The term culture has been primarily employed as a label for the collective life experience shared by people who live or have lived within the same social environment, such as a nation or a world region. Over the years, the concept of culture has been broadened to include smaller, more specified subcultures from domestic, ethnic, or racial groups as well as from other sociological categories, such as gender or sexual orientation. Consequently, intercultural communication has addressed the two main perspectives: cultural (intracultural) communication and cross-cultural communication. Scholars have labeled the former perspective as “emic” and the latter as “etic.” The etic perspective of intercultural communication is mainly addressed in this section.

Cross-cultural study in mass communication involves comparing similar phenomena occurring in different sociocultural systems. In ...