Communication Communication across Borders across Borders The Dialectic of The Dialectic of Paradoxes and Questions Paradoxes and Questions of Identity, Culture, of Identity, Culture, and Communication and Communication
Communication across Communication across BordersBorders
The Dialectic of Paradoxes The Dialectic of Paradoxes and Questions of Identity, and Questions of Identity,
Culture, and Culture, and CommunicationCommunication
Technological Advancements
Paradoxical Reality
Crossing borders amongst cultures while highlighting value contradictions and therefore cultural borders
again
Highlighting the gaps
Crossing borders
Ambivalence
TrueTrue
InternationalInternational
FunctionalFunctional
PublicPublic
ProductiveProductive
RealReal
False
National
Aesthetic
Private
Consumptive
Imitative
Questions of Identity, Existence, Time, Destiny, and
Communication
Meeting the needs of an Advanced Society: Communication, Business,
Industry and Leisure
Or
Controlling the Unaware Massive Market of the Consuming Countries by
Creating False Needs?
Only 15% of the world’s population controls 85% of the world’s
resources:
Q: Are those who consume and those who produce the technology ethically responsible?
Q: Is there advancement from false needs towards authentic humane cultural change?
Q: Are technological spaces platform for spreading knowledge or platforms for political and
economic hegemonies ?
Q: Can those looking for the food afford to raise the emblems of human
rights ?
Q: Do those looking for the food have the tools to use technology for human
development?
Universal values
(human rights,
freedom,civil
dialogue)
Home and community
Values
Patriotic Values
InnovationWomen's status
ExposureRelating to othersCollective (tribal)
cultureIndividual cultureFreedom of choice
Accessibility to knowledge
Human rightsFreedomEquality
Why do we need to move from A to B?
How can we move from A to B?
A reality of paradoxes and gaps A
BProcesses of reducing gaps in resources and approaching a core of universal values
What do we need to make the change?
Who is responsible for enabling the movement to happen?
Why do we need to move from A to B?
Terrorism in the name of God-
Wars in the name of democracy
Are these enough to provide answers to the questions above?
The immunity and peace of all societies in the world depends on reducing gaps
between cultures and minimizing frustration on collective and individual
levels .
How do we How do we move:move:
-From faith to choice?
-From consuming to producing?
-From dogmatism to multi-dimensional thought?
In Developing Societies
a
-From tradition to modernity?
In Advanced Societies
How do we move from patronism to symmetric
relation with the other?
From controlling resources to being ethically responsible for the other’s humane development
Ethical responsibility
Universal core
Social Agenda
Leadership
Universal leadership
Local leadership
Strategy: HRD
Unless the human resources development of developing societies take place, gaps among cultures will not be reduced and therefore the immunity of the international community will not be achieved
Freedom
Human Rights
Knowledge
Empowering women
Strategy: Education and the Study of Religions and
Humanities
Educational systems, particularly in the humanities, that are guided by the principles of human rights.
Religious studies that are based on critical thinking, comparison with other cultures, questioning, critical thinking and awareness of difference
Crisis
Personal, local, national, universal
Confrontation of values
Supporting environment
Energies (objection, anger, denial)
inequilibriumequilibrium
New set of values Staff members as
agents of change
The Concept of Confrontation of Values for Managing the Change
Culture/Values
Changing Environment
Base
Internal Environm
ent of cultural values
Trunk
Basic Assumptions (Schein, 1985)
Values
Norms
Behavior,Symbols and
Artifacts
Processes of change are usually situations of crisis that raise resistance.
The leadership must have the tools and built in mechanism to manage crisis and the resistance and channels to released energies.
When success starts to show, those who resisted join the success and aspire to the quality of life that it provides
A religious Jewish lecturer wearing a skull cap teaching in an Islamic college. The first day he hides his cap. Towards the middle of the year, he receives a kosher present at Passover from the Moslem young women he teaches.
Music lessons in the college started few years ago some hundreds of meters from the college—the voice of women shouldn’t be allowed to be heard. Some years later, the same group of female students chant in front of families and community in the graduation ceremony.
The problematics of ‘accepting the different’. Is accepting the difference of a shepherd living in poverty, married to four wives and having ten children, though plays the flute happily, ethically responsible?
Can those living in poverty be symmetric partners in true dialogue between cultures?
Minimizing gaps between cultures is the precondition for effective dialogue.
Dialogue forums must be platforms for projects of human resource development in the developing societies and developing ethical responsibility towards the other in the advanced societies.
The immunity of the advanced societies depends on how developed
the resources of the developing societies and how minimal the gaps between the two cultures could be.
Technology has a double and contradictory function; on the one hand, it functions as tool for development and
advancement; on the other hand, it could be tool for destruction .
Where are the limits?Where are the ethical judgments in the development and use
of technology?Does the human being bend the technology for the good of
humanity?Or does the human being lose the dimension of wisdom and
dimension of ethics at the era of technology?How can we manage the cultural shock that technology invites
into our lives in particular in a developing Moslem society?A milliard and quarter are already connected by a virtual world;
the rest are outside the net .The technological advancement does not necessarily reflect
ethical judgments. The economic hegemonies distract us from our real needs—the world's population with no bread and a
roof.We will always need the man/woman of ethics .