The Interview
No, not that Interview. A different one.
One of the key aspects to achieving global citizenship is having both the aptitudes and tools to function in a globalized world.
Our first Friday in China, during a focus group interview with our Chinese buddies, I was able to see a great example of global citizenship in action.
The goal of our interview was to spark an intercultural conversation about themes we uncovered in a film screening we enjoyed together—in our case, an episode of the documentary series on Chinese food, A Bite of China.
There are lots of commonly accepted best practices for academic interviewing: hold it in a safe, quiet spot without interruptions, keep note-taking and recording devices as unobtrusive as possible, and don’t use laptops. In our efforts to create an interculturally successful interview, we threw best practices out the window. Not only did we hold our interview over dinner in a restaurant, our group also made the controversial decision to have not one, but two note-takers capturing the conversation on multiple electronic devices. We thought we could make them less obtrusive by hiding them on our laps below the table.
Our buddies had other ideas. They immediately asked to see my teammate’s tablet and my MacBook, expressing their desire to buy one and asking how much they cost in Canada (roughly the same). While we had a feeling of awkward guilt about breaking the “rules” and typing the interview responses, our buddies broke the technological ice, so to speak, and caught us off guard in the process.
It was neither the first time nor last time we would be surprised by our host culture.
In case it didn’t already seem like a very informal interview, one of the buddies was fiddling on her phone throughout the entire process. She may well have been distracted by other more appealing social engagements, or just plain bored. But it soon became clear that at least some of her time was spent looking up words in her Chinese-English dictionary to help her understand our questions and give better answers.
Obviously her actions reflect the difficulty of conducting an interview in a different language (Waktins-Mathys, 2006), but they reveal several other key things as well. First, this is yet another way in which smartphones can help us conduct better intercultural research (van Doorne, 2013). Second, in conducting research, a smartphone can be an empowering tool that helps level the uneven playing field and power relations between researcher and interview subject (Creswell, 2013). Third, it shows the sheer ubiquity of cell phones in enhancing our everyday interactions, especially global ones.
Whether she knew it or not, by taking personal initiative and using technology to leverage her strengths in an intercultural interaction, our buddy was displaying what I would consider to be key qualities of the global citizenship manifesto.
© Jessica Lindal, 2015
Contemporary Issues in Communication, Master of Arts in Intercultural and International Communication, Royal Roads University
