Social Conventions

Today in Literature we were discussing Social Conventions. For those of you who may not be aware of what they are (and I'm sure there's some because I wasn't sure either) social conventions are rules and behaviours that all of us engage in everyday without necessarily thinking about. Some of my personal social conventions include: being polite when meeting someone new, being respectful to my elders, shaking hands upon meeting someone for the first time, especially in an interview, say hello when answering a phone call and goodbye when ending the phone call, telling my family I love them,  and saying please and thank you, are just a couple of the probably hundreds.

We currently have an exchange student from Switzerland in my Literature class and I found it really interesting to hear from her point of view how the social conventions are slightly different in the different cultures.

The first thing that came to her mind when we asked her what some different social conventions between the cultures was, the importance of friends and family. Apparently in Switzerland friends are considered more important than family. She would spend most of her time with her friends instead of her family. And she said that she only told personal things to her friends, as that was something she just didn't do with her family. She said that a difference with Australia was that it's easy to make friends here, you can have a conversation with someone and regard them as a friend, whereas in her home country she would only consider someone a friend if she had told them personal things about herself. See in Australia, we would usually tell personal things to our families, sure we'd have some close friends we'd tell things too but we also would with our families, in most circumstances.

Next she said that a social convention in Switzerland was making a cheers every time they have a drink of something. Her first night with her Australian family, she was having dinner with them and was holding her glass of water in her hand waiting for the family to cheers with her before she could drink it. She soon realised that it isn't something we necessarily do here. Maybe at a party we may cheers before seeing how much we can get down, but it isn't something we would always do.

It fascinated me how different cultures have different social norms, and I encourage you to think of some of your social conventions within your culture or family unit and comment them on this post so we can compare the similarities and differences.

Yours truely,
whothefuckiseh?
xoxo