Communication

Communication is all about understanding people.

This world is full of people, yet not everyone understand each other due to different culture, background, languages, etc. Communication allows people to share their experiences and come close to understanding each other. Communication starts with a smile, or a wink, and it can be huge in scale as a movie or the news, and it can be done through language and without language as well.

Since this podcast project is about communication, about sending out a message to people, our group decided to employ humor as the main tool for communicating with others. Framing short but absurd stories into an evening news type of podcast, we hope to make fun of our society, comment on social issues, and just be ridiculous. I mean, look at the news stories we read these days. Aren't they more for entertainment than for actual information? Are we not getting the most superficial details and making our judgements based on them? How many of us know the history of Egypt's politics or culture when we criticize their government system since what we've read on the NYTimes or what we've seen on CNN must be objective truth? How many people actually feel for the murders that occur every day, or kids starving all over the world?

I feel like I've gone a little beyond what I meant to say about the podcast project, but um, what I mean is, these were some of my thoughts on starting this podcast project.

I realize this can be difficult, since a sense of humor is something that is socially constructed and developed. As we are targeting different audiences (classmates, Japanese speakers, people in Japan, etc) this might actually turn out to be a failure.

Yet even if our project turns out to be a failure, there is a lesson to be learned. Whoever said communication was easy? Aren't all human interactions at some points come from miscommunication?

Through this project, I expect we'll learn about targeting an audience, letting others know of our intentions in a way that will keep them interested, and writing to amuse someone. Knowing the grammar and vocabulary in order to say what we mean to say will be the largest obstacle we'd have to overcome. But I'm sure we'll be able to get it done somehow.