Cultural Diversity againsts Globalization

The globalization helps to reduce uncertainty in communicating with people which has different cultural background. Communication and transportation technology enable people around the world to live and understand the life of other people culture. This may be good for some reasons but on the other hand the globalization may threat the cultural diversity into cultural extinction. For example in Indonesia, our people are influenced heavily with westernization brought by fast food, TV cable, Internet, and MTV culture for the teenagers. Those things can be a serious threat for our national cultural diversity.

Intercultural communication is not only about communicating with people between nations or continents, it can also between the ethnic in one country or even between different company / organization. Ethnocentrism is still one of our sociocultural issue until now. People in Indonesia are depended on stereotype that people used to believe long time ago. We may hear about this following stereotype such as Padang known as “pandai berdagang” and stingy, Sunda as “suka dandan” and materialist. This stereotype may create a gap between one ethnic to another ethnic in Indonesia.

Therefore, communicator should have intercultural competence to be able communicate with other culture. The basic competencies that communicators should have are sensitivity and self-consciousness. These two things can help communicator to start a conversation and maintain relationship with other people background.