From the Archives- My 125th post
The following post (part 2 of a 3 part blog) was written by me when I had just started blogging... it was on the phenomena of blogging in general... not very erudite, still, I think there a a few points to be taken home
Why blog?(And why not just relax and chill out in life, after all typing hurts)Part 2
Posted on 31 May 2006
Medium is the Message –
Marshall McLuhan
(I believe he wanted to say message and not massage)
Why humans need to communicate?
This question had enticed me for some time. Of course there are theories and theories about communication and every two theory, synthesized, gives another theory. My question, though, pertinently relates itself to something more pedestrian. Why do I and you need to communicate?
I will try to answer the question. But, this time I will refrain from building any theory and would like to speak for myself. Of course, from thereon, I can derive a few derivations and generalizations. But first how do I communicate and even before I answer that, I must answer who I communicate with.
To answer my last question first, I communicate with my family members and that would include my mother and father and their family of orientation, my siblings and their family of procreation. I also communicate with my friends and at times their families of orientation and procreation. I have also been communicating with my colleagues during my education, profession or hobby pursuits. Beyond this a few neighbours, and few occasional communication with strangers for sporadic and non-repetitive reasons. That sums up the list of people I communicate with, ever.
And really as to how do I communicate with them- its easy, mostly interpersonally- through spoken words and written and at times even non-verbally. The idea here is that I hardly use any non interpersonal medium to communicate with the majority of our subjects of communication.
And that brings me to my original question as to why do we communicate. (Over here I deliberately chose "we" over "I", simply because as a person no one is homogeneous in his behavioral patterns). This one is really difficult, its changes with cultural and temporal settings, but then it is not impossible to find a lowest common denominator at that too. I believe that we communicate because its one of our most basic psychological need, quite akin to food and water being our physiological ones. We need to communicate because we being a thinking animal interpret our world based on our thinking, and because all of us do think differently, our interpretations are more often than not, different from each other- and there is a dire need to renegotiate our interpretations with respect to those, who matter to us. Let's take a very small example, say in a market when you haggle over price of an item to be purchased, you arrive at a cost at which the deal has to be clinched based on your interpretation, whereas the other side does the same and you need to communicate (here in form of negotiations) to arrive at a common interpretation (here, a price). This postulate of communication works wonderfully well in a lot of empirical situations, even in acutely emotional situations (Read this book, Eric Berne's Games People Play, a psychological masterpiece, to actually see the basis of my postulate. It’s a book on transactional analysis and tells the patterns a person behaves in, while entering into a communication)
So the geographical and temporal separation (See Part 1) which LPG brought around with it, struck at the root of this communication- in a sense that earlier we knew who we were communicating with and therefore could understand the way that person would be interpreting things and so it was easier for us to negotiate with him or her, but now that person had changed and so our understanding of his patterns of interpretations were lost (Say for example we know how a shopkeeper in Karolbagh market of New Delhi will behave and it would be easier for us to communicate with him, as against to a shopkeeper in Khan-e Khalili market of Cairo will, and therefore it would be difficult for us to interact with him.) And yet we have to communicate, despite the constraints, we are placed under.
And therefore we have turned to newer models of communication. These other models were, definitely an antidote to the geographical and temporal separations. Now it's anybody's guess that the only antidote for geographical and temporal separation is brought around by technology.
Technology has always tried to outpace the flux of this separation, so as to avert a constituency against this geographical and temporal separation, as it would harm the very basis of economic growth, by questioning it. A very simple and yet a very powerful question which has always been thrown towards proponents of growth is- whether a man needs to be happy or rich, everybody knows the answer, but nobody likes to topple the apple-cart. Leeching a man from his natural habitat, often community based and pushing him into cities of mass production may make him affluent, but certainly not happier. (I am sorry if I sound like one of those Marxist thinkers, I am not even distantly Marxist). Therefore not only the market forces have invested a lot in creating new communication tools, but also have always tried to make them pedestrianly cheaper. A postal system, telegraph, telegram, mobile technology all of them fall under the same category- but none of them could come even closer to the masterpiece called INTERNET. Efforts are afoot to further push the limits by convergence technology and fit this connectivity into one's pocket.
Internet had one advantage over the intermediate technology, being its degree of involvement. So while a telegraph or a telephone served a big purpose, they could involve only one sense of a human being- hearing. They were highly inadequate to display a range of emotions. In contrast the postal system did exactly this, but was pathetically slow and the geographical separation was growing exponentially. Internet was a masterpiece as it combined the goodness of this anachronistic medium with state of the art technology and created a model of communication, where geographical separation became meaningless and the temporal separation became negotiable.
Why blog?(And why not just relax and chill out in life, after all typing hurts)Part 2
Posted on 31 May 2006
Medium is the Message –
Marshall McLuhan
(I believe he wanted to say message and not massage)
Why humans need to communicate?
This question had enticed me for some time. Of course there are theories and theories about communication and every two theory, synthesized, gives another theory. My question, though, pertinently relates itself to something more pedestrian. Why do I and you need to communicate?
I will try to answer the question. But, this time I will refrain from building any theory and would like to speak for myself. Of course, from thereon, I can derive a few derivations and generalizations. But first how do I communicate and even before I answer that, I must answer who I communicate with.
To answer my last question first, I communicate with my family members and that would include my mother and father and their family of orientation, my siblings and their family of procreation. I also communicate with my friends and at times their families of orientation and procreation. I have also been communicating with my colleagues during my education, profession or hobby pursuits. Beyond this a few neighbours, and few occasional communication with strangers for sporadic and non-repetitive reasons. That sums up the list of people I communicate with, ever.
And really as to how do I communicate with them- its easy, mostly interpersonally- through spoken words and written and at times even non-verbally. The idea here is that I hardly use any non interpersonal medium to communicate with the majority of our subjects of communication.
And that brings me to my original question as to why do we communicate. (Over here I deliberately chose "we" over "I", simply because as a person no one is homogeneous in his behavioral patterns). This one is really difficult, its changes with cultural and temporal settings, but then it is not impossible to find a lowest common denominator at that too. I believe that we communicate because its one of our most basic psychological need, quite akin to food and water being our physiological ones. We need to communicate because we being a thinking animal interpret our world based on our thinking, and because all of us do think differently, our interpretations are more often than not, different from each other- and there is a dire need to renegotiate our interpretations with respect to those, who matter to us. Let's take a very small example, say in a market when you haggle over price of an item to be purchased, you arrive at a cost at which the deal has to be clinched based on your interpretation, whereas the other side does the same and you need to communicate (here in form of negotiations) to arrive at a common interpretation (here, a price). This postulate of communication works wonderfully well in a lot of empirical situations, even in acutely emotional situations (Read this book, Eric Berne's Games People Play, a psychological masterpiece, to actually see the basis of my postulate. It’s a book on transactional analysis and tells the patterns a person behaves in, while entering into a communication)
So the geographical and temporal separation (See Part 1) which LPG brought around with it, struck at the root of this communication- in a sense that earlier we knew who we were communicating with and therefore could understand the way that person would be interpreting things and so it was easier for us to negotiate with him or her, but now that person had changed and so our understanding of his patterns of interpretations were lost (Say for example we know how a shopkeeper in Karolbagh market of New Delhi will behave and it would be easier for us to communicate with him, as against to a shopkeeper in Khan-e Khalili market of Cairo will, and therefore it would be difficult for us to interact with him.) And yet we have to communicate, despite the constraints, we are placed under.
And therefore we have turned to newer models of communication. These other models were, definitely an antidote to the geographical and temporal separations. Now it's anybody's guess that the only antidote for geographical and temporal separation is brought around by technology.
Technology has always tried to outpace the flux of this separation, so as to avert a constituency against this geographical and temporal separation, as it would harm the very basis of economic growth, by questioning it. A very simple and yet a very powerful question which has always been thrown towards proponents of growth is- whether a man needs to be happy or rich, everybody knows the answer, but nobody likes to topple the apple-cart. Leeching a man from his natural habitat, often community based and pushing him into cities of mass production may make him affluent, but certainly not happier. (I am sorry if I sound like one of those Marxist thinkers, I am not even distantly Marxist). Therefore not only the market forces have invested a lot in creating new communication tools, but also have always tried to make them pedestrianly cheaper. A postal system, telegraph, telegram, mobile technology all of them fall under the same category- but none of them could come even closer to the masterpiece called INTERNET. Efforts are afoot to further push the limits by convergence technology and fit this connectivity into one's pocket.
Internet had one advantage over the intermediate technology, being its degree of involvement. So while a telegraph or a telephone served a big purpose, they could involve only one sense of a human being- hearing. They were highly inadequate to display a range of emotions. In contrast the postal system did exactly this, but was pathetically slow and the geographical separation was growing exponentially. Internet was a masterpiece as it combined the goodness of this anachronistic medium with state of the art technology and created a model of communication, where geographical separation became meaningless and the temporal separation became negotiable.
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