For the last couple of weeks I have been milling with a question in my mind.
Are there rules for blogging?
People that are being communicated to, how do they receive information?
Sometimes in life all you need is half a sentence, other times a couple of hours to get the message across and then there are times the audience just does not understand/grasp what is being conveyed to them.
For successful communication what do you need and do you always need it?
Is there a difference between, hearing, listening, understanding, agreeing?
I’m hearing what you say
I’m listening to you
I’m understanding what you said
I’m agreeing with what you saying
The above responses do not mean you have successfully communicated:
I hear you but don’t understand/agree with you
I agree with what you are saying but I don’t really understand why
I listening, but now what do you want me to do with this communication?
I hear you, but it went in one ear and out the other
When you are communicating, what response do you need to know the audience has understood what you are saying?
Does the way one receives communication depend on what is happening in their lives and thus, interpret communications according to their current state of mind, and what makes one check what is being communicated to them from previous experiences? If the person has nothing to connect the communication to, what do they do with it?
Do we have different rules between verbally communicating and writing? Short answer is YES. Do we have different rules between blogging and writing? Short answer I think is YES.
What makes one stop and take notice of a communication?
What are the communication game rules? We know the traditional rules but what are the rules for blogging?
Where and how does blogging fit into all of this? If blogging is one of the ways people are going to use to communicate with in the future how do we do it successfully.
In a nut shell, at school I was taught how to talk and how to write with a pen. How to right different types of letter, e.g. a letter to a friend is different as a letter to the bank manager (note: you can see I am not 18 as when I went to school the bank manager had some power and was considered someone one would write to (before computer forms :-), now a computer make the decisions). So what are the rules? for today’s forms of communication? If we do not have rules to communicate correctly, we’ll continue to misinterpret the information.
All these questions and where do I go to for the answers?
Blog Communicating
Interesting thoughts. Another scenario: Two people can believe they understand, but they can disagree with each other. I guess that can fall under bias, which I suppose everone has to some extent or another (not counting myself, of course…).
Hearing and listening:
I think hearing is just acknowledgment of sound waves impinging upon the eardrum without necessarily getting any meaning from it.
Listening is the active process of hearing, then assembling that sound into meaning.
Understanding is the “I get it” part of the process, whether or not it means agreeing or disagreeing.
I think the person saying or thinking, “I agree with you but don’t understand why”, is a very thoughtful and honest person who may be able to differentiate between a knee-jerk response and truly “groking” it.
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok if you aren’t a science fiction reader)
I guess a person can ‘grok’ someone’s communication and not know what to do with it, but it’s a little harder for me to get my head around that idea. The only thing that immediately comes to mind is that the speaker/writer hasn’t finished his communication or hasn’t succeeded in conveying what he meant to convey.
It went in one ear and out the other…hmmm. I’ve read things that were a little on the ‘opaque’ side, especially if the language wasn’t plain, if the concepts presented had to do with a paradigm shift, or if the concepts presented were new to me. Maybe something like that would require breaking the communication down into smaller, bite-sized pieces.
If there’s a live audience that jumps up with a standing ovation, I’d say the “got it”, but I have a feeling it’s probably something they already believe, but they just haven’t heard it so well put. If there are disagreements, then those people at least believe they understand what’s said, but may have a natural bias — a prism of beliefs, if you will — that shows them only certain ‘colors’. If you wrote an article in a blog and someone wrote you an email telling you what you were full of, I’d probably dismiss that person as being unreasonable, unless he had something to back up that statement.
The way a person receives a communication may have something to do with the pressure he is under, whether or not he wants to be there in the first place, what he thinks of you (is the speaker/writer a leader? Professor? The new boss? Some guy you never heard of but sounds interesting?) All these things can color how an audience member listens.
What makes ME stop and take notices of a communication? In a blog situation, it would probably be something that piques -my- interest. This article made me stop and think, so I thought I’d try to write a few thoughts down so I can visualize what I thought about it and to see if I need to think more about it.
Rules of writing vs talking. Yes. Oftentimes, if I have an argument to give (say a political argument for example), I’ll try to cover all bases — to think of any weakness or objections there may be and overcome them or to neutralize them. At the same time, I realize my style of writing may differ from someone else’s thought patterns. What appears to be an easy read from my fingertips may be boring or tedious to someone else. I often wonder what goes through someone else’s head when they read something I’ve written. This particular response is more of a hodgepodge of thoughts than it is a nice, orderly piece of work.