User:Lelaina Lemire/sandbox

High and low context cultures creates a scale to describe a cultures communication with others through their range of communication abilities; utilizing gestures, relations, body language, and verbal or non verbal messages are ways in which a culture can be categorized. Categorizing cultures in this manner helps to comprehend a culture's communication skills and applying this knowledge also influences how cultures respond through global communication. High context cultures often stem from less direct verbal and nonverbal communication, utilizing small communication gestures and reading into these less direct messages with more meaning. Low context cultures are the opposite, direct verbal communication is needed to properly understand a message being said and doing so relies heavily on explicit verbal skills.

High-context cultures tend to be more stable, as their communication is more economical, fast, efficient and satisfying, but it is gained at a price of devoting time into preprogramming cultural background, and its high stability might come with a price of a high barrier for development.

Therefore, higher-context cultures tend to correlate with cultures that also have a strong sense of tradition and history, and change little over time.

The overlap between context cultures
Within both categories of context cultures, they are not totally separate and often take many aspects of each others cultural communication abilities into account. These terms are not classified with strict individual characteristics or boundaries, instead, many cultures tend to have a mixture or at least some concepts that are shared between them, hence overlapping the two context cultures. On the other hand, certain intercultural communication skills are unique for each culture and it is significant to note that these overlaps in communication techniques are represented subgroups within social interactions or family settings. Many singular cultures that are large have subcultures inside of them, making communication and defining them more complicated than the low context and high context culture scale. The diversity within a main culture shows how the high and low scale defers depending on social settings such as school, work, home, and in other countries; variation is what allows the scale to fluctuate even if a large culture is categorized as primarily one or the other.

Miscommunication within culture contexts
Between each type of culture context, there will be forms of miscommunication because of the difference in gestures, social cues, and intercultural adjustments; however, it is important to recognize these differences and learn how to avoid miscommunication to benefit certain situations. Since all sets of cultures differ, especially from a global standpoint where language also creates a barrier for communication, social interactions specific to a culture normally require a range of appropriate communication abilities that an opposing culture may not understand or know about. This significance follows into many situations such as the workplace, which can be prone to diversified cultures and opportunities for collaboration and working together. Awareness of miscommunication between high and low context cultures within the workplace or intercultural communication settings advocates for collected unification within a group through the flexibility and ability to understand one another.