August Blog

I think we've all been through the trauma of middle school dances and seen what happens with the expectation of dancing with your crush versus the reality of how it actually goes down. It's just awkward and uncomfortable for everyone, I just cringe thinking about my own experience with this incredibly horrifying time in my life. I thought of this example when we were discussing examples in class of pitfalls we can fall into for dialogic listening. As discussed by Conquergood, not all of these pitfalls have negative consequences, they are simply an attempt at dialogic listening, that has deviated from the definition. 

In my group for our last class activity, for custodian's rip-off, we came up with the example of getting the attention of a crush, so that they will ask you to a dance. This falls aligns with custodian's rip-off because it requires engagement with others for selfish reasons. Not that in this case it is necessarily a bad thing to  do, however it can set an unrealistic expectation for both people engaging in dialogue with each other and the meaning assigned to the relationship with both people on the same page. In pop culture, an example of this that comes to mind, is the show Big Mouth on Netflix. Over summer, my high school friends introduced me to this hilarious adult cartoon that makes fun of adolescence and the stage of life that is hallmarked for most, as the "awkward phase". In the show, the characters are all middle schoolers trying to make sense of what is happening to them emotionally, physically, and socially during puberty and often struggle to make a situation smooth. Many of the characters find themselves desiring attention from their other classmates that they find attractive, however this goes awry sometimes when the reason for attraction is use and loneliness. The differentiation in maturity levels often will get the best of them and will usually make for an uncomfortable moment for the characters as well as the audience. This show although, awkward, makes light of a time that most of us wish would disappear from memory and turns it into thought-provoking entertainment on how communication affects relationships.