Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

A literature review of scholarly research on both oral and typographic cultures shows that disciplinary isolation and an inconsistent application of oral and typographic concepts has hampered our understanding of media’s impact on intercultural communication (Bouknight 2017). Although research into the variations between oral and typographic cultural behaviors spans a variety disciplines, an instrument to measure the degrees of oral culture or typographic culture in a given test subject has yet to be developed. This study develops a valid survey of orality and typographic cultural behaviors. A fifteen-question survey of communication behaviors aligning with a current understanding of oral and typographic cultures was administered to two populations of community college students: those who had formally learned the concept in a classroom setting and those who had not recieved any formal instruction on the concepts. While the resulting pool of responses gathered thus far (n=120) is not sufficient for a valid comparison of the two target groups, the correlation between “theoretical” oral or typographic behaviors deserves attention. This study analyzes why many of the fifteen questions reveal a high correlation with the theoretical expectations and why some of the outlier questions do not. The overall correlation between survey responses and intercultural theory suggests that with more data, the behaviors associated with the oral-typographic dimension can be understood more precisely and expanded to cover new situations and new media.