Profile of a Theorist (Edward T. Hall) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Profile of a Theorist (Edward T. Hall) - Essay Example olars, among them the famous Marshall McLuhan who came out with the mantra, â€Å" the medium is the message†, and with whom Hall had a long and fruitful correspondence. Hall is universally acknowledged to be the founding father of studies on intercultural communication, because it all started with his early work in the 1950s for the United States State Department in order to coach foreign service personnel survival skills in intercultural communication. He realized that a majority of the communication gaps between people from different cultures could be because of different perceptions they had about the same thing, based on their cultural background. Intercultural communication is usually defined as any direct communicative interaction between individuals or groups of individuals belonging to different cultures. In other words, the term denotes interpersonal communication between "strangers" on the micro-level of face-to-face interaction. In a wider sense, however, the term is also but less frequently used to refer to direct or indirect interactions or contacts between ethnic groups, nations or cultures, thus denoting culture contact and cultural exchange on the meso- or macro-level. ( Roth, Klaus, 1999, p.206 ) The formal beginnings of intercultural communication are usually traced to the 1959 publication of â€Å"The Silent Language† by Hall. In this book, he defined culture as a concept, and described its role in setting expectations during the process of communication. He contradicted the prevalent natural assumption that communication styles and core values can be universal for all cultures. Instead, he proposed that a majority of human communication is actually non-verbal, mostly subconscious, and is determined to a large extent by cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In this book, he came up with the theory that not only does peoples cultural background act as a medium of communication, it also forms a subconscious part of the communication method.His