Understanding the Concepts - Essay Example

Understanding the Concepts al Affiliation) I was browsing through a random Facebook page and met new people who had similar interests to mine or so I thought. I added one into my friends list hoping that we would be able to share a lot due to the impression he had given me. During the interaction on the Facebook page, he shared a lot about his passion of creating a global network of friends because he spent most of his time on the web. He was looking to have a network of friends across the world as he was an information technology student and would be spending most of his time on the computer.

I was moved by his ambition because it would require him to be able to adapt to multiple cultures that exist across the world or he would be in for a culture shock. From the looks of it, listening to him would make you think he was ready to for the challenge but unfortunately, he fell at the first hurdle. My new friend, Omar asked me if I could loan him some money as he was in a slight financial trouble. I told him I am just a student and I could not be able to help in the way that he wanted me to.

He was disappointed because according to him, people from my country are all rich and a few thousand dollars would be like spare change to us. This came as a shock to me because my family is not rich and my parents work really hard to be able to pay my tuition fees and the other family bills. It was late in the night and I totally lost the interest I had in his ‘project’ as he was only looking for people from my country with the notion that they would give him money without having to work for it.

He was on the internet to look for money and not friends as he had indicated earlier. The misunderstanding was not resolved because when I tried to explain to Omar that not everybody in my country is rich, he refused to believe me and got angry so I had leave him alone to avoid further conflict with him. He assumed that I was lying and that due to the power of the dollar against their local currency, there must be a lot of money in my country and that I am just stingy and unwilling to help. This event shows that the cultures and imaginations of people around the world especially in the developing countries are way different to most of the cultures in the developed nations (Staib lecture 9/9).

The assumption is that the people from the developed nations are wealthy and have no financial problems. This event could be handled better in the future by being open with each other and telling it as it is even if it means upsetting the other party as the truth will stick. As a learning experience, it is important not to assume that someone understands who you are (Gumperz pg. 8). There were no other people involved in the event (Endangered Languages, film in class). References Anthropology of Language, chapters 1-5 and 8 Articles in Bb Learn: Gumperz, De Saussure, Duranti, Burling, Hill, Wolf, Ochs and Schiefflin Film/Video: The Linguists; George Carlin; Holding Door/LAHWF; American Tongues; Speaking in Tongues: Endangered Languages; Origin of Language; Linguistic Relativity video; The Californians/SNL video; References Crnkovic, I.

, & Larsson, M. (2002). Building reliable component-based software systems. Boston: Artech House.