My last post on this blog prompted a couple of responses that have given me cause to think about the way that what we say and write comes across to others. There is something very different about the way we say things to each other in person or over the phone where we are able to change the tone and volume of our voice, and perhaps even smile which delivers the message in the way we intend. In an email or in a comment on a blog things can be very different, particularly when we fire something off in anger or distress. Emails can cause particular offense if people are not careful with the way they come across, for example some people dispense with any niceties like writing dear so and so and instead launch straight in. This I would suggest can cause the directness bordering on curt particularly if the person then begins to have a bit of a rant about something they perceive you or someone else has done. Experience has taught me that emails can be very useful, but also quite a damaging tool in terms of relationships between colleagues, and sometime they can be used to say things we would never say face to face.
Equally people sometimes use the comments section of a blog to dispatch the kind of words that they perhaps wouldn’t dare to utter if forced a) to reveal their identity and b) to see the expression on the person they launched it at when it is read. I have been extremely lucky, my relatively low readership is mainly comprised of sensible people who think before they write, but you only have to read a small proportion of what is published in the blogsphere to see examples of comments posted with the most amazing vitriol. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we all have to adhere to the ‘if you haven’t got something nice to say, then don’t say it at all’ line, but I think it might be a good idea to think about how you would feel if it were directed to you and face to face.
Hi Julie
Never a truer post posted, I’ve recently gone to a closed blog because a post written with what I consider to be humour was read 3 years later out of context and not in the sense I wrote it by the person it concerned. Their reaction has been in keeping with the reasons behind the post in the first place but has brought home to me the fact that I can write tongue in cheek and 97% of the population will realise that that is the case but 3% won’t. Thing is I don’t think the person concerned has a reading that is wrong from their perspective it’s just alternative to what I intended. The older I get the more I think that communication depends on the baggage we bring with us to decode the messages we receive. Thing is I knew this at 18 when I first came across Gerbner’s Model of Communication, I just keep forgetting it.
Kieran
Hi Kieran,
I wondered why I couldn’t access your blog. The interesting thing about what we know in theory is the gap between that and our lived experience. Not only that, but the fact that we actually have to see it in different contexts to believe it. Somethings we write on here are more personal than others (to ourselves that is) and it is criticism, or the taking of them out of context (which has also happened to me) that causes us to question what we are doing. Any chance of being let into your blog?
By the way, how is your knowledge on phenomenology? I am reading stuff now that I would never have dreamed of and it is a challenge!