Week 1

During our first week of Organizational Communication, I have already learned so much. From the reading, I learned about globalization and communication’s role in today’s complicated world. Unfortunately due to personal reasons I was unable to attend Tuesday’s lecture. However from Thursday’s lecture, I learned the meaning of the saying “the world is flat.”

I found our reading very interesting and it is empowering to be really learning about what is going on in the world today and actually understand it. This first chapter touched on various current issues including terrorism, climate change and changing demographics. While the information is slightly outdated (I have the 6th edition), I still found it useful to be understanding times that I did not understand because I was too young to care about what was going on in the world. I think the most important part of this chapter was when it clarified why the author was explaining to it’s audience all of the complications of the world. The author wrote that “it is important to complicate our thinking about communication if we are to deal with the complicated world that confronts us” (Miller, 2012). Meaning, we must realize that today’s organizational communication is different from decades past. With ever-changing technologies and world issues, we have ever-changing communication of all types.

The video we watched on Thursday consisted of a talk by Tom Freidman at MIT concerning his book, The World is Flat. Freidman became a columnist for the New York Times in January of 1995 and in his column he discussed finance, trade, and other relevant topics. After years of travel and fieldwork, Friedman wrote his book discussing the flatteners of the world, also known as the products of increasing speed of technology affecting globalization. I found this very interesting because in my short 20 years of life, technology has made vast leaps. It has been incredible growing up in a time where technology is literally changing every single day and new discoveries are being made constantly. It’s incredible to my parents and my grandparents and all those in generations above me, that I don’t even know what it’s like to live in a world that isn’t like that. Tom Freidman’s discussion led me to thinking about all of these incredible changes in technology and how it affects the world. I knew that with the click of a button I could communicate with people in different countries but I didn’t realize how remarkable that technology was until hearing this talk.

I look forward to the rest of the semester and hope that every week is as informative and enlightening as this one was!