10 CHAPTER 1 • Intercultural Communication: Interaction in a Multicultural World
Introduction
This course will provide students the general knowledge of various cultures. This includes, but is not limited to, Western and Eastern cultures, Thai cultures, and local cultures of Southern Thailand. Students will analyze whether social changes and globalization have an impact on cultures and people’s ways of life.
For the purposes of this course, the complexity is avoided to focus on issues of more direct bearing on what students in the ASEAN Community need, in an interesting and exciting way.
Inter-cultural communication has been around for millennia, it is nothing new, and it will be around for millennia to come; for as long as we have human beings around. It has not been studied in depth till recently. To have some understanding of communication between cultures, we need to try and understand communication and culture better. That in itself does not sound too difficult, not until we start to dissect communication, and even more so, culture; its complexity could be overwhelming.
Not only local and ASEAN, but also global interaction is inevitable. We live in a rapidly changing world in all aspect humanly possible; and we know that culture and communication work closely together. The moment you interact, in which ever way, you are busy with multicultural communication and need to accept the consequences that that interaction has on the recipient of such interaction.
With this said, it should be clear that we should know a little more about culturalism, and more so about communication between cultures.
A condensed identification of multiculturalism and communication; Multiculturalism are those ‘behavioural traits’ of people sharing a specific defined group, whether it is age, gender, family, job, religion, beliefs, community, area, region, etc.; communication is the imparting or exchanging of information or news. So, multicultural communication can be identified as; “One culture’s interaction with another culture in an attempt to impart or exchange information or news.”