The discussion veered to a tangent which I also found interesting. Alan said something about the written word that I think is confused. The context was the topic of the goodness of reading which started here. Alan said (here) that the written word is bad because the written word can't respond to the interlocutor (discussion partner). He said that this results in people misunderstanding you. He said he was paraphrasing socrates and that it wasn't his area of expertise. (I'm also paraphrasing Alan.)
I don't think this makes sense.
People misunderstand you regardless of whether it's written or oral discussion. I don't think oral discussion has an advantage over written discussion in general.
People are creating misunderstandings and they are letting those misunderstandings go uncorrected, and this happens with written and oral discussion. I think that the root problem that causes misunderstandings (to be generated and to go uncorrected) is something that both the written word and oral word share in common — people ignore what you say/write, make dishonest interpretations of what you say/write, ignore your perspective, not know how to connect some statements to other statements and not even be aware of it, and then get pissed off if you point out their errors, have a malevolent view of the world, think you're out to get them instead of doing win/win truth-seeking, etc etc.
Written discussion has an advantage over oral discussion. It’s easier to slow down. It’s easier to do the work of figuring out what somebody said. It’s easier to figure out how statements connect to other statements (especially across many discussion sessions). It relies less on your memory, because you can review older messages by reading them. It's easier to keep your emotions out of the way as you're doing these things. etc
I learned about this stuff from FI.
Ideally you would write it down and record yourself saying the words in order to provide facial expressions and tone. There is information in the facial expressions and tones which can be helpful.
ReplyDeleteMost people don't have much experience communicating with the written word in comparison to their experience communicating without the written word. This is true at the individual level and at the species level as it relates to brain development.
BTW - I keep forgetting to click the "Notify me" checkbox. It would be nice if it defaulted to "Notify me".
ReplyDeletewhat do you mean by "brain development"? do you mean hardware/gene changes or software/meme changes?
ReplyDeleteThere is the kind of brain development which is due to practice and experience. And there is the kind of brain development which is due to evolution within the species. Both types are relevant to the idea of facial expressions and tone being valuable sources of information when we communicate and the difficulty of communicating without those sources of information.
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