Rosa Grieser 
The cycle of culture, communication and identity [PDF ebook] 

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Communications — Intercultural Communication, grade: 1.3, Charles Darwin University, language: English, abstract: When human beings are in the company of relatives, friends and neighbors,
they might take it for granted that communication is a complex continuous
process which has many nonverbal as well as verbal components. It is in the
encounter with a stranger or being in a strange situation which inherent uncertainness.
Having expectations how a stranger may act or how to act in a
strange situation can help to reduce this uncertainness. These expectations
are based on particular social convention, which are part of what is vague
called culture (Payer: 2011). If a situation cannot meet the expectations, people
become suddenly aware that, because all customary behaviors convey
information, they struggle to understand the happening until they know the
particular cultural code (Leach:1996:9p ). A cultural code describes the system
of representation by which signs and their meanings are arranged by cultural
convention to temporarily stabilize significances in particular ways
(Barker 2005: 436). Traffic lights are coded in a sequence: red for stop, orange
for pause and green for go.