Something that I found interesting while reading this chapter was when the author talked about day to day communication and how much of an important role it plays in our relationships. Typically when we think about communication we think of bigger life events as these are things we consider to be more meaningful. However, the author explains that natural day to day communication between ourselves and others is important to notice as well. Going along with this same idea, the author explains how any and all types of communication that you participate in have a relationship assumed underneath them. While I was reading this section of the chapter I thought about how we often don’t consciously think about this aspect of our communication. Instead, the link between the two is often just assumed. However, when we start to think more about the ways that communication helps us to enhance and modify our interpersonal relationships it seems to instill a sense of power, at least in myself. This perspective also helps us to understand why it is that we often switch between different ways of communicating when we’re talking to different people.
Another topic that I found interesting within this first chapter was the idea of frames and how they influence the way that we communicate. The author defines a frame as a basic form of knowledge that provides an expectation for a specific scenario. Immediately when I heard this term I connected it to schemas, a topic well studied and widely discussed in social psychology. Schemas are basic mental frameworks which we create over our lifetime that include appropriate roles and expectations for varying scenarios. The connection between these two terms intrigued me and made me a lot more curious about how framing influences communication, and the ways in which frames and schemas can be compared and contrasted.
