March Blog Post

For this month’s blog, I have chosen a sentence from the “Family Bullies” article. “Dialogue is a process where people try to come together to talk, often spontaneously, honestly, and without judgment, to clarify particular, often conflicting beliefs, values, and practices.” This quote stands out to me because of the background that I have in the field of communication. Many of the classes I have taken here at BSU really stress the importance and vitality of true dialogue. I have read articles that speak of conversations between people being similar to having two televisions turned on and facing each. Essentially, this example shows that many people are not concerned about what the other person is saying in a conversation, especially if the topic is something controversial or meaningful.

So often people are concerned only with what they are going to say next that they pay little to no attention to what the other person is trying to say to them. It is impossible to have thoughtful and productive discourse if there is not an actual dialogue. I feel like this is an issue that we see in our culture every day. If one were to turn on the news, they would see shouting matches between the host and their guests. One news channel in particular is notorious for this, but I will omit the name to keep from getting political. I can only wonder what educational and informative debates and conversations would take place if there was actual dialogue in these types of programs. Unfortunately, the outlook is not so good. This type of behavior is so engrained in our culture that a shift that dramatic would take quite some time if it were to happen at all.

Though it is seemingly insignificant, this sentence held great importance to me for the reasons that I have explained above. Productive dialogue seems to be hard to come by these days, but hopefully this is something that will start to change.