Cross-Cultural Blog

We learned that they weren't all that different from us in the way rhetoric and communication is structured. They approached the topic in exactly the same way we did for our topics.

Our most memorable moment was when Alex (the Australian one) said our drinking age was outrageous since it's only 18 in Australia.

We learned that keeping jargon and slang in mind when addressing an audience that might not necessarily know the slang is important. That was emphasized since Bay's political cartoon was composed entirely about Australian slang, which highlighted how little we knew about Australian slang/culture.

Echoing what the previous group said, they admitted that Australia wasn't that much different from America, aside from their version of "hella" as "bloody." They also said they tend to call things "funky" at times, but other than that, our cultures are quite similar.

The most memorable part was when we asked Neelan (spelling may be off) what she thought about President Obama. Unfortunately, she said he was quite unattractive for a president.

This is the list that we compiled of things to consider when writing to a cross-cultural audience.

Looking at topics from a global context
Taking into consideration different cultural views when addressing a
controversial topic
Look at language: for example, bloody awesome in Australia and hella good is
used in America
Avoid cultural bias and using different forms of media such as online blogs
or newspapers or cartoons such as the one below.
Basic English makes it easier for people to avoid language boundaries.
Use a pathos, logos, and ethos appeal when possible.
working place international workers and in just public places it seems like
cultural precautions need to be taken

It was very interesting seeing how different their political humor was from ours, and how deeply rooted it was in a very specific event. The Australian students described the recent open hostilities that some of their top government officials had been having towards one another, which is certainly interesting to hear about.

Also, two of the three students we spoke to were from China, and if time had permitted, it would have been interesting to explore that extra dimension that their origin adds to the analysis and impressions of the political cartoon. They tried to pick up on this, because the student that was originally from Australia, Emma, talked about a Chinese political cartoon, while the students from China had an Australian cartoon to present.

On a side-note, as we were asking them about school and what they studied, we found out two of the students were studying Spanish, which was surprising, but exciting because I was able to speak Spanish with Australian students.

One of the biggest take-aways from this cross-culture video conferencing experience was the importance of good technology. When you only have 1 hour to meet and you spend half the time trying to get your technology working correctly, you would be better off just picking up the phone, sending an email, or chatting using a stable IM client like Google Talk, AIM, or Skype.

The most memorable moment of the exchange was when we found out that no one in our audience played games. We realized this after we had presented most of our material. We had been presenting for the wrong audience -- we should have spent more time explaining and defining the terms we were throwing around so carelessly.

New insight: I will be sure to define all the terms that I use in my research paper. I will probably get quite technical when describing some of the hacks that players use to cheat in games, but I will ensure that non-techie audiences can still follow along without being turned off or intimidated.

Things to keep in mind when communicating to a cross-cultural audience:

Our group (Feross, Alexandria, Andrew) didn't have time to write this part of the assignment collaboratively with the other group, due to technical difficulties on their end. Some general things we talked about were:

- Laughter is great way to bridge cultural differences as its the common human language.

- Be sure to define terms that other audiences might not understand. For example, none of the Australian students in our conference were gamers, so they were unfamiliar with many of the gaming concepts which were central to our research topics. If we had spent more time defining and explaining these terms we could have been clearer.

- Body language is important and facial expressions (remember, they can see you!).

What I most learned about this experience is how really impressive and exact this process is. We had just a minimal problem in the voice (in relation to how everything else was working) that caused us to miss out on every few words they said and it made communication almost impossible. The switch to typing whenever something very important needed to be conveyed allowed for us to get our points across but it was inconvenient and defeated the purpose of talking over web chat.

From what I did understand I learned that no matter what culture you are, you seem to try to understand other cultures, evident by how they were analyizing chinese political cartoons and asking us questions about what everything here was like.

The most memorable moment was probably when they asked Tyler to sing. It was just comical. What surprised me the most was that they were being assigned to study rhetoric in a different language. I feel like that way you really get a feel for what they try to convey in the drawing rather than in the words, but I am sure that it must lose a little bit in the process.

For future intercultural communication I would have to say that we need to get everything running smoothly. We were able to tough it out, for the most part, but it was very difficult without proper sound. It would have been almost impossible to have continued going on for a longer period of time or for more indepth topics.

1. Explain the political and cultural
atmosphere at the time which the cartoon
was drawn

2. Explain the colloquial language

3. Explain what sort of symbols are in the
cartoon, the characters, the political
background and the policies of politicians
in the cartoon

4. Explain the context in which the cartoon
is in

We also noticed the lack of cultural differences between Australia and the U.S. Both sides were quickly aware of the similarities and didn't need to do a lot of explaining. Humor was similar, particularly in being self-deprecating.

Most memorable moment was discussing politics in each country. They knew a lot about Obama and we had no ideas about their political scandal that just occurred. They also made fun of their government as being an American pawn and copying everything we do.

Guidelines for Cross-cultural communication
I. Language familiarity/translation accuracy
II. Cultural/Taboo sensitivity
III. Making it a priority to work out miscommunications
IV. Learning how to communicate across cultures by actually doing it as much as
possible, using technologies such as the Internet, this strange program, etc.

I was part of the group that got to interact with Helen, Zoe and Brian (I hope I got their names right) earlier today.

I enjoyed the discussion very much and given that I am an international student myself, I very much identified with my Australian peers when it came to specific knowledge of American politics and the way American public viewed or thought about other countries.

I think I ended up learning a few things. I’ll summarize them briefly below:
1) When it comes to intercultural communication, do your homework. It’d be a fair assumption that US and Australian cultures might be much more similar than let’s say US and Pakistani culture are ever likely to be. So know the similarities and differences beforehand can make a whole lot of difference. About rhetoric, I think the basic techniques/rhetorical appeals mostly have no cultural boundaries. What appeals to one human mind is very likely to appeal to another mind regardless of culture.
2) In my opinion, the most memorable moment of the video exchange was the innocent lack of the knowledge of American politics prior to the 2008 elections. I just loved the expressions on the faces of my Australian friends when they were answering some of the more politics-related questions.
3) I gained a broader understanding of my research question while viewing it from the eyes of my peers from Australia. When discussing the Tesla Roadster (a very high-end all-electric sports car), SydU students were rightfully astonished to know that a market existed for the electric car in the current economic conditions even with a hefty price tag of US$100,000+. Just to add to what I mentioned in the conference, I found out today that Tesla motors have also launched a 4-door Sedan version (which seats 5 adults and 2 kids!) of their electric car with a relatively affordable price-tag of US$50,000. It’ll be very interesting to see the market and the technology around electric cars evolve over the next few years. I am certainly very excited!

Bryant Cabrera, Vahe Musoyan,
Sean Tannehill, Yaso Hu

-use phrases that are common to people all over the world, not colloquialisms
-explain history or provide background information for culturally specific material
-use visual rhetoric to elaborate on explanations
-keep in mind that things can be offensive to different cultures
-use terms that aren't specific to your curriculum
-knowing purpose of analysis

wow...it is very great...sydney and stanford is very very far away...it is a big WOW..

wow, that's very interesting.
Stanford univrsitas with university in sydney is not close distance, and their can mutual exchange of culture through video conferences. This is very easy for once so that Stanford students do not need to come to sydney, or otherwise . enough with the video conference can practice their presentation skills.

This is one of the positive impact of technology progress.

Video Conference provides help to student in nurturing their presentation skills.

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Its good to be able to openly communicate with students of other countries. Students can learn alot about how students of other countries do things different and obviously learn from that.

Video Conference is another offer from the new technology. Nice way to help students.

It is wonderful thing to see how student from different cultures and different continents are participating in that event. I am from another part of the world and I love very, much when we, me and my colleges, have similar event. I see that you have mеnшioned the vehicles developed by Tesla Motors and I am very exited of them too. I have one place in mind, when somebody say anything about this cars and it is http://teslaroadsatercost.co.cc