Interpersonal Relationship

Over the weekend, I watched a movie called Garden State. As the story goes, Andrew Largeman is the male protoganist who shuffled through life in a lithium-induced coma until his mother's death inspired a vacation from the pills to see what might happen. A moderately successful TV actor living in Los Angeles, "Large" hasn't been home to the Garden State in nine years. But even with 3,000 miles between them, he's been unable to escape his domineering father Gideon and the silencing effect he's had on his son from afar. Stunned to find himself in his hometown after such a long absence, Large finds old acquaintances around every corner living quite unique lives as gravediggers, fast food knights and the panderers of pyramid schemes. Meanwhile, at home, he does his best to avoid a long-simmering but inevitable confrontation with his father. By a twist of fate, Large meets Sam, who is the female protoganist, a girl who is everything he isn't. A blast of color, hope and quirks, Sam becomes a sidekick who refuses to ride in his sidecar. Her warmth and fearlessness give Large the courage to open his heart to the joy and pain of the infinite abyss that is life.

This movie, is a good example of media that portrays interpersonal communication. This movie portrays the different kinds of relationships that can be known to mankind. One of the concepts I'd like to talk about is the Knappp's Model of Relational Development. His models descibes the progression and development of relationships as a series of 10 stages in two phases. Stages 1 to Stage 5 is the coming together phase while Stage 7 to Stage 10 is the coming apart phase. However, in this movie, the director talks more on the escalation phase of this model.

Large and Sam first met at the hospital. Stage 1 of initiating occurs when the two screened and filtered themselves. This stage occurs in a very short period of time, sometimes as short as 10-15 seconds. In this stage, both Large and Sam are concerned with making favorable impressions on each other. They may use standard greetings or observe each other's appearance or mannerisms.

In the next stage, the audience see that both Large and Same ask questions of each other in order to gain information about them and decide if they wish to continue the relationship. We see them getting to know each other better and spending more time with one another. Besides that, they also meet each others' friends and families. This is Stage 3 of Intensifying occurs. Self-disclosure becomes more common in the intensifying stage. The relationship becomes less formal, the interactants begin to see each other as individuals, and statements are made about the level of commitment each has to the relationship.

Large and Sam become a pair in the integrating stage. They begin to do things together and, importantly, others come to see them as a pair. A shared relational identity starts to form in this stage. It is evident when Large's friend asked him, "Where's your girl, Sam?" and she was pleasantly happy with it.

Finally, the bonding stage occurs. During the bonding stage, a formal, sometimes legal, announcement of the relationship is made. Large and Sam becomes serious and a relationship was forged between them.

Even though many critics suggest that not many couples reach Stage 4 and Stage 5, I do feel that it is not impossible to reach. Love doesn't necessary only mean passion and fire, but it also requires the two individuals to work on it.

So what do u feel about relationship?

Cultural Imperialism

On the ride home after school last evening, I couldn't stop wondering about Singapore's identity. We're such a young but immeasurably successful nation. Within forty years, we developed and emerged to be one of the key resounding players in the global market and had been promoted as a First World nation.

I gave some thoughts about our cultural identity. As we know it, Singapore is a amalgam of Chinese, Malay, Indian and European immigrants. In the last ten years, however, Singapore saw, and is continuing to see, a vast number of foreigners to enter Singapore to seek a better living here. We have the Westerners, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Arabs, the Thais, the Filipinos, the Indonesians, the Indians, the Chinese (and the list goes on). Singapore thus, achieves a significant degree of cultural diffusion with its unique combination of these ethnic groups which has given her a rich mixture of diversity.

I feel that, because of the continuous migration, Singapore’s culture has been greatly imperialised. Cultural imperialism is defined as the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating, or artificially injecting the culture or language of one nation into another. Ms Hui prompted us to think about the relationship between cultural imperialism and media globalisation.

I guess it makes sense for a thriving economy like Singapore to be immersed in the process of globalisation. We have nothing but our people, our creative and innovative ideas and our skills. We invest in anything we can lay our hands on. We bring foreign talents into our country and they, in return, inject their cultures and traditions to us. We built up on the latest technology and are up to date with big players such as America and Japan. With such developments, we have greater access to media products such as magazines, tv programmes, internet and so on.

And such, it is typical that we will be highly inclined to adapt the different cultures that are presented to us. Our people, especially the young, absorb the media products to a great degree. This is to a greater extent true with respect to “Americanism”, as they are the dominant players in the mass media such as film, news, comics, and television hit shows. This is largely due to the fact that they are more financially powerful to invest in good productions. Singapore purchase these products for entertainment purposed. In return, the American culture has been imposed onto Singaporeans. We have thus become more liberated and “westernized”.

I guess we are a living example of cultural imperialism at work. haha!

Culture Differences

Last Wednesday, we had a lecture discussion on cultural differences, which is one of the influential factor in communication. Culture is based on beliefs and values on the basis of which people interpret experiencess that they go through and behave accordingly, depending on which culture group they fall under. As we know, this falls under the cognitive perspective, whereby individuals act and respond to external factors as categorized by their social schemata.

Broadly but simply put, "culture" refers to a community with which we share common experiences that shape the way we understand the world. Most of the time, culture is the root of communication challenges.

Below is a clip in which we see the cultural differences between a group of Sudanese and the Americans. The Sudan boys obviously know about the American culture through forms of media such as magazines and television shows. However, they still experienced the "culture shock" when they arrived in Pittsburg, USA. They do not even know what butter is and mistakenly took it as a small bar of soap or even cheese. This shows the different lifestyle the Sudanese and Americans lead.

You can also see how the Sudanese have difficulties adapting to the new lifestyle. They cannot relate the significance of Santa Clause to the Birth of Christ during Christmas. However, just like Americans, the Sudanese also want their rights to freedom and education. It shows that while there are stark differences between culturs, the values of humanities (of each culture groups) also coincide with one another.



Learning and understanding the ways in which various cultural groups relate to each other is the key to opening channels for cross-cultural communication. Becoming more aware of cultural differences, as well as exploring cultural similarities, can help individuals communicate with others more effectively.

So what is your take on cultural differences?


Source--> http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/places/countries-places/sudan/cultural-differences-ggtu.html?source=pincl

Beauty In The Breakdown

Let Go by Frou Frou

I am communicating with you. I am communicating with you through this song. What do you think I am trying to tell you?

The Singapore F1 Grand Prix - Putting us on the World Map

Today saw the highly successful completion of the first ever night race on the Formula One circuit, the Singapore Grand Prix. This was definitely a historic and momentous event that will be remembered by all, but there are actually deeper underlying implications of this event.

I believe that the event being held in Singapore marks the beginning of an era where Singapore has redefined itself as a global tourism hub. With the emergence of Dubai and Macau as new "super-powers" in the tourism industry, Singapore has also now seemingly communicated its masterplan to become their South-East Asian counterpart. The successful and highly exciting F1 night race event, which coupled with the upcoming casinos and integrated resort, looks set to propel Singapore as a choice tourist destination for the affluent globetrotters due to its central location within Asia. This has been helped by the accessibility to transport links, multi-racial and multi-lingual nature of our country.

What remains to be seen though is how our country develops to accomodate the negative externalities that will come with being such a prestigious tourist hub. Can Singapore also then communicate to the skeptics within our own population that there are substantial positive externalities that might be reaped?

The Fall of Lehman Brothers

Image taken from www.boston.com

Many economists have been lamenting about the fate of Lehman Brothers since the first sign of the economic downturn in the first half of the year. After a long drawn back and forth saga, its spokesperson today announced that Lehman Brothers is set to file for bankruptcy in order to protect the value of its remaining assets. Other victims of the crisis include investment banks Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns, each of these being bought out by Bank of America and J.P. Morgan respectively.

We only now begin to appreciate the full extent and impact of the subprime crisis on the economy, with three former banking powerhouses disappearing from the street in the span of a year. Nothing like this has ever been witnessed in history and that goes to say alot about the damage effected by the subprime mortgage fiasco.

It all came about when banks and other mortgage brokers decided to securitize mortgage loans with poor credit ratings (high risk of default) and sell these structured investment products to individual and institutional clients. The structural problems inherent within the US banking system were then exposed as these re-packaged products were given ratings of AAA (high investment grade) by rating agencies such as Moody's or Fitch. Therefore, how they could substantiate such ratings will always remain a mystery for most of us, up till now, when we realise that the fees paid to these rating agencies were from the people responsible for coming up with these investment products themselves.

We also notice that the widespread dissemination of these products to investors all over the world has led to another huge problem of tracking the extent of losses. This has led to continuous speculation that there are further losses and write-downs to be witnessed, and this consequently caused a lack of investor sentiment throughout the globe.

I believe we have yet to see the final act of this spectacular fall-out from the subprime crisis and there will be further casualties in the pipeline (AIG?, Wachovia?, Washington Mutual?). The Federal Reserve will stop bailing out institutions who are poor capital positions for political as well as, economic reasons and hence we will indeed see more blood being shed on the streets.

In such a state of economic emergency, i think we should continue to save more money and invest it in relatively safe asset classes such as 1-yr governement bonds etc to protect our capital and earn slightly above interest rates. This will ensure we still manage to grow our wealth, as little as it may seem, slowly but steadily.

So what are your views on the latest world economy?

Sources: Channel News Asia, 15th September 2008
BBC News UK, 15th September 2008
Bloomberg.com, 15th September 2008

Local Movie Review - Leap Years (3.5/5.0)

I've actually always wanted to watch "The Leap Years" ever since it came out in the theaters on 29th February 2008. However, I didn't managed to catch the screenings because..
1) I was working.
2) I wanted to watch it with my boyfriend (who was then still studying in London)

And so, when my COM101 project mates were brainstorming on a movie for our project, I took the opportunity given and suggested this particular movie for us to analyse and critic.



Despite not being chosen to present our findings on "The Leap Years", it is definitely one of the best locally produced films I've ever watched and have thus decided to mention it here. The entire story is based on a Catherine Lim (famous local author) story. And I find it interesting that the producers had cleverly injected a confluence of cultural and social concepts to emphasize and define an abstract concept such as love (as perceived by the female protoganist--and later on, by the audience).

An illustration of this point was when the local custom of Chinese fortune-telling was used at the start of the movies as the preferred method to convey Eastern idea of love and match-making. This was later met with quotes about love and affection from Western philosophers and writers such as Shakespeare. Therefore, this East meets West concept about the show really impressed me as it truly captured the integration of the many different cultures and social norms within the Singaporean society, thus showcasing our uniquely varied "identity".