into a companion or someone to talk to simply because one has accidently sat or stood next to someone who has had the bad day. Situations like this tend to not align with the proper level of intimacy that should be in the relationship because the stressed person (old lady in the red shirt) suddenly does not have a filter with the information they are disclosing to the stranger, acquaintance, new best friend because they are so frazzled about their day. Therefore, next time you are stressed about remember your settings and the roles of the people in it before you discuss your life with someone who is entirely uninterested. 

Works Cited

Tubbs, Stewart L., and Sylvia Moss. Human Communication : Principles and Contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 2007.

Johari Window (Definition)

The Johari Window is a model that is used to describe human interaction. It is named after the first names of its inventors, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham ("Johari"). The intention of the Johari window is to conceptualize levels of awareness and self disclosure in human communication (Tubbs 281). The window is consisted of four different quadrants which focus on "how self-disclosure can affect what we know about ourselves and how we feel about who we are" (Handout). Essentially, it suggests ways at observing intrapersonal and interpersonal affairs. Intrapersonal deals with experiences that come from oneself, but interpersonal affairs are derived from interaction with other people. 

The four quadrants the model acknowledges are the open, blind, hidden and unknown quadrants ("Johari"). The first quadrant is the "open area," which consists of information that is open to the public and easy for one to reveal. The next box is the "blind area," also recognized as "things others know about us, but we don't know about ourselves" (Handout).  The third quadrant is the "hidden area" is more personal information that we know about ourselves, but we chose not to share this information with others. The final and fourth quadrant is the "unknown area" that is information that you and no one else has yet to discovered about yourself. The Johari Window can allow for one to have eye opening experiences about themselves. 

Works Cited

Handout from Class

"Johari Window." 26 Apr. 1999. 22 Feb. 2009 .

Tubbs, Stewart L., and Sylvia Moss. Human Communication : Principles and Contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 2007.

I'm Sorry (Personal)

I have a friend who we'll call "Alex" that I have been best friends with since the first grade. She means the world to me and knows every single thing about me; I swear she has a "Mindy sense" because I never need to tell her if anything is wrong, she just knows. Unfortunately, Alex is also the only one of my friends that I tend to get in disputes with. However, since we both know one another so well it can be too easy to push one an other's buttons or discovers one's reasoning behind their actions. Surprisingly, this is what often times leads to are frustrations. Thankfully, with our past communication experiences I can examine those patterns to help define the truths behind our quarrels. 

Recently, Alex and I get into an argument over how we are away from each other at school and getting out priorities straight to see one another when we are home. We had miscommunication and took one an other's actions the wrong way. Our schedules did not align to see one another over Thanksgiving break, and I made Alex feel as if it was simply unimportant for me too see her. However, since Alex has been my best friend since the first grade I knew that know matter what she would always be there, and I had so many family obligations and prior plans with other friends I had already committed to. I was very disappointed that I did not get to see her, and Alex was upset too. I was able to predict how she would act due to our life-long friendship. Later, I employed qualitative research for my concerns with accurately understanding and describing how Alex was reacting to me not being able to see her. And after I few unanswered phone calls, I faced the harsh reality that I probably would not be talking to her until I saw her over Christmas break. This was extremely upsetting for me since I often have the urge to tell her about every aspect of my life. However, once we were able to communicate about the series of unfortunate events that occurred over the past three weeks while we were away we were able to understand one an other's motives and reconcile with one another. I was able to predict that we both needed to just be able to talk to one another about everything to make the other person understand our side of the story, and once we did our friendship became as strong as its always been even through the miles between the corn fields of Nebraska and the desert of Arizona. 

"Did You Hear Me!?!?" (Applied)

"Did you just hear what I said!?" yells Amanda Bynes in her hit television show What I Like About You as she is in a fight with her boyfriend. This argument within this particular episode of What I Like About You is full of common communication flaws. For example, Amanda and her boyfriend both talk in a loud tone at the same time, making it impossible to listen to one another. Also, neither of them or even willing to listen to the other person's story because they are both so focused on getting their own message across. Hollywood often portrays many boyfriend/girlfriend, and husband/wife relationships to have challenges seeing eye to eye at times. Amanda's quote, "Did you just hear what I said!?" is a line that Hollywood employs as well as everyday people do, to clarify if the other person or peoples are listening. 

After acknowledging this common trend in communication I have developed the hypothesis that if someone uses this phrase with a loud tone in an argument it tends to upset the other person more. There are several possible ways I could go about affirming this information. First, I need to recognize that this will be an experiment of the social sciences since I would hope to understand if this rule or question explains the following behavior of another person. I would have to employ the three step process of question, observe, and three step process. Furthermore, I would apply the qualitative research method because "Qualitative researchers gain understanding through interpreting and elaborating, or making explicit, human conditions and events holistically as they occur in the world," ( Dues 61). Therefore, I would use in-depth interviews, as well as,  conversation analysis to be able to judge people's reactions to the question properly. After following this process I should be able to tell if it is a universal truth that people become instantly aggravated when someone angrily shouts, "Did you hear me!?" or something similar. 

Works Cited

Dues, Michael, and Mary Brown. Boxing Plato's Shadow : An Introduction to the Study of Human Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 2003.

Necessity of Communication Studies (Def Blog)

The modern studies of communication has continued to evolve since 1910. Boxing Plato's Shadow recognizes the process communication studies had to undergo in order to establish itself as an academic discipline; there were several prerequisites that were essential for the discipline. "First, the content [of the the course] must represent a substantial and discrete subject area that is not covered by any other discipline," (Dues 34). This requirement displays that the topic of study should be unique with an established foundation. "Second, the discipline must have a methodology of its own - that is, an accepted set of systematic methods for developing new knowledge about its subject.," (Dues 34). However, this criteria established difficulties because scholars used several different methods to study communication depending on the form of communication they were studying. 

On the other hand, two relevant advantages existed in which scholars employed to help gain awareness of the necessity of communications as part of the liberal arts discipline. For example, the subject of communication "had an enormous practical value" because communication is present in everyone's daily life whether one chooses to recognize it or not (Dues 35). Communication is present in people's lives in more forms than one can imagine; therefore, it is essential for people to study it, so humans can properly understand the way individuals in society think. Nowadays, the National Communication Association is able to recognize that, "The range of communication research and its implications for improving the world are breathtaking," (Communication). Although an another advantage to the establishment of communication as a study was the fact that it "had deep roots," (Dues 35). The basis for the study of communication began with the well known scholars that we previously learned about: Plato, the sophists, and Aristotle. 

After much work, "In December 1915, a group of 17 scholars met to address these defining issues and to find common ground for a twentieth-century discipline to address spoken communication." Finally, from this meeting created the "Department of Speech," or the "Department of Speech and Education," (Dues 36-37). 

Works Cited

"Communication Research." NCA. National Communication Association. 12 Feb. 2009 .

Dues, Michael, and Mary Brown. Boxing Plato's Shadow : An Introduction to the Study of Human Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 2003.

Communicating (Week 2, Applied)

This illustration displays my interpretation of communication. I decided to draw a man who is delivering a speech to be my main "sender" of the information. Their are many different receivers in the audience who are communicating differently to the speaker. One of the members of the audience is verballing communicating with the speaker by saying, "YES!" in agreement with the speaker. However, there is another member of the audience who is nonverbally communicating with the speaker. This member of the audience is simply laying down which portrays that he is uninterested in the speaker's speech. This is a good example of intentional nonverbal communication because this character wants the speaker to know that he is boring him to sleep. Additionally, sometimes people can unintentionally employ nonverbal communication to portray that they are uninterested by wandering eyes. However, these messages can also be interpreted the wrong way because a person who is interested may be nonverbally looking like they are uninterested because of the interference around them. In this picture i have two different examples of interference; there is one person talking to the person standing next to them which a distraction for all the member of the audience. Also, the speaker is right next to the street which is another form of interference because the background noise is making it difficult for people to hear the speaker. This drawing that i have created contains all of the crucial parts of communication, along with some of the variables that one can encounter while communicating. 

Experiments (Week 2, Personal Reflection)

All theories, no matter whether they are a communications theory or a theory from another science have to be supported by research and experiments. In chemistry lab I have to conduct experiments once a week; these experiments help me understand the theories of chemistry. When I physically conduct experiments on a theory that we are studying in class, it can be very helpful when attempting to understand the theory. For example, I had a difficult time understanding the Lewis Dot Structures in chemistry; however, after the lab I gained new confidence in understanding the Lewis Dot Structures.Therefore, theories are essential in to help people make sense of subjects.

 Additionally, in the seventh and eighth grade I had to conduct several experiments to prove or disprove a theory. One of the experiments my partner and I conducted tried to prove our hypothesis that burning trash before putting it in a landfill was worse for the environment than simply burying the trash. Hypothesis are essential when trying to prove or disprove a theory, so you can have a foundation for researching the topic. When we conducted this experiment, just like any other experiment, we had to consider many different variables to help us determine our experiment. In conclusion, when people are trying to prove or disprove a theory an experiment offers the best support; we successfully proved our hypothesis when we conducted the landfill experiment. 

Theories (Week 2 Definition)

Theories are not static; they continue to develop and transform with time. Chapter two defines theory as "A set of inter-related propositions that suggest why events occur in the manner that they do" ( Points 44). When theories are founded, empirical research takes place to test the theories. Empirical research studies are based on experiments or observations. The Manor College identifies four main objectives with empirical research: "capture contextual data and complexity; learn from the collective experience of the field; identify, explore, confirm, and advance theoretical concepts; and enhance educational design" ("What").  Empirical research methods are important to use for three reasons. One reason is that tradition and assumed knowledge have been relied up for too long. Also, it "integrates research and practice." ("What"). A final reason why it is essential to use empirical research is because science needs to continue to progress since our world is always evolving.  

Moreover, it is necessary to test theories for reliability and validity. Reliability or, repeatability, is an important factor when creating a theory because one must known how strong their evidence is. In order to have true evidence an experiment must be supported by more than one actual experiment, but with many trials of an experiment. Additionally, validity ("the ability to measure what the theory purports to measure") is an important factor for developing theories because theories need to "prove" what they are identifying. Theories are made up of many factors that help establish a strong point of view. 

Works Cited

"Points of View About Theory."  Ch. 2. 43-65. 

"What is Empirical Research?" Manor College. Sept. 2006. Basileiad Library. 1 Feb. 2009 .