5.1 Prelude

In the previous sessions you dealt with various aspects of culture including the concept of culture, the understanding of multicollectivity, your personal cultural embeddedness and the influence that culture has on social behaviour. In this context, communication was referred to as a tool to create and pass on culture and thus as a precondition and basis for social interaction and the development of social relations.

Against this background, this session aims at providing an understanding of communication as a complex, mutual and ongoing process that moves us towards the co-creation of meaning in the sense of developing an understanding of each other’s perspectives. To this end, the following session will introduce and discuss the transactional model of communication and show how it can be used to analyse the influence of context, message, media usage, response, and noise on the co-creation of meaning.

Download: Learning journal for session 5