Effectively Steering Conversation a Personal Challenge

Over this past weekend I found myself in three different social situations in which I was more or less habituated to take a background role in conversation and let others dictate the flow and content.  Coming away from it all, I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.  On the plus side, this doesn't leave me overthinking later on about whether I misspoke about something and offended anyone.  But on the minus end, it all kind of left me bored since I know many of these good people out there have skills and interests, some of which they could help me develop if the communications were more directed and substantial (and interesting).  As I make my way into the wonderful world of retirement, I'm seeing more effective interactions with acquaintances and strangers as a kind of personal challenge.  And since there is no shortage of people out there, there should be plenty of opportunities to experiment with this conversational tactic or that.  But it's all pretty uncomfortable...I tend to be on the far reclusive end of "introvert".  On the other hand, enduring others going off endlessly with their boring rants and tedious talking points is uncomfortable as well...might as well get them talking about something I care about...

Podcaster Discusses Why People Won't Change Their Viewpoints

On a recent Mindset Mentor podcast of his, personal development coach Rob Dial gives three reasons why it's so hard for people to change their own minds about things as well as change others'.  They are (1) cognitive dissonance, (2) partisanism/tribalism, and (3) confirmation bias.  With cognitive dissonance, someone hears something that conflicts with what they are comfortable with, so they either rationalize or trivialize it...or as is often the case, just get mad at the other person who they perceive as messing up their life by expressing it.  The second one has to do with our tribal social nature, be it following a particular political party or politician, religion, culture, family, work pals, section of the neighborhood...or maybe just what our favorite sports team is.  Folks tend to magnify the faults of those outside their felt circle, especially when they are in direct competition with them, as is the case in politics and sports.  Dial himself says he doesn't come down on either side of the political spectrum, he's in the "center", and doesn't care about all the political things others do.  With that I have a problem: you can be in the center and care more than many on the left or right fringe.  But I'm totally in agreement with him in that people in a group who want to be accepted within it will often, if not usually, bend their beliefs to fit in...even if they are obviously false.  As for confirmation bias, people tend to seek their sources of information that confirm their already cherished beliefs and reject those that challenge them...this isn't helped by Internet algorithms that various social media and search engines use to "perceive" the user's inclinations and then fulfill them with affirming material.  Also, Dial mentions that there is a tendency for people, if they hear something repeated enough times, to accept it as truth...combine that with confirmation bias and the desire to "fit in", and you have whole entrenched sections of the population at odds with one another while "circling the wagons" to  protect own "tribes".  I don't think that this problem with human nature has changed over the centuries, but with our very recent development in mass personal digital communications the effects have mushroomed.  Rob Dial's solution seems to be to avoid confronting people with the truth because you're wasting your time for the aforementioned reasons...up to a point I agree with him, but at some point you have to stand up for what you know is right...

Quote of the Week...from M in the Movie Dr. No

Miss Moneypenny, forget the usual repartee.  007's in a hurry.                  ---M, Dr. No

For a long-standing movie series' first installment, the James Bond spy series got a lot of things right from the get-go with Dr. No, from 1962.  Then again, you can see some unworthy, dated stereotypes as well.  But I've always enjoyed the brief interplay from movie to movie between Bond and Miss Moneypenny, M's secretary in the supersecret British spy agency M16.  M, in the early movies played excellently by Bernard Lee, is Agent 007's immediate superior and has a very quick, acerbic wit...he's probably the only character in the series to which Bond displays a respectful subservience.  In an early scene from Dr. No, Bond, played here by Sean Connery, goes to M's office for his assignment and naturally encounters Moneypenny (played by Lois Maxwell), where they engage in their typical light, flirtatious banter.  Then Bond goes in to see his boss.  As he is leaving, M presses his speaker and delivers the above quote to Moneypenny...and 007 promptly leaves, giving her the empty box from his new gun.  I recognized the brilliance and humor of inserting this exchange in the movie, but I see a deeper significance.  I can't begin to count the times of annoyance when I would be watching the news on TV or listening to a radio talk show or podcast and the people on it would waste time just gibbering around with one another on no topic in particular.  This naturally doesn't occur when there's just one person present.  I'm guessing that part of this is to make the audience identify with them as regular folks, and part is to fill in some dead airtime between the actual features that they're really there for.  But sometimes they just go on and on as if they are in on some private joke apart from the audience and even snicker and giggle...that really sets me off: it's one of several reasons I refuse to watch the Greg Gutfeld show.  As for podcasting, I have written regularly about one series I enjoy listening to: Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor, in which he gives some ideas about living better in a conversational but disciplined manner.  I thought that since I like running, I might find a podcast that addresses that activity and found one featuring a couple who seem to feel that doing the old "Sonny and Cher" verge-of-argument routine is a great way to present a show.  After trying them out more than once, I came to the conclusion that although they did get around to eventually addressing the subject for which they had the podcast, it was too frustrating plowing through all that "repartee", as M termed it.  If I'm watching or listening to anything, I can tell you flat-out that this kind of prolonged banter is a big turnoff.  However, real life is different, and I think that light, inconsequential conversation is the stuff that greatly helps to hold us together in families, workplaces, stores, schools, and anywhere else people find themselves to keep from going to war with one another.  A little of that in movies, TV shows, radio, and podcasts...like Bond and Moneypenny in their flicks...adds some welcome flavor to the experience, but as with spices added to a recipe, too much can ruin everything...

"The Conversation" Post-Debate Reveals Surveillance Society

Being at work Tuesday evening, I missed most of the Democratic Party presidential campaign debate, broadcast on CNN.  There were six candidates on stage, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both competing for the support of the party's more leftist progressive wing.  From what I did hear at the end after I got home, each candidate seemed to express their positions and philosophies pretty well and were able to adequately answer the questions posed to them.  Apparently, though, earlier on there was some kind of squabble between Warren and Sanders...following the debate, with the candidates still onstage congratulating each other, the two seemed to be engaged in a hushed argument, obviously not intended for others to hear.  Initially unaware of the ongoing spat, one of the other contestants, Tom Steyer, approached them and was seen momentarily taken aback at the quarrel.  Later on CNN he was asked what they were talking about and he responded by saying that he didn't hear it...a most diplomatic position when in all likelihood he did hear their conversation.  Yesterday the news buzz wasn't about the actual content of the debate itself but that very brief disagreement between the two senators.  And yesterday morning while I was waiting for the Senate to begin its proceedings on C-Span2, I watched CNN play an audio-enhanced recording of what they said, which eerily brought to me memories of an old 1974 movie starring Gene Hackman...

In The Conversation, Gene Hackman portrays a techno-geek who is known in his trade as an expert on bugging and surveillance.  A powerful business magnate, suspecting infidelity on the part of his young wife, hires him to spy on her and bring to him evidence of what she is up to.  Much of the movie revolves around a conversation he picks up...from his electronically souped-up van...between her and her suspected lover in an urban public park.  The movie explores how he is able to filter out extraneous noise and enhance that conversation, giving the clear impression that nothing is private anymore and that anyone who can afford it can spy on anyone else...the movie's ending clearly places an exclamation point on that notion.  Tuesday night following the debate, the CNN analysts did not as yet have access to the conversation between Warren and Sanders...only after a day of technical processing on somebody's part did they receive the audio.  Now of course the two senators weren't really having a private discussion since they were front and center on the national stage, but it wasn't meant for outside ears nevertheless.  Steyer was right in refusing to discuss what they said...unfortunately, CNN has revealed the depths to which they will go to push a story, in the process also demonstrating the utter lack of privacy or discretion left in our society...

Quote of the Week...from Shelley Moore Capito

Being a good listener is more than just being quiet.  It's reflecting back on what you're hearing.  It's processing the information to formulate a question, a comment or a speech.
                                                                         Shelley Moore Capito

When Shelley Moore Capito, then a Republican representative from West Virginia, won her U.S. Senate race in that state following the retirement of Jay Rockefeller, it marked the first time since 1942 that her party had won a Senate seat in that state...as a matter of fact Rockefeller, originally a Republican in line with the rest of his political family, had switched to the Democratic Party because it was so dominant there.  Well, times have changed and West Virginia's voters have tended to vote for Republicans of late.  Capito was on the 17-member committee to work out a compromise border security funding bill just recently that kept the federal government from again shutting down.  She is known in the Senate as a likeable colleague who, although true to her conservative principles, works well with members of both parties and is known to try to see things from others' points of view.  On the Senate floor she is one of the more eloquent, informed speakers: Capito's oratory is meant to educate and persuade, not demean and divide.   You might infer from all this that I happen to admire her, and you would be right.  I think she would make an excellent Republican president...

The above quote is simply an explanation of Shelley Moore Capito's own pragmatic philosophy...listening doesn't mean you are weak or are in agreement with who's speaking, but rather that you want to learn as much about an issue from all of its angles and arguments.  When there is agreement, capitalize on it and when there isn't, then either stick to your guns if it is a high priority or find a trade-off somewhere where both sides can come away with something.  It is people like her that make things work in our elected government, not the brash attention-grabbing grandstanders with their obstruction, taunting accusations, insults, and weaponized political correctness...

Quote of the Week...from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think. 
                                                                               ---Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Noted American astrophysicist and popularizer of science Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of my favorite public figures (run for president, Neil!), has a birthday today, turning 60, almost exactly two years younger than me.  Whenever he's on as a talk show guest on TV, he brings a sense of decorum and reason to the table...even when the host happens to be an ultra-partisan, embarrassing, and tactless annoyance.  As for his above comment, I'm not clear on the "empowers" part, but I know that it's far too common for people to be content with allowing those in the media to spoon-feed them opinions...and then spout them back out almost verbatim to others, often in the form of creepy rants.  Or even, in our social media/internet society, bypassing that by simply inserting links to "their" information sources when encountering a differing argument (that's happened to me with comments on this blog).  Whenever I encounter someone who talks like a clone copy of some opiniated media figure, I wonder to myself where does this veneer come off and where do individuals like this begin to think for themselves?  I've heard just about every sort of opinion and narrative about various topics and issues...somebody who just repeats the same tired old crap isn't going to sway me in the least.  But if they instead were to open up a little about themselves and how they came to their way of thinking, along with the values that they prioritize the most highly...well, that's a sign that they do know how to think, as well as effectively communicate.  But a lot of us, while real adept on the attack and copying and pasting pithy slogans, are suddenly reticent when it comes to coming clean about ourselves and what motivates us philosophically and politically.  I respect and appreciate an expressed opinion...even when I vehemently disagree with it...when the person promoting it lays out his or her thought processes in arriving at it.  If I just wanted someone to inject finished viewpoints directly into my consciousness, conspiracy theories and doomsday scenarios included, well...there are plenty of overpaid fools on TV and radio more than willing to oblige me, and I'd be the bigger fool for letting them...

3-D and Virtual Reality Technology Needs Development and Promotion

I was watching the Star Wars movie series this weekend on the TNT channel.  In Attack of the Clones, Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi has been given a tip as to the location of a star system in which the inhabitants thrive on creating clone armies...for the highest bidder.  But when he goes to the great star library to discover its identity, he only sees empty space where its coordinates are...someone had surreptitiously deleted its memory from the records.  Then Obi-Wan goes to the Jedi temple where Yoda projects a three-dimensional star map around them.  And once again I was reminded about the lagging state of our virtual reality technology...

We don't live on Flatland, but rather in a three-dimensional, spatial environment...so why do we get all our communications either through one-dimensional language or two-dimensional flat pictures?  I remember as a kid loving to look through the View-Master and experiencing at least a semblance of three-dimensional immersion in what I was seeing...where is the improvement over that during the past fifty-plus years?  Why watch a sports event in only two dimensions when cameras can be set up around the competition from strategic vantage points and coordinate together, giving the virtual viewer a truer, spatial sense of what is really going on?  I go outside and see all these stars in the sky, and there is an illusion of them all being projected, side-by-side, against a black background.  Yet I know that some are relatively close to us while others are hundreds...sometimes thousands...of light-years away.  I would much rather have a three-dimensional star map, like in Star Wars, where I could walk among the star projections and more truly appreciate their spatial relationships with each other.  And why can't cinematic art finally take the plunge into virtual movies instead of those occasional tacky 3-D flicks with the silly glasses...what are they afraid of?

I am currently rereading one of my all-time favorite science fiction novel series: Otherland by Tad Williams.  It vividly paints the picture of a well-developed virtual reality technology a hundred years into the future, and I can't help but feel envy for the fictional characters in it who experience the wonders of alternate realities.  But in decrying the lack of three-dimensional visual technology, I'm also complaining about the lack of that level of general communications about our real world...after all, we're not flatlanders...

The Telephone Game, Updated with Google Translates

I imagine that most if not all of us have during our childhood experienced...usually at school or parties...the Telephone Game.  This is when a group of several kids sit around in a circle and each one whispers a short message to the next one...who then whispers it to whoever's on the other side.  When the message finally returns to the first kid after going around the circle, it is usually...and hilariously...very different from its original form.  Which is the whole point of the game, naturally.  We can in our Internet age do a different version of this, by starting with a basic sentence in English and then with the use of the Google Translates feature translate it into a different foreign language.  So 1 translates to 2, 2 translates to 3, and so on down the line until 14 translates back into English...which is usually altered from the original statement.  I tried this out by taking yesterday's quote from Igor Stravinsky and passing it from English through 13 successive languages and then back.  The result wasn't altered too much, but there still was a divergence from the originally expressed quote;:

1: I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
2: No he entendido un bar de música en mi vida, pero lo he sentido.
3: Ich habe kein Musikstück in meinem Leben verstanden, aber ich habe es gefühlt.
4: Я не понимал музыки в своей жизни, но я это почувствовал.
5: 我一生都不了解音樂，但是我感覺到了
6: Je n'ai pas connu la musique toute ma vie, mais je l'ai ressentie.

7: मुझे अपने सभी जीवन में संगीत नहीं पता था, लेकिन मुझे यह महसूस हुआ।

8: Tôi không biết âm nhạc trong suốt cuộc đời, nhưng tôi cảm thấy nó.

9: Nem ismerem a zenét egész életemben, de úgy érzem.

10: 나는 내 인생의 모든 음악을 모르지만, 나는 기분이 좋아.

11: Hayatımdaki tüm müzikleri bilmiyorum, ama hoşuma gidiyor.

12: أنا لا أعرف كل الموسيقى في حياتي، ولكن أنا يتمتع بها

13: 私は私の人生のすべての音楽を知らないが、私はそれを楽しむ。

14: Nie znam całej muzyki mojego życia, ale lubię to.

15: I do not know the whole music of my life, but I like it.

As you can see, between the translations somewhere "understand" changed to "know", "whole" was added, first to modify "life" and then switched to modify "music" (which dropped "bar"), the tense changed from present perfect to present, and "felt" changed to "like".   Now the fun in this game is to look back on the translations and see where the changes occurred.  For example, the change from "understood" to "knew" occurred between the Chinese (#5) sentence and the French (#6).  "Whole life" first appeared in Chinese (#5) as 一生.  Since I know some of these languages better than others, there are sections where the changes can be hidden and it takes some extra linguistic detective work to find them.  By the way, do you know which languages are featured here? 

Four Types of Listeners

Seeing how I've lived as long as I have already and therefore feel somewhat confident that I can makes some comments about human nature, I've come up, from my own personal experiences with talking to others, with four different types of listeners.  Now, people can be any combination of these, and can also change from one type to another...but generally speaking, they usually display one of these types as their own particular personal way of listening...at least when it concerns listening to me.  The four types are, as I have coined them: sympathetic listeners, critical listeners, attention-deficit listeners, and narcissistic listeners.  Let's explore these, one-by-one...

The type of listener most valued by yours truly...as well as being the rarest of the four, is the sympathetic listener.  They will hear me out and try to discover and understand the full scope of what I am trying to impart to them...and then make a point of even remembering it!  This does not necessarily mean that they are emotionally attached to me or even like me...I see examples of sympathetic listeners on TV and radio...Larry King on his CNN interview show was of this type (at least with his guests...not the callers), as well as is late-night radio's George Noory.  If you want to people to open up to you, then you need to let them say what they want to say...and that involves giving them some time to express their thoughts while putting your judgments on at least temporary hold.  As I said, this is rare...

The critical listener is another type, one that I sadly run into far too often.  They will let me speak...at least that much is true...but then they act as if their greatest mission in life is to find holes in my rhetoric that they can expose, or that they are doing me a great favor by jumping in to offer counterarguments or worst-case scenarios.  Also, critical listeners may want to me to talk about topics other than the one I chose to discuss, and they have no problem interrupting me in mid-sentence to change the subject to the one they want to dissect.  There are too many of these types of TV and radio: three of the worst are MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox's Bill O'Reilly and Chris Wallace...

In spite of the fact that critical listeners annoy me to no end, at least I know they're paying attention to me...and as such I feel that, on at least some level they respect me as a fellow human being.  Besides, like it or not, it can be helpful for someone be pick apart your thoughts every now and then.  But regarding the attention-deficit listener, trying to communicate a connected thought with them that lasts more than a couple of sentences can be an exercise in futility.  And being the rather touchy, sensitive individual I have been for most of my life, I can recall many times when I renounced to myself friendship to others who had suddenly cut me off or just turned away while I was in the middle of trying to say something to them.  This type, as rude as they are, is oblivious to the disrespect they send out.  The idea with them seems to be that I am only being heard for their entertainment, and if what I'm saying doesn't immediately excite their attention, then it's time for them to immediately direct their thoughts elsewhere.  There is some similarity here with critical listeners, but whereas the former has a tendency to interrupt my train of thought, this attention-deficit type is the master of zoning out, and I have absolutely no use for them in my life.  They do worse then interrupt: they turn away...

The final type of listener is the narcissistic listener, and they are only slightly better the attention-deficit type.  Have you ever begun relating something about your own life to someone...or perhaps it was just an opinion you might have held about something, and the person you were talking to breaks in to relate how something similar to your topic tied into their personal life...and then took over the talking to make it all about themselves?  If you haven't had this experience, you are blessed, my friend...but sadly I cannot the same about myself.  I have known someone, no longer with us, with whom I spent much, much time in "conversation" over the years but realized that he never really valued anything I had to say about my own life, feelings, and thoughts...but rather that the world revolved around himself: his own vast life, with his own opinions and experiences automatically supplanting mine whenever I managed to bring up a subject on my own.  I realized after a while that my role was not to speak independently, but rather to just sit there and give the appropriate affirmation-sounds (like "uh-huh", "yes", and "you're right").  Over the span of decades, in countless conversations, I could not bring up any kind of subject without being interrupted and the talk shifting back his own monumentally important life and thoughts....implicitly relegating me to insignificance.  Sad. By the way, if you are looking for this type of listener in the media, just tune in on the radio to Michael Savage and see how often he interrupts a caller to go off on a tangent about his personal life and opinions...

If you know me, then you also know that I don't talk very much...I have let myself be wounded too many times by critical, attention-deficit, and narcissistic listeners.  Notice also that by writing my thoughts out and posting them, I can bypass these types...while anyone interested in actually knowing what I have to say can read them: ahh...finally, some communication!

Behind the Times Using Smart Phone Innovations

When the latest editions of various computer or cell phone gizmos come out from time to time, some people rush out to buy the new products, even to the point of camping out in line the night before they first go on sale in order to get a jump on everyone else.  I'm in the opposite group of folks, who tend to reluctantly join in on new innovations just around the time when something else is coming up to make them obsolete.  Such is the case with these "smart" phones.  I had gone for the longest time on my cell phone without any Internet, finally getting around a couple of years ago to putting it on a relatively primitive Blackberry.  But I upgraded to a more "current" phone on my account, for practically nothing, a few weeks ago and am now in the process of trying to figure how to use it.  I am pretty happy, though, about my Internet access, which is now lot faster and easier to view than with that old Blackberry clunker.  And I have been able to transfer to my new phone an application that I had been heretofore been using a lot on my laptop computer: Quizlet.

Quizlet is a website that allows users to learn and practice material from just about any field that one can dream up...with me, my focus of interest is foreign languages.  With Quizlet, I can study and practice vocabulary lists from many different languages.  The application on my phone has a feature that allows me to practice matching words with their meanings, and I've been availing myself of this a lot in recent days.  How far this will actually take me in learning the languages I'm studying is another matter, though...but at least I am spending more time, interspersed more throughout my day, in studying them...

It looks as if Apple is now coming out with a "smart" wristwatch with a built-in computer to mimic a lot of what we get now with smart phones. I like that innovation, but I think that with the tiny, limiting screen that necessarily goes with a watch's small face, I'd rather wait until they develop eyeglasses that have computers built into them, providing more full screens to interact with. But for now, I think I'll just revel in my ready access to Quizlet, ESPN, Wikipedia, and, oh yes, that cool flashlight that my new cell phone provides...

Slow Down, You Talk Too Fast

I'm sitting in this Starbucks, see, huddled off in a back corner, wondering whether I'm beginning to go senile at this relatively young age of (nearly) 57.  It started on my drive down here when, literally out of the blue, it began to ran.  Sure, there were some puffy clouds to be seen around, but nothing to indicate any impending precipitation.  Still, it looked as if my original idea of sitting in the wide-open outdoors to drink my coffee and study (including writing this blog article) would be for naught.  And the prospects for finding a seat ANYWHERE inside this Starbucks likewise dimmed with the freshly falling rain, as it is a popular hangout in this part of town and is usually filled to capacity on Sunday afternoons.  I nevertheless pulled into the parking lot: who knows, I might find a spot anyway.  And as I said, I did...in an obscure corner of the java joint.

So anyway, I'm sitting here, writing out some foreign language sentences for practice, which is something I do as a daily routine.  The rest of the place is packed with customers, some of whom are studying by themselves (or pretending to do so) and some of whom are engaging in sociable conversations.  As I sit here studying OTHER languages, an eerie feeling begins to creep up on me: everyone else around me is speaking English, but at the fast rate that they are speaking, their words are almost incomprehensible to me...almost as if they were speaking an exotic tongue.

I've long had a block when it came to picking up and understanding normal conversation when I hear it in other languages...even those languages that I have studied and can comprehend when it is spoken in a more formal setting on radio and TV news broadcasts.  It's almost as if, regardless of whatever language they are speaking, the talkers are in a completely different gear of communication from anything else.  And now, today, the same troubling feeling started coming to me as others were SPEAKING ENGLISH so fast in conversation that I could scarcely make out their words.  Then a universal principle hit me...

It seems that in nervous social conversation, people regardless of their culture or language tend to talk at a breakneck pace, almost seemingly necessitating a psychic link among themselves from them to understand what each other are saying.  The speed of speech can get very, very fast...to the point sometimes that a native language can sound foreign.  That's a little scary for me...

Then again, there is possibly a more mundane, reasonable interpretation for all this.  When people are conversing in person, a great portion of the communication that is going on between them is unspoken but rather revealed through facial expressions, gestures, and body language.  As a matter of fact, I wonder sometimes if these aren't the main elements in the communication and not the actual words.  In any event, when I'm sitting there with my back to others, I'm not picking up on these integral elements of the interactions between these people and, quite possibly, this may make their spoken language less clear as a result...    

The Meaning of a Communication is the Response You Get

I'm a bit skeptical of organizations that tout how comprehensively benevolent their agenda is for humankind...Neuro-linguistic Programming, or NLP...which sounds super-scientific, doesn't it...is an example.  You can look them up if you'd like...I'm not interested.  But I did indirectly pick up one of this self-help group's precepts...through Tony Robbins...which is very profound and true when it comes to interpersonal relationships: The meaning of a communication is the response you get...

If a mother or father tells their child to do something, it may not be enough to just say it and walk away.  Instead, asking the child to repeat what was said and to say whether they understood completes the communication while imparting a sense of personal responsibility to the child.  Likewise, I have personally discovered in my workplace that expressed expectations of employees need to be accompanied with their acknowledgement of those expectations.  Yet when it came to my own experiences throughout the elementary and high school years, nothing of the sort ever happened between any of my teachers and myself...

The responsibility for seeing that a communication is effective is on the communicator to be proactive in seeking a response from the party receiving it...and it needs to be done on an individual basis, not just in a large group setting.  In a classroom setting, the tendency from my own experiences in school was for the teacher to hand out "learning activity packages"...i.e. enhanced syllabi...and speak to the students as a collective body from the front of the class, if at all.  To be sure, students were accorded time to meet with teachers and ask questions if they took the initiative to do so, but NOT ONCE in my twelve years from the first grade in 1962 to graduation in 1974 did any teacher approach me one-to-one to establish that I knew what the class was about and what was expected of me.  Furthermore, NOT ONCE in those twelve years did any teacher ever approach me as an individual human being to encourage me or tactfully ask if I had any difficulties I wanted to share with them.  I DID experience, on a number of occasions sprinkled throughout those years, teachers angrily coming to me and chastising me about something or another...often with me being totally innocent while in the process humiliating me in front of classmates...but even then they weren't interested in my point of view: my role apparently was to keep my mouth shut and stay out of their attention range...

Once I saw a Twilight Zone episode titled Changing of the Guard that featured an elderly teacher forced into retirement.  He had spent his entire adult life teaching his pupils and remembered every one and their idiosyncrasies.  In despair he feared he had wasted his life to no effect, but his old students from years back returned one day and assembled...from the "twilight zone"...each telling him what a difference he had made in their lives.  I wonder about all of the teachers I had...and whether they could even get a row of students to speak for them, much less a full classroom.  If I sound bitter, I am: I think that there were crucial periods in my childhood when a positive, encouraging word from a teacher would have made all the difference and have changed my life...but it never came.  Yet I'll bet each and every one of the teachers I had were confident that THEY were doing their job well as it pertained to me, who was to them merely a name attached to a face that I doubt hardly any of them remembered (or cared to) only a few years later.  To them I say: if you think you taught me something but never knew me as a distinct person with my own identity and personality...and viewpoint...then you have failed at your job.  I sincerely hope that my readers' school experiences with their teachers were different from mine...maybe you had some of those great interactive teachers like in those NEA television ads...

So direct interactions would be more effective if the speaker asked for pertinent feedback from the one spoken to.  But what about writing?  After all, I am communicating here and that's true whether or not the reader agrees with me.  Obviously, people can choose whether or not to read what I write...but if they do, then wouldn't it seem appropriate to offer at least some perfunctory acknowledgment that they had done so?  I post links to this blog on Facebook, which offers this sort of feedback system to postings.  And while I tend to skip over others' posts that may contain interesting content but are merely copy-and-paste exercises on their part, when I read something that is original and relatively coherent...and I believe to be directed either at me or the general reader...I have a tendency to click on "like" and sometimes even volunteer a comment.   Some of my articles are likewise directed at certain folks I have "befriended" on Facebook.  Now many don't read my writings but for those who do, wouldn't it be an act of constructive friendship to at least acknowledge me...or better yet...write your own reactions in a comment? 

Speaking of blog comments, there are two ways to accomplish this: one is if you are getting it through my Facebook link...just use this site's comments feature as you would any other post.  But you can also bypass Facebook and submit a comment directly to this blog by clicking on the "Number of Comments"  or "Post a Comment" links after the end of the individual article.  It won't be printed until I have read it...you can even request it remain unprinted or even write anonymously...and would finally appear on the blogsite right after the article.  A little more of a roundabout way, but it gives you more flexibility and enables those not on my Facebook page to communicate as well...

The Precious Rings and Cellphones

One of the Encore channels was showing the Lord of the Rings trilogy the other day. I've seen it many times before, but always enjoy repeat viewings. Tolkien's story is full of insights and lessons about human nature and society, and I usually pick up something new each time I watch it. This time was no exception.

The whole premise of Lord of the Rings is that, in the distant past on Middle Earth, different sets of rings were forged and presented as gifts of power to the leaders of the men, elves, and dwarfs. Unknown to them in their utter attachment to these rings, which they wore and treasured, was the fact that the dark lord Sauron had forged a separate ring that bound all who wore the others under his power and control. The result was the ascendency of Sauron to power and war against the peoples of Middle Earth.

I can't help thinking that, with today's increasingly compact and Internet-fast cellphones, something similar is going on. Like Tolkien's rings, their possessors tend to be almost fanatically attached to them; they really represent in some ways their "precious". And it does seem that these little gadgets provide their owners with a lot of power, don't they? But...

It seems that, with each new advent in information technology comes a corresponding decrease in personal privacy. For not only is it much easier to pick up signals from portable devices and hack personal information from them, but simply transacting any kind of business on them seems to be fed into various data banks that build up dossiers on the users. But there is something, in my opinion, even more foreboding than this...

My particular phone has a feature whereby all of the individual phone locations within my plan (with me there are four) can be pinpointed and revealed through GPS (presumably as long as the phone is "on"). This phone-locating service is supposedly a purely elective option available only to the subscriber, but my suspicious nature just can't keep me from wondering whether other parties have access to this information besides me. You can see, can't you, how much concentrated power could arise if some one party knew the exact whereabouts of everyone? Especially if the people didn't know this? Coupled with the increasing ability to launch precision remote-control military attacks, this could make that party almost invulnerable and all-powerful. Remind you yet of Sauron?

So please forgive me this near-paranoid rant. After all, this is America and something like that could never happen here, only in some made-up fantasy land like Middle Earth...or could it?

Apple's Steve Jobs Will Be Missed

Computer innovator and entrepreneur Steve Jobs has died at age 56, presumably from complications arising from his pancreatic cancer of several years. Being an original founder of Apple Computer and seeing the introduction of the graphics-friendly, user-friendly Macintosh personal computer in the early 1980's, he then left the company in 1985 after a conflict with others in high management. Later he returned in the late 1990's and revitalized the then-floundering company, introducing the "i" line of products with which we are so familiar today.

Many today are paying tribute to how Jobs changed the information and communications industry. Others see him as a shining example of a creative entrepreneur, someone on whom Americans and others worldwide can model themselves to create their own new companies and products that that can, in turn, revitalize the flagging economies we see all around us today.

Steve Jobs will be sorely missed, but his example will endure for a long, long time...

Hank Williams, Jr. and His Remark

Hank William, Jr. has a carefully-crafted reputation as being the "bad boy " of country music. As such, perhaps he felt that the public would pretty much hand him free rein over everything he said. And, to be perfectly honest, he IS an American and entitled to the protection of the First Amendment regarding his speech and opinions. But he was also making money representing a private media company (ESPN) with his weekly opening appearance on the Monday Night Football program. So his recent equation of President Obama with genocidal mass-murdering tyrant Adolf Hitler, while constitutionally-protected as free speech, still went way over the edge in regard to its propriety. Thank you, ESPN, for immediately dumping him. Had you not, though, I was preparing to launch my own personal boycott campaign against your company and sponsors...

One aspect to Junior's unfortunate diatribe that I haven't yet heard discussed was the fact that he made it while a guest on Fox News' Fox and Friends show. Evidently, ol' Hank felt real brave and cocky sitting around a bunch of like-minded right-wingers when he let loose his slime bomb. But didn't the dude realize that EVERYONE was going to hear him, not just his little insulated bubble of political "friends" who just sat there emptily grinning at him?

I've seen the same going on in political campaigning as well. In 2008, a surging Mike Huckabee, while trying to ingratiate himself with Christian fundamentalists in South Carolina who wanted nothing less than a Christian theocracy (with THEIR doctrine, of course), espoused to a sympathetic crowd that he wanted to change the United States Constitution to conform more closely with the Bible. Yes, he won points with that crowd, but his words went nationwide, scaring the hell out of millions and effectively torpedoing his presidential aspirations. Other examples of candidates saying objectionable and/or controversial things in ostensibly sympathetic settings... without regard to the fact that in today's instant-mass-communication age, EVERYONE is the real setting...abound without anyone seeming to understand what they are doing at the time they make their ill-chosen remarks.

Politicians and celebrities can no longer play to their extremist bases with inflammatory rhetoric and then turn around and claim to be more reasonable in other settings. Because, well, it's all out there now for everyone to see and hear!

Anti-Tirade Tirade

In the 1986 movie Mosquito Coast, Harrison Ford's character Allie Fox is an inventive genius with all sorts of ideas he wants to inflict on the world. He is also a very verbally overbearing personality, constantly going off into loud and often angry tirades about any of the pet topics that draw his interest. The others in his family and anyone else within earshot are reduced to passive stick-figures having to absorb his wrath and venom without being accorded a respectful hearing of their own feelings. If you've seen this movie, maybe you have some idea about what I mean by "tirade".

Tirade should also be a verb ("to tirade") and "tirader" a noun that describes one who performs this abusive form of speech. If you're a language purist, you just might want to skip the rest of this article, because I plan to use these two forms, correctness be damned.

Tiraders, the way I see it, have a couple of problems that cause them to talk as they do. One, they don't have enough self-restraint regarding the expression of anger or aggression when these feeling arise within them. Two, they are basically contemptuous of the dignity of others (particularly the listeners who have to suffer through their tirades) and feel that their own personal narratives and opinions are the ONLY narratives and opinions that count.

When I am around someone who goes off into a tirade about something else (not about me) in their life or that they heard from radio or television, the harsh, aggressive tone of their speech has the same emotional effect on me as if I were the object of their anger anyway. And I then automatically begin in turn to become angry at them, regardless of the truth value of what they are expressing.

There is what I believe to be a mistaken notion in our society that it is important for people to vent out their feelings to others, especially if the feelings have a negative character to them. It feeds into the idea of "release": just let it out of your system by sharing it with another. But to me, all this really does is to spread the poison. Besides, many of the tirades I have suffered through in my life have little to do with the negative experiences of the speaker and more to do with his or her mental fabrications.

Our society also seems to collectively regard tiraders as somehow being stronger and more important than others, deserving special attention and respect. So now we're stuck with abusive professional radio tiraders like Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh. While watching C-Span I've seen representatives and senators from both sides of the political aisle get to the podium and loudly pitch angry fits on behalf of their opinions, expecting this to somehow bolster their arguments. And who can forget the flood of vitriolic tirades at the town hall meetings while the health care reform bill was being debated?

There are people in my life who, in varying degrees, have given themselves over to tirading. And it hurts me when they do that. They are showing by talking like this AT me that they feel that I am insignificant, essentially a nonentity incapable of thinking for myself and arriving at my own conclusions. Plus, a tirader implicitly inserts a nasty ultimatum into the tirade: if the listener rejects the tirader's point, either in whole or in part, and expresses this disagreement, no matter how respectfully or softly, then the tirader takes it as a personal attack. The listener than becomes either an "idiot" (one of Mark Levin's favorite terms) or an enemy.

Yeah, like I really want to hang around people who treat me like that!

Communicating Means Listening, Too

The pastor at the church I attend has quite a gift with public speaking. His sermons are at the same time witty and profound, balancing well the religious message he is trying to convey with his personal life experiences. A lot of times I come out of there saying that he did a great job of communicating what he was trying to express. But not too long ago, I had a personal experience with him that gave me pause for reflection.

This pastor, who is about my age, had decided to train to run in the Sarasota Half-Marathon that was held in March earlier this year. He and an associate pastor in the church were quite public about what they were going to do (neither had run a half-marathon before), and the a.p. actually incorporated it into one of his own sermons. Well, I had thought at first that the half-marathon that they were going to run in would naturally be the LifeSouth Five Points race held right here in Gainesville on February 14. A race, incidentally that I had trained to run (and did). So when that day came and went without any sign of my two religious acquaintances, I wondered whether they might have skipped out. But no, they had decided to run in Sarasota instead. Fine, I thought, maybe I'll have the chance to "compare notes" about our experiences someday.

When that day came, it was after church and the pastor walked out and, noticing me standing there with my two children, walked over to warmly greet me. That's when I brought up his half-marathon race and asked him how it went for him. But he was very terse and quickly let himself be distracted by someone else. In mid-conversation. I was left feeling like someone who had just been insulted. And then it hit me.

If you know you have a more-or-less captive audience for a specific block of time (like with Sunday sermons), then you can plan elaborately textured speeches that leave the listeners impressed with your abilities. But most of the time, you are in informal situations where it can be a struggle to hold someone's attention for more than just a few seconds. It is not your fault that people don't have the courtesy or attention span to hear out your ideas; it is more due to their bad habits as poor, selfish, and inattentive listeners. In that stunted after-church "conversation" with the pastor, his discourteous behavior cast a shadow on the subsequent times I sat through his sermons; if he won't listen to me for a couple of minutes, why does he think I should listen at all to him?

So from now on, when I hear that someone is a great "communicator", I understand that this usually means that they have a good speaking delivery and methodology. But to truly warrant that kind of praise, the great speaker also needs to be a great listener. And I have discovered that, in spite of the relative scarcity of good speakers, there are even fewer good listeners, my proud running pastor included.