Blog Post 1: Lola Perez

The sentence I chose to focus on for this blog post was from page 65: "...we consider the complexity of listening as not simply a skill but a fully embodied way of being in the world." 

Essentially the entire reason I became a communication major revolves around this type of quote. I feel as though every day of my life—no every minute—I encounter some type of jarring miscommunication that most likely is stemming from some type of “listening” error. People too often see listening as a birthright, and it’s not. This goes along with the whole “listening is an innate skill” situation because if you truly believe that you were born being a great listener, then chances are you are not a great listener. The skill of listening is a learned act, one that most of us could only dream of becoming experts at. That is simply because we are human, we have brains that are shooting us many different messages at many different times and we have the entire world to distract us all at the same time that someone is verbally trying to tell us something. If more people were to begin to think of listening as a “fully embodied way of being in the world” I feel as though we would maybe just have a little less miscommunication and a little more knowledge about one another.

I wouldn’t say that this quote necessarily makes me think differently about the course material, per se. But I will say that because we are still in the beginning phases (mostly) of this class, reading this quote in the beginning of chapter four gave me a little bit of light and excitement when it comes to this class as a whole. I will admit that with this class being a 100 level course, I did have some thoughts that it would be one of the more…simple classes, with the potential to be a bit dry. However, of course being a communication class it has prevailed and even shown me that my knowledge from other classes is very beneficial to this one. 

I cannot link another class, but last semester I took two classes that so far have really connected with this one: Listening, and Theory and Philosophy of Communication. With both of these classes we really dug into the whole fact that we truly do not know how to listen very well, and we discussed in great depth different ways in which to make sense of the world all at the same time as trying to gain knowledge of ourselves and each other. This quote made me instantly think about my theory class because we took many different “lenses” in which to look at the world around us, and the different uses that they would have to us just being able to put ourselves in those different learning positions. I read this little sentence and it immediately connected with the ways in which we would look at those lenses, because most of them would focus on the fact that we are all little parts just interacting in this world. And not just knowing, but understanding the part that we all play in the big scheme of things is vital to us gaining (and also sharing) knowledge. If we not only think about the absolute complexity involved in the act of listening, but that it is an honor to be able to interact with this crazy world armed the skill of listening, imagine the growth that could come.