Abstract:
Our times are often referred to as the new world order with its new economy. What this means is that capitalism has been restructured on a global scale, and people of widely different cultural and linguistic backgrounds have been thrown into contact more than ever before. Cultural contact may occur in the flows of information and mass media, as well as in the flows of actual people in migration. Given the ubiquity of cultural contact, mergers and hybrids, it is unsurprising that there should be a strong interest in intercultural communication. If intercultural communication is an exchange of stimuli, data and information through an interaction between individuals came from different local communication contexts, we can daily come across this type of communication process. Sociology as a discipline makes an important contribution to the study of intercultural communication: it is the key contribution of discourse analysis to take culture as empirical and cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. Moreover, to investigate whether it is possible to avoid any of the problems of intercultural communication, it is suitable to start with the communication situation itself and analyze why misunderstanding and conflict arise. Today a new form of communication is necessary; it should take itself away from the temptation of merging, tolerating and joining together different cultural realities. Intercultural communication today moves towards an horizon much more complex, which offers a new interpretation: in fact it is necessary to promote cultural coordination and cooperation.
