Blog Post #1: Listening

“This perceptual focus can happen visually, too, as you shift from looking at your phone or computer screen to looking up and out into the room. Both perspectives are in your range of vision, but depending on how you choose to focus your attention, your experience of the world around you will vary. Our ability to shift the focus of our perceptions as listeners is a combination of individual motivations (what we want to attend to) and skills (what we learn to attend to) within specific social and cultural contexts” (Warren and Fassett, 67).

Now, I know this quote is long, but I couldn’t take anything out because it is all so important. I pulled this quote out of Chapter 4 which talked about Compassionate Critical Listening. Listening in general is so hard to do these days, and especially compassionate and critical listening. There are millions of distractions around us at this very minute and they never stop. For instance, as I’m writing this post I have my phone on and sitting right next to my laptop, there is the white noise sound of the fan blowing throughout my room, the sound of the TV, and the little notifications that pop up every 5 minutes on my lower half of my screen. I could go on and on, because there are just that many around us constantly!

Although, our phones and social media are the biggest listening barriers we have today. In our generation, everyone has a smart phone, and everyone has it on, fully charged at all times. They are in our pockets, just ready to grab and check to see if anyone has contacted us or liked the picture you just posted. I would say that because of this, we are not able to hold a genuine, true, and compassionate conversation with one another. For example, if I’m talking to my friend about how class was, she will pull her phone out and start texting back someone else she is trying to conversate with. Now, would you say that she is actually listening to me talk about class? Of course not! Like the quote mentioned above, we shift our focus on what we want to attend to.

To find someone to listen to you, genuinely is rare. Listening is not only limited to our ears, but in other ways like the positioning of our body and facial expressions. When I’m trying to talk to someone and they are staring deeply at their phone (more than likely scrolling through their Instagram feed or snap chatting someone back) I feel not important. Even when I say, “Hey did you even here what I just said?” and they reply “Yeah, I’m still listening,” I know they are not based on their body language. Body language reveals a lot, and when someone is involved in another activity or conversation, how is one supposed to be compassionately listening? I found this quote by Don Ihde very true when talking about listening. He stated in our book Communication: A critical/cultural Introduction, “I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body. My ears are at best the focal organs of hearing,” suggesting that listening is not only your ears, it takes all of you, and all your effect in order to engage in listening. There are numerous articles that discuss this topic on how social media affects our listening, but this one in particular is fitting because it directly correlates with the audience of this blog (college students).

Reference
http://college.usatoday.com/2012/10/11/opinion-why-social-media-is-destroying-our-social-skills/