Hi everyone, can someone please read over my essay on communication? Thanks
“Communication is two-sided – Vital and profound communication makes demands also on those who are to receive it. Demands in the sense of concentration, of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated” – Roger Sessions
“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome” – T.S Eliot
Communication, and the ability to communicate, has also been critical in our ability to interact with other members of the human race. Like most other members of the animal kingdom, humans are social creatures that require the safety and security in numbers not only for protection, but also for effective functioning of both the group and the individual. As civilisations progressed, as the human populations grew bigger in more places, and as technology improved, our need for social interaction has placed less emphasis on our basic need for survival, and more on our need to exchange ideas, derive entertainment, and thus develop meaningful relationships with various people in our lives. Even today we still crave deep connections with others, and yet with modern technology now, whether we are still able to achieve this is still debatable.
As Roger Sessions once said, “Communication is two-sided – Vital and profound communication makes demands also on those who are to receive it. Demands in the sense of concentration, of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated.” This implies that both the communicator and communicated need to be active participants of the conversation in order for different ideas to be properly communicated. Otherwise, the active participant would just be spoonfeeding the passive, accepting audience, and ideas, no matter how profound, would not be retained in the communicated’s head. The way two or more people ‘communicate’ is dependent on the medium they use for communication. Before the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century, written communication took any time between a few days to a few months to arrive to the recipient, and even more for a reply. As a result, this allowed more time and less pressure for the reader to consider the letter, and thus reply accordingly. Fast forward about 100 years later, social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype allows almost real-time conversations, even ‘face-to-face’ ones that were, only a couple of years ago, could only be done in real life. As a result, these types of medial have great potential in helping us forge deeper, more fulfilling connections with more people.
Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case. Whilst modern technology has enabled us to connect with more people, it has not been as successful in helping us form closer bonds with these ‘friends’. This is evident in the rise of ‘chatspeak’ where a ‘lol’, a ‘ttyl’ and a wink face undermine whatever serious conversation was taking place, if it was serious at all. Compared to the “sense of concentration, of genuine effort” Sessions spoke of, chatspeak seems lazy, shallow, and unintelligent. Not only does it also appear to be a bit inconsiderate to the communicator, but it also seems like a reflex, thoughtless response, a far cry from what communication should be, according to Sessions. Other forms of media, such as television, reinforce the illusion that we just need human company, not human connections, that we are mindlessly content in our self-imposed solitude. “Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome,” as T.S Eliot once said. Thanks to television, families do not have to put so much effort into maintaining conversations with each other, and yet still be able to enjoy (or at least tolerate) each other’s company as they absorb another episode of ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’. TV has provided us with yet another distraction from forming meaningful relationships with others, and lulls us into a false sense of contentment that our natural, social tendencies will thrive in front of our TV screens by ourselves. Interestingly enough, some shows allow watchers to go on live and tweet about their opinions, and thus ‘connect’ with other viewers and ‘join in the conversation’. Yet rather than encourage actual meaningful discussions on said reality TV show, Twitter just functions simply as a platform for viewers to voice their thoughts, criticize (rarely critique) the participants, and up-vote other similar opinions. This is hardly the exchange of ideas and opinions between two active participants who are willing to discuss and impart profound ideas.
Social media has the great potential for us to communicate with more people across the globe, even more so than our predecessors. Yet close, fulfilling communications is more difficult today, with more emphasis on having 5,000 Facebook ‘friends’ rather than actually getting to know them. Because of this, some forms of social media are just not appropriate for starting and maintaining deep meaningful discussions with each other. After all, how do you have proper conversation using 140 characters or less?