Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

100th Post: Not to Despair, But We Are Islands

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, Wikipedia.org
                Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Wikipedia.org

We our own islands of consciousness, forever separated from others.  We may share the substrate of a common culture and lineage, and we can build bridges to each other, but we can never fully inhabit another’s unique psychological space.

Climate scientists warn that it will be just decades until areas of South Florida will become a watery archipelago. The level of the sea rises about one inch a year in Miami Beach, inundating streets that some residents continue to believe are flooded by water main breaks.  Even in denial, they must sense that a chain of islands makes continuous connection with the rest of the community an insurmountable problem.

Interestingly, in the last six years communication scholar John Durham Peters has eloquently made the same observation about human communication (Speaking Into the Air, 1999).  We are, he says, our own islands of consciousness, forever separated from others.  We may share the same substrate of a common culture and lineage, and we can build bridges to each other, but we can never fully occupy the adjoining person’s world.  His analysis turns the iconic lines of John Donne’s prose poem literally and figuratively on its ear.

All of this is Peters’ way of reminding us that we have oversold our abilities to make things right through communication.  He notes that problems of connecting with others are “fundamentally intractable.”  The goal of doing so creates a “registry of modern longings” that can never be fully satisfied.  Disappointment is a natural part of the effort.

Our sensations and feelings are, physiologically speaking, uniquely our own.  My nerve endings terminate in my own brain, not yours.  No central exchange exists where I can patch my sensory inputs into yours, nor is there any “wireless” contact through which to transmit my experience of the world to you. . . .  In this view, humans are hardwired by the privacy of experience to have communication problems.

Of course the theme of humans physically together and psychologically apart is universal, reflected in everything from Edward Hopper’s lone figures in the painting, Nighthawks (1942),  to virtually any film or play that treats individuals and relationships in all of their complexities.  The tensions inherent in coupling and adapting are shot through the work of film directors, ranging from Woody Allen to Ang Lee.

This perspective only seems pessimistic if we believe in a kind of communication that is so stipulative or stripped of complexity as to be uninteresting. I can say with great accuracy that the Ketchup in our household is in the refrigerator, and know I can be understood.  But who cares?  The things that usually matter–feelings, values, aspirations and needs–all feed into making each individual their own special case.  Could it be otherwise when we engage with other living souls with different life histories, memories, fears and hopes?

Another part of our common over-optimism about communication is that we have sold ourselves on the belief that advances in technologies are themselves reasons to mitigate communication confusion. Our devices make it possible to talk or text through every waking hour.  But, if anything, opportunities for sending and receiving messages only increase the chances to see the differences between us that remain.

The trick here is to accept the challenges that human complexity produces without decending into a solipsistic view that the outside world is mostly a mental mirage. To fall into that trap is to deny the ecstasies that are still possible when words, images and music make sometimes durable bridges to others.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

 

We Hear What We Need to Hear

Models, Problem Practices, , , , , , , ,
Wikipedia.org
                                    Wikipedia.org

This pattern of misperception is actually so common that if all of us drove cars about as poorly as we listen to others, our roadways would be strewn with wreckage.

We all have had the experience.  We are explaining a piece of our world to another, and the other person seems to be listening.  But their response indicates that they have mostly missed our point.  Instead of a reasonably accurate rendering of our thoughts, their comments reveal that they are projecting what they want to believe about us. For example, you may be talking about the challenges of your job, while a listener–for whatever reasons– may need to hear that you dislike your work. Or you tell them about your first visit to a novel new destination. And the most you can conclude from their response is that they need to hear that the site of the visit is overrated. At the end of such conversations we often walk away puzzled, perhaps concluding that the listener already had a mental map of us that they needed to confirm. This pattern of misperception is actually so common that if all of us drove cars as poorly as we listen to others, our roadways would be strewn with wreckage.

 To be sure, we can be unclear or ambiguous. “That’s not what I meant” ranks with “hello” as a well-worn locution. But sometimes the listener has seemingly willed their own preconceptions on to our rhetoric.  And it’s interesting to ponder why.

One explanation for this kind of selective perception is that conversation is mostly a process for seeking the familiar. This motive to retain what we already know is sometimes known as  “motivated reasoning” or “confirmation bias,” both representing the idea that we have the urge to place incoming information in a familiar map that we have already worked out.

Beyond the obvious economy of reverting to a well-traveled neural pathway, other reasons are possible:  Envy? Maybe the guilty comfort that comes with knowing that another person’s life is going less well than our own?  And there’s more.

We all construct fantasy themes about others that fill in the unknown gaps of their personal biographies.  In communication terms, fantasizing is not a mental health problem, but the natural result of the inductive reasoning we must do to create a more complete picture of another. Psychologists focused on social intelligence sometimes call this “theory of mind,” meaning that humans make estimates of others’ probable mental states based on the circumstantial evidence of prior experience. Add in the projection of the listener’s values onto the details of our life, and it’s easy to understand how we hear responses that can clearly puzzle us. As a general rule, any subject’s actions cannot help but be filtered through the receiver’s perceptions.

Put all of this together and we have an accumulating library of biographies with separate volumes for virtually every relative, friend, coworker and celebrity who is part of our cognitive world. As with any library, one of its rewards is the chance to revisit the familiar.

When things are off base enough you may be tempted to tell an interpreter of your own life that can you can’t recognize yourself from their descriptions.  Fair enough.  My guess is that we begin to offer a correctives to others by our fifth year.  It’s the birthright of every person to freely assert their uniqueness, and sometimes to remind interlocuteurs that they’ve missed the point. Such is the nature of rhetoric that persons who are ostensibly mirroring our ideas may really be saying more about  themselves.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu