Communication Foundations Perspective

I wouldn’t say I have a terrible group experience, but I definitely have one that wasn’t good. My freshman year of college, I took a communication class, specifically focusing on media and society. In the class, we had lectures everyday, few individual assignments, and many group projects. For one of the group tasks, I was put with people who were all similar in nature to me. I’m introverted, at least when in new environments around people I don’t know yet, and it seemed like everyone else in the group was, too. Nobody was really willing to take charge at first. Not that we all weren’t willing to contribute to the assignment, it just seemed like it was really difficult for all of us to be able to find the courage to speak up first. I don’t think it helped that it was an introductory level course, so the majority (if not all) of the group was first year students. The problems didn’t end once the project was completed. Because my group members and I were all rather reserved, it was also...

  The Social Penetration Theory explains how information exchange functions in both the growth and conclusion of interpersonal relationships. Specifically accomplished through self-disclosure, social penetration describes the process of bonding that moves a relationship from superficial to more intimate. Both vital to social penetration, the first dimension of self-disclosure is breadth (the number of the topics discussed) and the second is depth (the degree of intimacy that guides these interactions). When I was in my freshman year of college, I lived out of state and had two roommates who I had never met before. The first few times we interacted, there wasn’t much to say and I always struggled to keep the conversation going. Desperately trying to think of any possible similarities I had with either of them, I was constantly trying to establish some sort of middle ground where I could relate to them. Because I lived with them, I obviously couldn’t avoid seeing them, and with each ...