What is communication?

But first a brief introduction: 
For the past 11 weeks, I've been writing about gender communication for school. I've generated quite a lot of content, and thought I should share it with anyone who cares to read the things I write. The first 11 posts will be the essays I wrote weekly for the class. The posts after that (approximately 20) will be responses to discussion questions posted online for the students to answer. Enjoy!

Communication itself, broadly speaking, is about how ideas are transferred from one person’s brain to another person’s brain. Most definitions of communication require at least two parties in order for communication to have happened. Gender communication is a subset of the more general topic of communication. In gender communication, the idea is to explore what differences between the genders might exist in how they communicate, as well as to look at how the genders communicate with each other. Gender communication looks at how men communicate with men, how women communicate with women, how men communicate with women, and how women communicate with men. The discipline tries to determine what, if any, differences there are in how men and women communicate in order to better understand the phenomenon of communication.

As a female person, I have noticed an expectation from my female friends that I will communicate in a particular way--specifically, that I’m more interested in talking about my feelings, or that I’m interested in specific types of gossip (generally gossip which pertains to other friends). I’ve noticed these expectations primarily because I’ve never been comfortable communicating feelings or my personal, inner life; and so, occasionally, I’ve had to express to a female friend that I’d rather not focus on how I feel about something, or that I really am not interested in the complicated social workings of our circle of friends (at least, not in the same ways they are--if I were an anthropology student, I could probably write a term paper on the social interactions of 20-somethings). When one of my aunts passed away several years ago, I was encouraged by a couple of female friends to share how the event made me feel, even though I wouldn’t have naturally thought to share how the event made me feel. My friends were unable to understand why I didn’t want to talk about my aunt’s passing--they expected that I would want to talk about it, and I expected that they knew I didn’t want to talk about it.

I have had many effective conversations with the opposite gender, usually online. Until recently, I was a moderator for an online forum, and was therefore in a position of authority with respect to most of the members of the community. Anytime I had to use my “moderator voice” (that is, I had to remind a user of the rules for posting, or had to explain why the rules were what they were), I was able to successfully communicate the idea I was attempting to communicate. I’m not sure to what extent my gender played into this, as the entire interaction was through a written medium. That I’m female was well-known on the forum, but I didn’t notice any difference in how the users reacted to me and how they reacted to the male moderators (the moderator team was a mixed-gender team). In my face-to-face conversations with the men I work with, as long as we’re discussing neutral topics (such as which tasks need to be completed for the day), we are able to communicate with each other just fine.

The biggest lesson for me in these experiences of effective and ineffective communications have been the expectations my peers have regarding what I want or should talk about. The problems I’ve faced when communicating with my friends and peers usually arise from their expectation that I want to talk about certain things, and my expectation that my friends and peers will know, without my having told them, that I don’t want to discuss those things.

Three ways in which effective communication can be increased are “talking to make it better”, “being open-minded and willing to change”, and “treating another person as an individual” (Ivy 35). “Talking to make it better” means a willingness to understand where the breakdown in communication is happening. “Being open-minded and willing to change” means putting forth the effort to understand the other person’s point of view. “Treating another person as an individual” means not applying stereotypes to the person you’re communicating with.

Of these three methods to make communication better, I find that treating the person I’m communicating with as an individual helps to best facilitate communication. Not assuming that all women I speak with are interested in shopping, shoes, and feeling, or that all mean I speak with are interested in sports and never want to talk about their feelings, means that I actually get to know the person I’m speaking with. It means getting to know who I’m speaking with, and shows that I have a basic respect for them. Not making assumptions about someone because I think they belong to a certain category means that frustration and hard feelings are avoided.