Anna's Blog

For this blog post, I listened to the podcast "The Art of Listening: How to Master Relationships Through Communication" with Chris Lee. This podcast focuses on the principles of being a generous listener, and how that can benefit your communication and therefore your personal relationships.  The podcast mentioned how about "70% of communication is not the words you say" (Lee). This makes communication larger dependent on tone, facial expressions and gestures. This reminds me of the concept of a "channel-rich context" from the textbook, which describes how some conversations "involve many different communication channels at once" (Green). This is especially important in face to face conversations, and an element we miss in online conversations. This is why Chris Lee recommends that for important conversations a face to face conversation, or at least talking on the phone, allows you to be a much better listener. If I think back to important convers...

These days, we have access to a lot of information online and it can be very dangerous when it comes to forming opinions based in fact versus fiction. This prompt reminded me of a study mentioned in one of our chapter readings for the week that spoke of how people mainly shared posts on Facebook that confirmed their own prejudices, instead of focusing on accuracy of information. Social media can be an echo chamber, meaning that we can see and hear our own thoughts reflected back to us and then believe them even more to be truth. A sort of mob mentality starts to form and we do not stop to take information or opinion with a grain of salt.  A successful and very viral online campaign I immediately think of is the Me Too movement. This movement used a hashtag to immobilize people especially women to speak out against their oppressors and share their experiences. It exposed many influential figures and made them be held accountable. This campaign used the power of how interconnected we...

 For this week's post I chose to explore Cafe Yumm's online communication and presence.  Cafe Yumm is a restaurant based on elevating rice and beans, with their own trademarked signature sauce. They have locations throughout Oregon, including ones in Portland, Corvallis and Eugene. The company does a good job communicating online in terms of having a clear efficient website. It looks updated with a recent new menu item to try. They also have social media, in which customers can tag them - perhaps using their sauce in their own recipes. Cafe Yumm's Instagram reposts these stories to their own, which is a great way to show appreciation and create an online dialogue and community.  On their website at the top there is the option to see menu and locations. In the center is the new menu item, which rotates with other images of different popular menu items. On the bottom is different sections labelled " Seed ", " Flame ", " Bowl " and " Life ...