Sunday, March 11, 2012
Week 3/5-3/11: Encoding Messages: Part 3
For this week’s topic for the third question, I chose to focus on dress. A professor once told me, “Treat everyone in the room with the same amount of respect. It doesn’t matter if they have spiked purple hair because they are people too.” Clothing and hair can be a way a person expresses themselves as people. The book describes three major functions of clothing: to protect us from the extreme spectrums of the temperature; covers our body; and where people come from, like in a cultural pyramid. This is important when focusing on nonverbal behavior. We get dressed every day, and little thought goes into it. Now, if we swapped lives with someone in a different environment, culture and place we might feel uncomfortable to dress in the everyday clothes of that person. Without verbal communication we can tell a lot about a person, but like speech tones, and physical movements we must not read too far into them or be blind to see the right queues.
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Hey! I totally agree with your post about how people dress, and how it can be an encoding message. As someone who works in retail, I work on commission, and I always try to suggest things that people would like. While doing this, I definitely judge what the person is wearing- not in a bad way, but so that I can pick out clothing for them based on what I think they will like. You’re right, clothing and hair can absolutely be a way that a person expresses themselves. I think there is a fine line between being blind to these cues, and seeing them correctly.
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