Daniel Livingston

HCOM-214

Blake Rodger

5/12/15

Prompt: "My Topic or Content Goals"

          There are many situations in which conflict or a simple disagreement ca occur. Different environments may allow for more in depth arguments while other environments don't have the appropriate platform for someone’s opinion to be spoken. Along the same lines of scenarios and situations where conflict may arise, conflict can also be brought up in different forms in context to the group. For example, a topic that may come up in a work environment would probably handled much differently than in a church environment. The three different groups I would like to focus on are friends, family, and co-workers, and how an issue would arise, and how in these different contexts, they would be handled differently.

          

          First, in my experience, a controversial topic among friends really has no boundaries in terms of what we are going to say. An example of a topic that would traditionally arise among friends would probably be religion or politics. Because in family, mostly eve roe has the same religious and political views, but in friendships, it can vary more often. A topic that would come up in family, in my personal experience, with my brothers at least, would be film or television. Although it may sound silly, some of these conversations can get pretty heated. Topics like that are more common among family, but the with family, topics are more likely to get more sensitive with controversial topics such as abortion and gay marriage and similar topics. Lastly, with co-workers, the kind of topics that would come up in this environment very much greater than that of family and friends. The reason behind this is because with people at work, you are forced to be there, the relationships didn’t happen naturally. Since these relations among co-workers is artificial in a sense, topics tend to be less serious. The weather and mild politics are common in the work force because no one wants to step on anyone else’s opinions.

         With friends, I would say that the topics tend to get to more of a serious level because we all come from different backgrounds, unlike family. With family, the topics tend to be more lighthearted, but with the occasional deep discussion of a very pressing issue. In terms of family, I would see there is a pretty solid medium. And if there was a scale showing the mildness of topics among these groups, I would say the co-workers would be the mildest, with topics sally only used to crate small talk, and nothing further.