Blog Post 3

Interpersonal Relationships

“We are individuals, agents, or actors in the world, with some ability to effect change in our circumstances, even if our actions are highly structured or influenced by the world around us” (p. 192). Warren states that our individual identities are often more intricate and misunderstood than we can even grasp and because of this, we will never fully know the world of “The Other”, or those from different cultures from our own. But, along with that, leads us to constantly aim to transcend our own perceptions of the world in order to make more meaningful and important dialogues and relationships with others. We engage in communicative interactions constantly within various cultures and relationships and there are many factors that play into these relationships, like ideologies, histories, and identities. That is why this sentence was profoundly interesting to me.

I continued going back to the word “actor” and how that concept plays into not only what we see in others but what we try to be within ourselves. This sense of actorhood essentially constructs the actor as a authorized agent which then impacts how one enacts their identities for more broad collective purposes. I struggled with finding the perfect example of identities and actorhood but, during class, we touched on the T.V. show called Wife Swap. This was a perfect example of how these two completely opposite families had their own identities and cultures within not only themselves and their families, but in society as well. One family was a very straightlaced, rule bound military family, while the other family was a much more relaxed and carefree family that had little to no rules.

Just in the small clip we watched, the separate identities that each family had were very apparent and as they tried to build those relationships and get to know the Other, there were rifts and tensions that began to arise. When they swapped lives, the mothers had a naturally hard time losing their identity, or actorhood, they had for the new family. Because they were so ingrained in their normal rituals, their openness to building a new and lasting relationship with the families was hindered. If they had tried to be more open with the experience in the beginning, the outcome of their circumstances could have influenced their identities and culture far more positively. Whether they agreed with “The Other’s” way of living or not, the interpersonal relationships were the important part and building them could have significantly altered their lives.

Warren, John T. and Deanna L. Fasset.  “Chapter 10: interpersonal relationships in culture.” Communication: A Critical/cultural Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2015. Print.