What's your perception??

What do you think when you see these pictures?? Will you think that the glass is half full or half empty?? What about the pie, a half full pie or a half empty pie?? Finally, the guy, is he having a half full head of hair or a half empty head of hair??

There is no right or wrong answer regarding these questions. Everybody perceives things differently. Therefore, a person can think of things as half full or half empty. When a person thinks that the thing is half full, he/she looks at things from the positive point of view. Conversely, when a person thinks that the thing is half empty, he/she look at things from the negative perspective.

There are many factors that can influence a person’s way of perceiving things. In the selection process, there are individual characteristics, mass media, habits of family or friends, psychological state, and many other things within a person’s environment. For instance, a person’s current psychological state can affect his/her way of perceiving things. Current psychological state can also impact a person’s decision making ability. When a person is experiencing hardship in his/her life, such as, retrenchment, he/she might see things negatively at the moment she is experiencing the hardship. It is because that his/her mood might not be good at that time. On the other hand, when a person is feeling extraordinary happy, perhaps because that day is his/her birthday when everyone in her family tries to make him/her happy, he/she might see perceive things in a positive way.

From the example, it shows that many factors in our environment can affect our way of perceiving things. There is no right or wrong way of perceiving and interpreting things. It is just the way different person with different thought which resulted from his/her cultural, social, economical background perceive the things. Hence, what do you think about perception?? Is it possible to make everyone perceive things from the same perspective??

Modern Communication Models

Nowadays, people like everything that saves their time. Similarly, in communication, people like the easy way to contact or inform each other about a certain happenings. This can happen through mobile phones, where people can call and deliver their messages through phone conversations. People can also text their friends or colleague about the important information that their friends or colleague should know. If it is not necessary to meet each other, people will like to communicate with each other through this high-tech communication tools.

Another way to communicate is through the online tools. For instance, the social networking websites are experiencing their popularity in the recent years. One of the popular websites is Facebook. Through Facebook, people can do many communication actions, such as, send a message, chat and post a comment. Those that I have mentioned are only the basics. There are many other things that you can explore once you have a facebook account. You can play various games, like mafia wars which my brother plays every day and you can also post as many pictures as you wish. In addition, people can make new friends who they get to know from their close friends and people can also find their old friends from their kindergarten or primary school who they lost their contact, probably since they moved to another school.

Hence, are the mobile phone and the online communication tools going to replace the traditional face to face communication completely?
I don’t think so. One of the fundamental reasons is that we are social beings. As for the mobile phone case, people still need to meet each other after they talk in the mobile phone. Let’s say if you talk with you colleague about an important business agreement which requires both of you to meet up and talk about it, then you will need to arrange a meeting. What if we can just talk on the phone about the agreements in detail and just send the agreement to each other’s office to be singed? Well, apart from that, as a social being and in order to satisfy the transactional model of communication, people need to arrange meetings (face to face communications).

According to the transactional model of communication which improves the linear (one way communication) and the interactive (communication without face – face meeting) models, communication is a process of simultaneous exchange and mutual influence and exchange between communicators. Transactional model of communication also happens within the existence of the surrounding environment. Hence, a physical existence of the two communicators is essential. Likewise, in the facebook case, even though the online communication seems to be efficient and engaging, people still need to interact directly by doing a face – face communication. Additionally, come friends in the social networking sites are only online friends who you do not meet in the real world. This strengthen the idea that face – face communication is a better way of communicating where you get know real world friends and not “online friends”.