Globalization And Intercultural Communication: An Explorative Study

Globalization as a topic has received great popularity as well as academic attention. Practically, it appears as the ever-increasing inter-influencing and inter-dependency among/between different nations in the whole world, politically, economically, and culturally. Intercultural communication the very activity of itself pushes the globalization forward, and to a certain extent, globalization may be regarded as the product of intercultural communication. The thesis is to put intercultural communication in the context of globalization, analyze globalization's effects upon the different aspects of the intercultural communication framework and have discussions over the opportunities and challenges that globalization brings to Chinese culture and the cultural awareness that should raised for the Chinese intercultural communicators.Main contents can be summarized as thus:The first part involves the intercultural communication theoretical foundation. Culture, here, is regarded as a unified system of three layers including attitude, behavior and materials from the interior to the outside. Individual cultural acquisition and development are shaped by both the real environment and the virtual environment. The process of intercultural communication includes eight ingredients horizontally and cultural context, situational context etc. vertically. Works of Hofstede, Hall and Kluckhohn have been cited here for latter cultural analysis.The second part deals with the term globalization and mass media. Globalization has been investigated immensely recently, and in this thesis, it is perceived in the cultural dimension. The writer adopts Tomlinson's view to look at globalization as the ever-increasing global inter-connectivity, hence avoiding the debate over cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity. Mass media are the constructor of virtual environment and have great effects upon culture. Its concentration internationally and the emergence of Internet bring new problems to the intercultural communication.During the third part, the thesis analyzes the influence of globalization upon intercultural communication. Globalization with its pervasive power reaching everycomer of the world has changed the whole process of intercultural communication. With the analytical work, questions, as a result, are raised in three aspects. The first involves the convergence of cultures, which leads to a better understanding in intercultural communication activities, but, also unequal to the less developed countries in the imbalance of information exchanges. Whether there will be a third culture or not? And the third culture is really third or neutral rather than just the dominant cultures in another form? This naturally leads to the issue of nationality and cultural identity.The fourth part puts the Chinese culture in the world to analyze its characteristics with tools developed by Hofstede, Hall etc and at the same time Confucius tradition has been taken into consideration. The writer remarks that Chinese culture with its collectivism, long term oriented, and high context communication features, has its modern significances as well as challenges.All the analysis and discussions in the thesis are explorative, with an aim to win the attention of intercultural communication research and practice to the globalization process.