The emergence of globalization has changed the way people live these days. Basically, the phenomenon of globalization allows people to interact from any country at anytime. One of the forms of globalization is the emergence and utilization of social media by societies.
People from all over the world are able to be closer together through a simple click in social media. Often, social media is used to communicate since it is a lot easier and convenient to communicate with people across the world. When it comes to communicating through social media, people from any country must adhere to their own cultural values which usually cause differences from one to another.
As it stated in the Samovar's Book,
"Culture plays a primary role in establishing specific, shared rules that stipulate the communicative behaviors for different social and physical contexts"
Essentially, the way people behave or act toward themselves or their surroundings are always influenced by their own culture. As these cultures differ from one to another, intercultural communication is needed when we are facing this situation. "During intercultural communication interactions, difficulties can arise because you and your communication partners rely on different standards".
Being aware of everything may be the key to intercultural communication. One of the assumptions grounding in communication contexts that may be linked to one of my experiences in the context of committee organization is that communication is rule-governed in which communication govern us on what kind of communications are appropriate.
The concept of intercultural communication itself may be applied in almost every context in everyone's life. In the university phase, students must have at least experienced working as a committee of an event. Last September, in commemoration of Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University's birthday, there was an International Cross Cultural Day which I was one of the committee in handling that event.
The event may be classified in an organization context in which it involves the students and the foreign students as participation in the event. The division position that I have was a division that happened to be related a lot to the foreign students, such as liaison officer division.
In my experience, the event was named to be cross-cultural, yet the preparation before the event since I was one of the committee involved an intercultural communication in it. In essence, the task of being the liaison officer is to make sure the foreign student 's performance will run smoothly during the event. To be exact, I was handling two people that come from Africa.
Not to mention, I was very happy to get to handle them since it will be my very first experience in communicating with people that come from Africa. Not to mention, there are some words or things that happened to be nonsense.
