Noise, talk and communication
May 27, 2002 | 12:00am
A surprising lot of you responded to last week’s piece on "Grammar Boot Camp," so give me another week to sort things out before I respond in turn to your comments. Meanwhile, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave last Thursday in Baguio before the Speech Communication Organization of the Philippines, on the ponderous topic of "Global Concerns Affecting Communication Effectiveness" (they thought of it, folks, I didn’t). I’ll admit that words like "humankind" don’t pop out of my mouth all that smoothly, but just imagine me wearing a black suit and saying these things in dead earnest, okay?
We all recognize and value the centrality of speech in human communication, and we take it almost as a cozy axiom that more speech means more communication, which should mean more understanding and better chances for peace and prosperity.
Unfortunately, plain experience tells us that this simply is not true.
The world today is awash with speech – much of it idle chatter, speech not meant so much to solicit or interact with other ideas as simply to announce one’s presence or to fill the void. In the media, on the streets, in the malls and restaurants, we are bombarded by words that actually say very little.
Many of us have come to take noise for talk, and talk for communication – not really communication, I should qualify, but rather a form of broadcasting, a one-way transmission of the same loud but lonesome message that people feel compelled to send out in a society that confers identity and status on only a privileged few.
There’s a lot of talk – too much, I’m sure – but not enough communication of the kind that leads to clearer thinking and more intelligent decisions. This is true both in speech and in print – in the often empty if not deceptive rhetoric of politics, in the often vapid reportage we get from our news media, in the tired, flimsy, and silly plots and speeches of our movie and TV dramas.
In a world as connected as never before – through the Internet, satellite TV, and cellular telephony – it has become harder to seek out and to establish the truth. This is the great irony of our time, alongside the even more painful irony of the fact that humankind has never been richer as a whole in knowledge and resources, but has also never seen so much poverty and suffering.
Whose word can we trust, whose wisdom can we value? This seems to me to be one of the central problems and questions of communication today, and one that we should bear in mind as we examine ways of fostering more effective communication in our society, in our workplaces, classrooms, and homes.
There are, to my mind, several global factors or concerns affecting the way we communicate with one another today:
First, the phenomenal growth of information and communications technology or ICT;
Second, the persistence of political, economic, and military conflict;
Third, economic globalization and its impact on national or local economies;
Fourth, the absence or decline of centers of moral authority in the world and in our society; and
Fifth, the dominance of English as the global language.
Let’s take a look at ICT and the Internet. It might seem that these technologies have solved the problem of global communication, finally making of humanity the "global village" that Marshall McLuhan envisaged in 1964. Indeed, the Internet and other electronic means of communication have enabled communications to an extent and in ways most of us never imagined only 10 years ago – sending text and pictures across the planet in a second, chatting simultaneously across five time zones. Being on the Internet and keeping in touch with friends around the world through an e-mail address gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling of interconnectedness, of living in some kind of golden age of communication.
But this euphoria often obscures at least two important problems. First, getting on-line costs money, which some have and many others don’t. The growth of ICT has spawned what we might call an "information aristocracy" (or, in Gilles Willett’s neologism, a "communicatocracy") or what others have termed the "digital divide," the gulf between the opposite sides of which keeps growing as technological sophistication keeps rising on one side and poverty worsens or remains unabated on the other. A relatively small but increasingly influential segment of society will be talking about e-mail, e-groups, e-commerce, downloading, processor speeds, DVD, and CD-burning, leaving most of their countrymen out of the loop.
The second problem is a more subtle one. Because of the excessive volume of traffic on the Internet, there has been a growing tendency even and perhaps especially among avid users to retreat into anonymity and to safeguard one’s privacy. After the initial elation of discovering and being discovered by the world at large, we quickly realize that we can really handle only so much information and so much contact. The Internet can be a bewildering and lonely and sometimes dangerous place – and the way we deal with it is to remain faceless ourselves. Thus we may have a global village – but with each villager hiding behind a mask in his or her hut.
The growth of ICT does not seem to have reduced our propensity for war and conflict. It has only whetted our appetite for sharper sound bites and more arresting video images, in real time, of bombing runs and other spectacles of ruin. Indeed, advanced communications technology has made war easier for many; the global news media have turned the world into a living theater featuring high drama on one stage or one channel and action on another. War and crime have become forms and staples of entertainment. September 11, more stunning than any Hollywood blockbuster, made jingoistic rhetoric fashionable once more, and global leaders virtually indistinguishable from their Hollywood models.
Economic globalization – that process by which economic production has been increasingly shared between and among many countries, and by which an American brand like McDonalds can turn up in Beijing and Moscow – has also had a profound impact on international and intercultural communication. With some help from ICT, globalization has raised local awareness of other products, other methods, and other options, thereby also raising local expectations and leading to political demands for liberalization. Like information from the Internet, the human desire for more and better things can be very difficult to control, and it will often initiate a critical political dialogue between people and their government.
For me, this has been the great positive effect of the growth of ICT and of what we might call the global liberalization of information. As we can observe in the proliferation of NGOs and other citizens’ organizations, people have taken a more critical, more direct, and more active interest in their lives and their future.
This has sometimes come at the cost – or as a result – of a loss of faith in the traditional centers and founts of moral authority in society, namely the government, big business, the Church, the military, the educational system, and the media. Bitter experience seems to have convinced many citizens that these institutions and their representatives are, to put it delicately, purveyors of untruth. Even the Church has seen its image sullied by sordid scandal, and its hesitation or refusal to be more forthright has not helped its position any.
Our best and most reliable lines of communication could be those in private business and industry, which has always depended on timely, accurate, precise, and reliable information for its survival. But also because of its money-making and profit-seeking nature, business – especially as it relates to the consuming public, such as through advertising and public relations – can also engage in obfuscatory verbiage.
The weakness or even the failure of our moral centers may be a sad thing, engendering confusion and crisis. But on the other hand, it has also encouraged critical dialogue, which to me, short of poetry, is the highest form of human communication, because then we speak freely and plainly and truthfully, often against everything we have been trained to accept or to revere blindly.
And then, a word on language. Undoubtedly, much of the impetus and the energy behind globalization has been Western, and the final emergence of English as the de facto global language has much to do with the economic and political resurgence of the West. This notion of a connection between English and economic growth informs – some would say distorts – even our educational policy here. We privilege English and its use to what I sometimes feel is an inordinate extent. Certainly we must learn it to do business with the world; but we must also realize that our economic woes have not been caused (and therefore cannot be significantly cured) by our use or misuse of English, but rather by deep historical inequities and appallingly weak foundations in science and mathematics.
What we may have to remember in the end is that communication is a social activity, and that we communicate as a society to promote harmony and to reduce the possibility of destructive conflict. We communicate to preserve and improve our lives – and to reaffirm and enhance our fundamental and common humanity, which technology alone cannot achieve.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com..
Unfortunately, plain experience tells us that this simply is not true.
The world today is awash with speech – much of it idle chatter, speech not meant so much to solicit or interact with other ideas as simply to announce one’s presence or to fill the void. In the media, on the streets, in the malls and restaurants, we are bombarded by words that actually say very little.
Many of us have come to take noise for talk, and talk for communication – not really communication, I should qualify, but rather a form of broadcasting, a one-way transmission of the same loud but lonesome message that people feel compelled to send out in a society that confers identity and status on only a privileged few.
There’s a lot of talk – too much, I’m sure – but not enough communication of the kind that leads to clearer thinking and more intelligent decisions. This is true both in speech and in print – in the often empty if not deceptive rhetoric of politics, in the often vapid reportage we get from our news media, in the tired, flimsy, and silly plots and speeches of our movie and TV dramas.
In a world as connected as never before – through the Internet, satellite TV, and cellular telephony – it has become harder to seek out and to establish the truth. This is the great irony of our time, alongside the even more painful irony of the fact that humankind has never been richer as a whole in knowledge and resources, but has also never seen so much poverty and suffering.
Whose word can we trust, whose wisdom can we value? This seems to me to be one of the central problems and questions of communication today, and one that we should bear in mind as we examine ways of fostering more effective communication in our society, in our workplaces, classrooms, and homes.
There are, to my mind, several global factors or concerns affecting the way we communicate with one another today:
First, the phenomenal growth of information and communications technology or ICT;
Second, the persistence of political, economic, and military conflict;
Third, economic globalization and its impact on national or local economies;
Fourth, the absence or decline of centers of moral authority in the world and in our society; and
Fifth, the dominance of English as the global language.
Let’s take a look at ICT and the Internet. It might seem that these technologies have solved the problem of global communication, finally making of humanity the "global village" that Marshall McLuhan envisaged in 1964. Indeed, the Internet and other electronic means of communication have enabled communications to an extent and in ways most of us never imagined only 10 years ago – sending text and pictures across the planet in a second, chatting simultaneously across five time zones. Being on the Internet and keeping in touch with friends around the world through an e-mail address gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling of interconnectedness, of living in some kind of golden age of communication.
But this euphoria often obscures at least two important problems. First, getting on-line costs money, which some have and many others don’t. The growth of ICT has spawned what we might call an "information aristocracy" (or, in Gilles Willett’s neologism, a "communicatocracy") or what others have termed the "digital divide," the gulf between the opposite sides of which keeps growing as technological sophistication keeps rising on one side and poverty worsens or remains unabated on the other. A relatively small but increasingly influential segment of society will be talking about e-mail, e-groups, e-commerce, downloading, processor speeds, DVD, and CD-burning, leaving most of their countrymen out of the loop.
The second problem is a more subtle one. Because of the excessive volume of traffic on the Internet, there has been a growing tendency even and perhaps especially among avid users to retreat into anonymity and to safeguard one’s privacy. After the initial elation of discovering and being discovered by the world at large, we quickly realize that we can really handle only so much information and so much contact. The Internet can be a bewildering and lonely and sometimes dangerous place – and the way we deal with it is to remain faceless ourselves. Thus we may have a global village – but with each villager hiding behind a mask in his or her hut.
The growth of ICT does not seem to have reduced our propensity for war and conflict. It has only whetted our appetite for sharper sound bites and more arresting video images, in real time, of bombing runs and other spectacles of ruin. Indeed, advanced communications technology has made war easier for many; the global news media have turned the world into a living theater featuring high drama on one stage or one channel and action on another. War and crime have become forms and staples of entertainment. September 11, more stunning than any Hollywood blockbuster, made jingoistic rhetoric fashionable once more, and global leaders virtually indistinguishable from their Hollywood models.
Economic globalization – that process by which economic production has been increasingly shared between and among many countries, and by which an American brand like McDonalds can turn up in Beijing and Moscow – has also had a profound impact on international and intercultural communication. With some help from ICT, globalization has raised local awareness of other products, other methods, and other options, thereby also raising local expectations and leading to political demands for liberalization. Like information from the Internet, the human desire for more and better things can be very difficult to control, and it will often initiate a critical political dialogue between people and their government.
For me, this has been the great positive effect of the growth of ICT and of what we might call the global liberalization of information. As we can observe in the proliferation of NGOs and other citizens’ organizations, people have taken a more critical, more direct, and more active interest in their lives and their future.
This has sometimes come at the cost – or as a result – of a loss of faith in the traditional centers and founts of moral authority in society, namely the government, big business, the Church, the military, the educational system, and the media. Bitter experience seems to have convinced many citizens that these institutions and their representatives are, to put it delicately, purveyors of untruth. Even the Church has seen its image sullied by sordid scandal, and its hesitation or refusal to be more forthright has not helped its position any.
Our best and most reliable lines of communication could be those in private business and industry, which has always depended on timely, accurate, precise, and reliable information for its survival. But also because of its money-making and profit-seeking nature, business – especially as it relates to the consuming public, such as through advertising and public relations – can also engage in obfuscatory verbiage.
The weakness or even the failure of our moral centers may be a sad thing, engendering confusion and crisis. But on the other hand, it has also encouraged critical dialogue, which to me, short of poetry, is the highest form of human communication, because then we speak freely and plainly and truthfully, often against everything we have been trained to accept or to revere blindly.
And then, a word on language. Undoubtedly, much of the impetus and the energy behind globalization has been Western, and the final emergence of English as the de facto global language has much to do with the economic and political resurgence of the West. This notion of a connection between English and economic growth informs – some would say distorts – even our educational policy here. We privilege English and its use to what I sometimes feel is an inordinate extent. Certainly we must learn it to do business with the world; but we must also realize that our economic woes have not been caused (and therefore cannot be significantly cured) by our use or misuse of English, but rather by deep historical inequities and appallingly weak foundations in science and mathematics.
What we may have to remember in the end is that communication is a social activity, and that we communicate as a society to promote harmony and to reduce the possibility of destructive conflict. We communicate to preserve and improve our lives – and to reaffirm and enhance our fundamental and common humanity, which technology alone cannot achieve.
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