A Response to Professor Nancy Longnecker's Talk -- New

I think the lecture was good and casual.  I really appreciate that the lecturer thought of the audiences and gave more explanation of some words that I personally didn’t understand the meaning.  For example, she explained the difference between misinformation and disinformation.  Misinformation refers to unintentionally giving wrong information while disinformation is intentionally giving incorrect information which she gave example of Tobacco company. The company advertised and encouraged pregnant women to smoke because their babies will be small resulting in easier for them to give birth which was so scary to hear.  

In terms of her main point, I think she mentioned that an effective communication is to consider lots of factors such as considering the differences of their target audiences.  For example, the audiences could be someone who are uninterested, skeptical, polarized or interested audiences.  Moreover, she also talked about the communication objectives is to raise awareness, educate understanding, and lead to some changes of behaviors or changes of policy.  Therefore, I agree with her that we are different.  We have different interest, beliefs, skills, social norms or behaviors.  As a result, it is vital to consider these differences when we want to achieve an effective communication.  

In terms of the point she made that particularly resonated with me was raising awareness to audiences because I totally agree with her that it is crucial to make people deeply understand why they have to do something.  For example, in my country, it is not compulsory to sort waste.  However, after I came to New Zealand and learned more about the waste problems that if I don’t sort the waste, many parts of the waste could not be recycled as a result, we will have lots of issues such as chemical contamination and excessive of waste which leads to global warming.  Thus, I have learned that reminding people about the problems is one of the key to lead to successful communication.

In terms of the state of communication in the future, I hope that it will become easier to communicate successfully because we now live in the world where technologies help us to easily connected to each other around the world.  Therefore, we can learn and understand the differences among us.  However, we also need to be aware of disinformation as well due to easily accessing news or information through social media because we could easily be manipulated by some people in order to follow what they want us to do.  Furthermore, I really hope that what lecturer said was “to be kind to others” would be followed and stayed in our society.