October Blog

October Blog

Lauren Brill

            This month, I was really interested in the Interpersonal Relationships in Culture. I learned that interpersonal communication is the exchange or interaction that occurs between people who are in an interdependent relationship. There are three different sections within communication that can be researched. First there is relational, which is how individuals interact with each other. Next there interpersonal, which is the independent idea. Finally, family can be studied. 

            Within interpersonal communication there is relational dialects. Relational dialects help us explore how our rational lives are always in flux and always shaped by contemporary impulses that arise in and through our communication. The creators, Baxter and Montgomery, identify three different dialects. They are: connection vs. separation, predictability vs. novelty, and openness vs. closedness. In class, we looked at examples of these. All three examples were from the show Friends. For the openness vs. closedness example, Phoebe wrote a song and sung it to her music partner. Her partner told her she should send it in to a cat commercial and make money off of it. Phoebe said she didn’t want to sell it. Later her music partner went behind Phoebe’s back and sold the song to the cat commercial. This is an example of openness vs. closedness because Phoebe was closed about the idea of selling her song, but her partner was open to it so she went off and sold it. For predictability vs. novelty, the clip we watched was about Phoebe changing her name to her husbands. When she went to go change it she went out of the way and changed it to something completely random. Her husband didn’t predict her to do that, so when she told him what she had done, he was in complete shock. I found another example from friends, but this video I found is an example of connection vs. closedness. In this scene, Ross is telling Rachel how he feels distant from her, due to her work. He is feeling the closed out from her and wants to be let in. On the other hand, Rachel says that she enjoys having this to herself and him not being a part of it, since he is part of her everyday life and friends. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY9wkrgtGX0

            I really enjoyed learning more about interpersonal communications. I am excited to take interpersonal communications next semester and learn more about the subject.