Sunday, December 11, 2005

Comm presentation piece

1) The paper that I am presenting today looks at politeness and etiquette as a folk concept and asks these questions: are there etiquette codes comparable in American and British culture or is politeness based on normative rules from family values? As well as if politeness is still significant today anyway. And also, what social drama exists when someone is impolite? And what ought to happen when someone is being impolite? Anything?

2) I am using a combined format of both Donal's 'normative versus code rules' frame as well as components to the Hyme's framework. I am formulating politeness into a case of normative behavior, the things that we ought to do. But I am also pulling on the social scene of which the random acts of politeness occur in everyday use around campus. These acts included situations of holding doors for others and sneezing and getting the “God bless you”.

3) I had the convenience of working with a few students from England abroad this year. They basically marked my initial interest in this subject as they never said “God bless you” to me and it left me looking for some reaction to sneezing. And so I began working on this idea of politeness to see if perhaps it was just me being overly polite or whether there was really something to it. I conducted informal interviews with the British gentlemen and it turns out that saying “God bless you” is not a part of what they do, though it is not entirely foreign to them in England.
On top of my interviews conducted with these Brits, I also observed many situations of previously said random acts in order to get a sense of how people are with each other in public. I studied at the DC, the library and outside dorms. So anywhere I went had a potential for observation, but it came down to using just these places.

4) My case showed no profound insight into the actions and behavior of others. For my comparison of British and American college-aged people, it seems technically that Americans are more polite. But at the same time, I would not call Brits rude. And then, this was just based on 3 British males that I spoke with and observed. My study reinforces the ideal that we ought to be tolerant of others because the etiquette and standards that we have does not equate to other people across the globe. The point is that life is circumstantial and little things like this are rudimentary.

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