Communication
Published by James April 26th, 2008 in None- If communication can fail, it will.
- If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
- There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
- The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.And I particularly like his observation that anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:
- Who you think you are
- Who you think the other person is
- Who you think the other person thinks you are
- Who the other person thinks he/she is
- Who the other person thinks you are
- Who the other person thinks you think he/she is
I would like to go to a communications coach/counselor. Fascinating stuff.
Really interesting. Good points to remember when communicating through any medium.
I visited the 37 Signals blog and then clicked on the source to find that the above ideas come from Professor Osmo A. Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication. The site indicates that his communication theories usually applies to pedagogy, as cited in the following quote.
“The important thing is to realize that even the best explanations and illustrations will be misunderstood. The student needs a way of testing his understanding against some criteria. At best, this means doing something and seeing whether it works.”
Regardless, still applies to the regular world. Will be in touch soon…
An interesting corollary that can be deduced from the axioms above:
Since all communication can fail, it always will. In other words, there isn’t really any communication going on anywhere. What we have is a bunch of people walking around talking to themselves while looking someone else in the eye.
On the other hand, if you want to get Jungian about it, we might all be tapped into the collective unconscious, in which case, we all de facto share an understanding of everything that is most important in life, and language is just a clumsy way of trying to communicate the banal details.
Some heavy stuff here Mr. Cohn. I was talking with Teresa Neilsen-Hayden (see:–> http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/) and she brought up the interesting patterns she sees in communication being the moderator of BoingBoing. Crazy to think of the output you get when people have tools to communicate and meet like-minded nodes.