Cultural Variability in relation to Intercultural Communication Essay

Submitted By Hunter-Ventura
Words: 596
Pages: 3
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Hunter Ventura
Intercultural Comm.
9/14/14
Cultural Variability Assignment

Cultural variability is an idea that is present in all forms of society and parts of this idea can be present in everyone’s daily lives. Personally I can see aspects of this idea in many parts of my life and in this brief paper I would like to present examples of these ideas in my life, such as the ideas of differing context cultures, power distance, and certainty/uncertainty oriented cultures. The first idea of cultural variability I want to discuss is individualistic culture versus collectivist culture. An example of individualist culture in my life is when I was applying to colleges in my senior year of high school. Individualist culture is very competitive in nature, everyone must fend for themselves and try and get ahead of others, and that is exactly what was happening as everyone was applying for colleges. We were all trying to make ourselves as appealing as possible to the colleges we were attempting to gain entry to, highlighting all of our commendable experiences like volunteering experience, or past leadership roles. Trying to get into good schools is very competitive and everyone is trying to out-do the next person so they can get a spot at the school of their choice and hopefully be able to come out with a degree that will help them to be successful. Along with individualist and collectivist cultures, there is also the ideal of high and low context environments. I can also see aspects of high and low context environments in my life. Typically, I have seen a lot of low context environments throughout my life, because of the culture that I grew up in. For instance, I would consider school a high context environment because everyone is trying to be direct in their verbal messages, whether they are presenting information (teaching) or trying to learn the information. In both cases the information is being exchanged in a very direct form which makes it relatable to a low context environment. Another concept that is involved with cultural variability that I can relate with my life, is the idea of low versus high power distance. An example of low power distance, or at least an attempt of low power context with a hint of corruption, is the US government. In a low
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