Dedication to Canvas (my coms group)

The last Communications entry for the blog YAY!!! Well just want to make the last entry one meaningful post for my communication group and how well they treated me :) even when our lessons clashes in odd days. Nevertheless, they still did not bear a grudge on me, I hope XD. We started off really shaky, cause not everyone in the group is a Singaporean. At the start it was really terrible, especially for me because of the negative perception of being the only guy in the group = slave (from pass experience). Everyone use to be so quiet not wanting to comment on each other’s idea cause of the fear of giving everyone a negative perception of being the devil, which might result in the lousy peer evaluation. But times have change as we spend more time together doing the project; we spend our time doing constructive work while having fun together, laughing, gossiping et cetra. Sometimes my group will speak in their own mother tongue (maybe it is easier to express their thought), but there is always someone who would kindly convert whatever is said into English for those who cannot understand and that includes me (so lucky right? J). One thing I like about my group is that there is really no prejudice on each other. Tolerance is at the max.

Well, I feel that the need to understand each other in a group is really important to doing well. Of course one should not take a stereotyping view of like he’s of another race, hence a loser. Personally, I got to know quite a lot of things from my group like a little of Malay and two lines of Japanese. The fighting scene made and directed by us. These are the little things that might just make one smile for the rest of the day.

On exclusionary language

I remembered once upon time during the days of adolescence where my peers and classmates sought for their identity and for the sense of belonging to a particular group. During those days were the times where everyone had to belong to a group in order to feel “accepted” or “recognised”.
As such, while different groups tried to differentiate themselves from the rest of the community, codes, hand shakes and sometimes to the extreme, even crests were born. In all desperate attempts to paradoxically “individualise” “groups”, the F language was born.
The F language, although ironically should only be understood by a certain group, presumably the group who first came up with it, begin to proliferate amongst the rest within the community for example, our school. Slowly, it began to even manifest itself amongst teenagers or people of my age and before anyone realises, almost everyone on the street who were of the same generation could speak the F language. An attempt to differentiate one’s group failed miserable as in-groups did not keep to their part of the bargain—to maintain the group’s “code” language.
What’s all the ranting about? I am not trying to forcefully share a part of my adolescence-hood with you good readers but rather, I am trying to raise a point that even though a group can make use of exclusionary language, the extent of “exclusionary” can only go as far as the tightness of the lips of in-groups. This whole argument about exclusionary language is only but a theory or a concept which is very flexible.
Exclusionary language, as its name suggests, refers to any forms of terminology or jargons which are supposedly shared and only understood by a certain group within its in-group members. The fact that the in-group members are the only ones who understand the language separates or excludes the rest from the former. However, how exclusive is this exclusionary language? Alas, but it can only be exclusive unless in-group members decides to be “nice” and educate friends and fellow peers who are technically considered out-group in an attempt to look “cool” or to boast about their group. This brings me back to my point that exclusionary language is a very flimsy, or rather, flexible concept although it does a good job defining terms and jargons which we may not understand, never mind that we may one day be so lucky as to be educated by one of them in-groups regarding these “foreign languages” or shall I say, “exclusionary language”?
Delving deeper into thoughts about exclusionary language, I have to further elaborate that sometimes, exclusionary language can include jargons or terms used by professionals. In these cases then, the “exclusion” that it has on people should be thought of as a subtle and unconscious form of exclusion. This would probably be easier understood in a story form. Imagine you are a doctor and you have spent more than six years studying terms which are far from lay man’s and it is all internalised within you thanks to the millions of tests you have gone through. One day while you were having coffee with your friend (who is anyone else but a doctor) when suddenly you have a headache at the back of your head. Instead of saying “oh no, I have a throbbing pain at the back of my head” you say, “oh no, I have a muscle tension stretching across my occipital lobe from the medulla.” How is your friend going to react to this? You did not use these jargons on purpose but because it was internalised within you, it came out automatically as compared to the previous example whereby groups come up with codes or languages specially to exclude people.
This concludes the point that exclusionary language can be both subtle and blatant as with the two scenarios I have described above.

SMOKE SMOKE SMOKERSSS

Non-verbal communication, something that did not strike me until recently(due to some special reasons) is much more effective than its verbal counterpart. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.



The gruesome images are designed to disgust smokers, and try to use the shock factor to persuade smokers to quit. The effectiveness of this campaign can be seen especially on the teenagers. For instance, I have a female friend who was so disturbed by the images on the cigarette boxes, that she got one of those cigarette containers, just to put their cigarettes in.

In the past, words were used to inform the smokers on the danger and harm smoking can deal to one person, an advertisement of the quitting smoking can get you a near motor-bicycle, but that did not really stop the smokers from cutting down. Now the usage of these new unsettling images of cancerous growths and (more recently) deformed foetuses are far more effective in deterring smokers from lighting up their next cigarette. A television advertisement, featuring a woman with a sallow complexion and whose teeth had fallen out, was panned by the public for being too unsettling. At least now there are more people (especially the female smokers) aware of how smoking can destroy the image of being BEAUTIFUL.

Hence, the dilemma of how much of the shock factor to include in future anti-smoking campaigns. Too much, and the general population will complain of the overly repulsive images shown. Too little, and the intended effect will be completely lost on smokers once again.

In the mean time, we must keep in mind that the longer we take to decide just how unpleasant we want to make our health warnings, the more time the smokers have to get used, and eventually become immune, to yet another method of discouraging them from smoking.