Neighborhood Interpersonal Communication In Change

In the past 20 years, the reconstruction of colleges and universities'tube-shaped apartments has been conducting vigorously, hundreds of thousands of young teachers and families moving from a single room of a dozen square meters into a big suite. On one hand, people are enabled to enjoy more spacious and better-equipped living conditions; on the other hand, people are gradually aware of other changes in their surroundings, for instance, dropping around among neighbors gets less and less, resulting in looser and looser neighborhood relationship, and more difficult encounter and exchanges with each other as well. This phenomenon is in sharp contrast with the common yet popular neighborhood exchanges in tube-shaped apartments in earlier years. The author, having lived in these two circumstances respectively for a long while, is deeply concerned about this change with a complex deep inside. Therefore, this paper can be considered to record and seek the past unforgettable life or to discover factors leading to intimacy or estrangement; however, it intends to serve as a modest spur to attract more valuable opinions, enabling more communication scholars to concern themselves with changes in real life, to facilitate research on interpersonal communication. Most of those existing versions get interpersonal relationship as the starting point to illustrate change in interpersonal relationship from the perspective of sociology and space planning theory and to explain influences exerted by space on interpersonal relationship; nevertheless, few has attempted to study dialogues, scenes, changes and causes from the viewpoint of communication, so this current study is necessary and meaningful.American communication scholars once predicted there would be no more important task than understanding and improving interpersonal communication, In the past studies on communication, mass communication research is always dominant, while nowadays scholars should pay more attention to this communication activity between individuals. As the most typical social communication activity, interpersonal communication is also the direct reflection of social relationship among people, In the past, neighbors living next door become important subjects of interpersonal communication because of unavoidable interaction and frication, but today's neighborhood exchanges are getting subprime and interstate(次级化,事际化),making neighborhood relationship lose its once dominant position. Based on personal life experience and interest in interpersonal communication research, the author decides on this topic and raises questions. Only by learning about the to-die-away or the having-just-died-away means of daily life exchange can we better realize difference between nowadays and the past. So how is the neighborhood interpersonal communication in the past and nowadays like? In which aspects have changes occurred? Which factors led to these changes?Built on the above questions, this paper consists of 4 chapters, describing existing situation, analyzing changes and illustrating causes. First of all, it explains why and how this topic is chosen, sorts and analyzes current research based on raised questions, discovers shortcomings of these studies and decides the significance of this study. Besides, it analyzes several core concepts related to neighborhood interpersonal communication to ensure that the study is just on the right track. Then, it adopts methods of interview and participatory observation to describe the situation of neighborhood interpersonal communication in tube-shaped apartments and self-contained apartments, making the scene vivid and lively through multi-angled description so as to shape contrast, and it also uses scenes of neighborhood exchanges from literature works as circumstantial evidence. Finally, this paper, after learning about these two different modes of neighborhood interpersonal communication, attempts to analyze this change and underlying causes, presenting changes in location, content and frequency of communication and analyzing structural factors at the level of physical causes, social causes and psychological causes.Though neighborhood interpersonal change is just a minute fragment of big social change, it is an important reflection of the profound transform of the latter. Mills once said, "Things we undergo in kinds of specific situations are always caused by structural changes. Thus, we have to surpass these changes and look at them so as to understand changes in personal situation. Since the institution we are involved in are becoming more multifarious and disorderly and relations get more complicated, number and types of these structural changes are continuously increasing. To have a clear awareness of and to utilize sharply the concept of social structure, one should be able to perceive relations in many different situations." Such a process can not only solve the puzzlement deep inside, but re-learn about the having-died-away and dying-away life as well; nevertheless, how to improve neighborhood interpersonal communication and to critique contemporary indifferent interpersonal relationship in the neighborhood is not the goal of this paper.