I am not passive anymore

This week, we learned three theories; two of them are regarding with relationship between media and its audiences and the other one is about communication. Among three theories, I really prefer to wirte about the spiral of silence because I experienced it many times as a victim of that.

According to the spiral of silence, fear of isolation is the key force that drives the spiral of silence.Usually people don't want to be different from others; we can feel the distance if people are different from us in terms of physical appearance or opinion. When everyone says, “Yes” it is so hard to say, “No.” However my cases are something different. I should be silence whether I want or not. The reason was that I am nuturally different from others in the Philippines;I am a foreigner and I can't speck Tagalog so my classmates(not only our classmates but also classmates from other courses because I am irregular student) felt that I was different. That is why they wanted me to be silent . When I was first year and second year, I really hated group work; my group mates didn't ask anything about projects; they just gave me order. I didn't want to be treated that kind of way; I wanted to say and do something but I didn't have choice then. I should be silent because I experienced the fear of low grade(It's horrorble.) If someone ask, “why didn't you tell about it to your classmates then?”, my answer will be, “ I tried but they didn't care; whether I told it or not, it was same.” What I did to overcome this is that I started to make my own group, and I tried to do my best. I thought that if I want to change something, I should show them some nice outputs. First time, it was hard to do it, but time goes by, I changed what they think about me; now, I don't have any problem. I don't blame my classmates(not only our classmates but also classmates from other courses)about what I experienced because I understood why they did it.

I think that this experience gave me lots of positive effects on me. Although it started with negative effects, if I don't have that experience, I cannot be who I am now. This is what I experienced about the spiral of silence. I learned really precious lesson from this that if I want to change something to become positive, before I try to change others, I should change by myself first. I am not passive anymore.