A Study On Privacy Awareness In Intercultural Communication

The rapid development of globalization promotes exchanges and understanding among different cultures. In the background that poly cultures collide each other, on the one hand some common features among different cultures are gradually turning out, on the other hand barriers influencing intercultural communication are emerging. Privacy, as a cultural value, is with significant differences in the cultures of East and West. Western cultures with individualism focus on privacy and Chinese culture with collectivism is more attentive to private affairs of the group. Moreover, in Chinese culture, less attention is focused on individual privacy in communication. Privacy issue has been an important cultural difference and main obstacle in communication between China and the west, which people have to face in intercultural communication. However, in the previous studies, the study on privacy is confined into the surface. The right of privacy tends to be paid more attention, but seldom has the study attached importance to privacy awareness. There are many phenomena and few reasons, many stereotypes and few findings.This research, based on theories and achivements of privacy in west countries, make a study on Chinese privacy from the perspective of intercultural communication. Beginning with quantitative study, privacy awareness, the degree, manifestation and protection are investigated. The subjects for this investigation are two separate samples: one is enterprise staff, and the other is university students. There is Likert scale in the questionnaire. Differences between them are analyzed using SPSS software regard of gender and age. Finally, the author discusses the performance and the underlying causes by applying cultural dimensions on culture values. It is universally acknowledged that people are lacking privacy awareness in Chinese culture with typical collectivism in the academic world. However, it is found in this research that with the accelerating pace of globalization and the development of economy, Chinese privacy awareness gets reinforced, especially for middle-aged and young ones. And privacy awareness correlates closely with power distance of the organization, age group and gender. Privacy influences interpersonal relations and intercourse frequency directly. The more privacy people have, the more indifference they perform, and the lower intercourse frequency they get and vice versa. Mechanism that protects privacy is in its own way for everyone but silence is an important means among them.A better understanding of Chinese privacy awareness and its reason not only deepen the theory for privacy study but also provides certain reference value to effective communication. It will pave the way for next reseach.