Those with their cellular phones in their hand on trains are trying to “pull even.”

“Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, found that there is a direct connection between the duration of a person's commute and their sense of social isolation. By his calculations, every ten minutes of commuting results in 10 precent fewer social connections.” (Arianna Huffington, Third World America, p.104) I commute for one hour each way. That means I have 120% “fewer social connections.” “A study by Swiss economists at the University of Zurich discovered that commuters with a one-hour commute each way need to earn 40 percent more than noncommuters just to pull even with the noncommuters' level of satisfaction with their lives.” (ibid., p.104)

International Communication Education

Communication needs an expressionist on one end and audience on the other, since monologue cannot be called communication. Expressionists send their messages out. If nobody else audits the message, there is no communication but monologue. If audience audit the message, there comes communication for the first time. Thus, if communication is to exist, there should be both an expressionist and her/his audience. International Communication is, of course, a kind of communication, and thus needs expressionists and audience. International Communication Education, a crucial part of International Education, is, therefore, an education which develop both expressionists and audience across borders. Let me examine how International Communication takes place. Expressionists express their ideas or their facts they have found usually in their second languages. Here we need an education to develop expressionist-ship in our students. Audience, off course, audit what expressionists have expressed usually in their second languages, but, to audit, the audience have to find the expressions. That is, they have to subscribe to the expressions. Therefore, we have to develop audience-ship, which includes subscriber-ship, in our students. By developing both transnational expressionist-ship and transnational audience-ship in our students, we can have transnational communication. Plural transnational communications will finally make up International Communication.