How to love communication

Normally, there is this need for expression that drives one to write. At the moment, I really don’t want to share anything. It’s strange to do things you don’t want to just for some wrong impression of a better feeling. Alright, so you feel bad and don’t want to do anything. Don’t blabber around. Don’t write if you don’t want to.

Three days later..
It’s important to notice when you’re even annoying yourself. Sometimes, there’s nothing to talk about. No, in fact there’s always something, but most of the time it’s just not the right audience we’re talking to. And sure: yourself is your best audience. That’s the reason we should rarely only speak with ourselves. We just wouldn’t notice if we were boring, spoke inarticulately or didn’t process any output signal at all.
To speak to others brings huge benefits. With a lot of our senses we can sense reactions. We can feel that our thoughts can make a difference. Feedback is what we should always care about. Even if we feel ignored it’s a valuable impression. That’s why lectures get better the more often we give them. Except maybe, if the audience stays the same. That is another problem for ourselves which can be helped by changing our own point of view as often but also as aware of it as we possibly can and can be.

Life is an awesome journey between imaginary places.
Communication is our machete, our bridge and our rope.

Talking about nothing

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” – Plato

To talk only for the sake of communication itself seems pretty unnecessary for some people. Well, it probably is. But there is more to it than most may realise. Small talk is like grooming. Primates form bonds of trust and build cooperation groups. They groom each other to get food, sex or other favours.
Maybe we don’t go that far just with small talk but it’s in a way the best option to start a conversation to get to know each other. The special thing about this form of phatic expressions is that it serves to find a way to communicate. It’s about evaluating the spoken language, style and level. Some do this even only to overcome a waiting time or an uncomfortable silence. Imagine two computers just connecting to say ‘hi, how you’re doin’?’ – sounds a bit pathetic, doesn’t it?

In general, there are the following categories of conversations based upon their involved topics: ideas, concrete objects and facts, people, the self. Their different purposes are: extend understanding and awareness, consolidate a general view, boosting of self esteem, attracting attention. Anyway, to start talking about something with somebody, you might want to consider a topic that’s neutral, without heavy personal information and hard questions. Make the talking part easy by staying simple!

Breaking limits

It’s raining. Additionally it’s still unpleasantly hot. So those who sit in their offices can sweat their coffee out while the ones on the outside are getting their make-ups washed. But I don’t really want to comment the weather. I leave that to the annoying football commentators as it adds a bit of suspense to the whole fan and commercial society.
I’m also not really in the mood of writing, so I’ll just leave a few links to a great comedian who died four days ago. He’s known by the Americans for going past the limits of TV and Radio manners. What I find kind of interesting – and I don’t know much from his shows – is, that he managed to speak to a big audience in a direct and uncensored way but staying both understandable and on a sometimes high level of the communication itself.

In one of George Carlins best known routines, he went against euphemisms and said that they’ve become so widespread that no one can simply ‘die’. To phrase it in his words:
‘Older’ sounds a little better than ‘old’, doesn’t it? Sounds like it might even last a little longer. [..] I’m getting old. And it’s OK. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won’t have to die – I’ll ‘pass away’. Or I’ll ‘expire’, like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they’ll call it a ‘terminal episode’. The insurance company will refer to it as ‘negative patient care outcome’. And if it’s the result of malpractice they’ll say it was a ‘therapeutic misadventure’.

Links:
those famous seven words at YouTube
about soft language at YouTube
religion and sun worshipping at YouTube

Senses of balance

There are numerous reasons why challenging yourself is fun. For one, there is the part where you may achieve something you didn’t know you were able to. That usually comes as a pleasant surprise, which itself is good for your own self-esteem. Another thing is the knowledge new experiences come packed with. The better you know your own reactions, the better your self-assessments are going to work for new situations.
In case of my own last weekend I’d like to note some things about scuba diving. First of all, it’s awesome to move freely around in every possible direction. Anyway, there is this feeling when you turn around in foggy waters and enter this state where you are unable to make out any direction or reference point anymore. That’s my first uneasy feeling. The second one is when you dive lower, let’s say to 20 meters, and imagine the height of water by comparison to the height of some building you know in the same size above your shoulders. That’s just a freaking amount of water and thus, a lot of pressure, if you get what I mean. The last thing is the silence you may experience when you slowly breath in and nothing around you moves or makes any noise.
All of these sensations are not bad, they are just interesting to experience and may take a little bit to accept.

Links:
Underwater Communication ~ How-To Communicate Underwater
Diving Signals ~ Scuba Diving Signals, Wiki Diving Signals
Sign Language ~ NZSL

How to clear your mind

Everybody has a mind of their own. And that is true in every sense of these words. Previous posts show that this makes for example the subject of communication a little – well, rather much more complex. Other influences are on possible ways to find your focus and concentration for specific actions. Some do sports, others take drugs and a few undergo brain surgery. Honestly, most of these solutions I would not really recommend.
The best thing to do with probably the fewest side effects is to find out what’s bothering you and thus is stealing your attention. As next step, you have to find out the expiration date of this problem. Afterwards, all you should do is find yourself the best conclusion you can make for this special issue until something changes after its expiration. Then, the hardest part is to draw the final stroke.

If you got too much on your mind and you need to get rid of it very fast, you’ll need to focus on something really important for you. Like you are thinking about relationship troubles, problems at your job, a family with murderous intentions and you’re currently falling of a cliff. I’d tell you: you better concentrate at your biggest threat. Usually, you’re in situations where you should focus on an important business, but you’re having troubles caused by crazy weighted neurons. Whose fault is that? Never mind, find a picture, some piece of music or information which is most interesting for you at the moment. Concentrate on it and afterwards try to go directly into the matter that’s most important.
If you’re hungry right now, look up procrastination!

How to be objective

Normally, I’d like to say that there are always two ways: the friendly one and the honest one. Nonetheless, when it comes to be factually there seems to be not so much of a choice. In the sense of communication objectivity can only be achieved by knowing how both, transmitter and receiver, are going to understand a specific message. For humans that is hard indeed, cause there are no strict standards for conversations.
If you just think about some factors like speed, tone, word order, facial expression a lot of possible and different statements can be created even with the same words. As for the message itself, always problematic are for example comparisons, clauses and restrictions. The phrase ‘I like you, but..’ has always a kind of a killer effect. One reason may be that the but-part is the exception to which is usually given more weight.

Another problem shows up when people realise something said might be misunderstood. They switch into defensive mode and that just has to seem like you’re wrong for your conversational counterpart. Even with words less is often more. Skip the unnecessary filler words. Objectivity in the understanding within a group of more than two people would be real luck. You’re sometimes better off by not even trying to find a common communication standard. It takes a lot of time, it’s never guaranteed and most people don’t listen to you anyway.
The answer is: ‘what was the question again’!

You can’t be someone else

The modern Internet offers us much more than communication. It’s the imagination of being able to be anyone you’d like to be. Chat rooms or worlds like Second Life try to make us believe that we can be anyone. Why does one even want to be different? And if you don’t manage to be like you want, why would it be different online? This brings us a bit down to the mind/body problem. Je pense, donc je suis – that’s what Descartes said. It’s the thinking of two things existing by their own in relationship to each other. It’s also referred to as dualism, a philosophy of mind. Most religions require such a distinct point of view.
One problem is, it’s simply not scientific. Why should our bodies feature something called soul? Though, it was quite important as explanation when EEGs and MRI technologies didn’t exist to represent our thinking processes on the material level. We know about neurons, synapses and basically how it all works together now. The first organism to have its genome completely sequenced and all of its 302 neurons mapped was Caenorhabditis Elegans, a roundworm.

So much for science. Whether we believe in a soul, karma, in god, chemical substances or love – it doesn’t matter. For virtual worlds it is important to understand that we can’t be someone else. You change everytime you think. Every thought gives your brain (or soul) a different face. Still, you define yourself through your body – where you are and when. A quote I read a short time ago – but forgot where – was something like: people change everytime, love is when you like someone even though.
Don’t try to be someone else, learn to know yourself!