Quote:
Originally Posted by GreyWolfsGhost
Listening is not passive. Hearing is passive but truly listening requires focus the same as seeing the words on the page is not the same as reading them.
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I'm enjoying reading this thread, so many passionate voices being ... well, passionate, I guess.
Certainly we all have different communications styles and some groove more on reading books, others audio books, a bunch more don't care either way, but I personally went "right on!" when I read what Grey Wolf's Ghost wrote about "listening" vs. "hearing."
Now when it comes to one-way audio communication, like an audio book or radio program or podcast where one person speaks and there's no way for the listener to respond *to the speaker* (i.e. person A has monologue, person B has no way of interacting in real time with person A), then that's one thing. It is *totally* different if you've got two people *interacting*, where I'm talking to you and you're talking to me and -- theoretically, anyway -- we go back and forth in a conversation (or the equivalent) and there's a dynamic that exists right there, right now, that affects both the speaker and the listener. It's not all canned, it "lives" while the people are talking/listening.
Books and other "one-way" communications can be very very cool and I love reading and imagining I'm having a conversation (sometimes) with the writer/speaker .... but just due to the fact that there's this "disconnect" between "what I'm saying right now" and you, dear reader, "hearing" it and then responding, in your own head and/or in some kind of communication back to me ...
It's just really, really easy for this "disconnect" to happen between people when we do the "one-way" conversations (I write, I send, I wait, you read, you think, you write, you send, I wait, etc.) that -- and I suspect this is a major problem in our current world culture today -- we humans tend to think we are talking to each other, and listening to each other, when a lot of the times we're just sorta sending words into the air and thinking they mean one thing, and somebody else picks up the words and thinks they mean something else, and then the two people (the sender of words and the picker-upper of words) each go, "What I said/heard was perfectly clear so if you said/heard differently, there's something wrong with you and/or your way of talking/thinking. Now if you just follow my example I can show you the proper way to do things."
Anyway, in my own real-world job, I gotta go out every day and work with people to resolve their problems and issues with technology so they can get their work done. I rarely know exactly what the heck their work even is, and as often as not the person doesn't really understand the problem (on a technical level), they just know that something ain't working. So, through talking and listening -- in real time, in the real world, right there talking to each other face to face -- we finally figure out some way to communicate so we both come away better off than we were when we started.
But then I realize I've been doing this for thirty years and some days are as hard as they were the first day I started.
