We Need to Talk | Musings
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18th June 2024 | Times of India
I happened to read a very interesting article in the ‘Speaking Tree’ Column in today’s Times of India, Chennai Edition, thanks to Dr. Selvakumari, Dept of Physics, MCC who shared the clipping with me, since the article also quotes some inspiring lines from our Principal Dr. Paul Wilson.
The article is written by Ms. Narayani Ganesh, daughter of the legendary Gemini Ganesan. [For newbies here on our blog: actor Gemini Ganesan is an illustrious alumnus of our College, and he was also Professor with the Dept of Chemistry, MCC, before acing his career in acting, full-time!]
In this article, Ms. Narayani Ganesh emphasises on the importance of conversation in our day-to-day life.
Says she –
When we stop using our legs and arms for physical work or exercise, we’re told, they could get atrophied. If our limbs could shrink due to lack of use, how about vocal cords and tongue, I wonder.
Because we are talking less and less with one another. Well, we do, in a manner of sorts, over text messages, emoticons, social media and emails. But verbal articulation is on the decline, because the other means of communication have gained greater prominence.
Then she proceeds to quote our Principal Dr. Paul Wilson’s interactions with her, on her visit to the MCC-MRF Innovation Park, in Campus –
I recently visited my father’s alma mater, Madras Christian College in Chennai. The principal, Prof Wilson, gave us a guided tour of their new facility, the MCC-MRF Innovation Park, where research students’ cubicles in classrooms were open-ended. “Oh that,” explained Prof Wilson, observing my puzzled expression.
“All our lives, we’ve told students not to talk, and to just listen to the teacher. Here, the idea is to have them talk lots to each other as they work on their computers, so that ideas are exchanged and even newer ideas germinate in a synergetic way.”
For those on the spiritual path, satsangs are a good way to interact with like-minded people. Realised sages say that there is no loneliness if you are connected to the Divine, and you live a life of selfless service, staying active in the community, extending a helping hand, with enough room for self-exploration.
That is, you don’t have to look for companionship in a person once you make the connection with higher consciousness,
she concludes.
It is a very profound article with such valuable life lessons for all of us.
Indeed, this article proved the spark and the inspiration for me to share from a lovely book titled, We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations that Really Matter, by American Journalist and author Celeste Headlee.
Says Celeste –
In a 2012 survey of twenty-one countries, Pew Research found that 75 percent of people who own cell phones use them to text.
Two of the places where texting is most common are among the poorest nations: Kenya and Indonesia. Our reliance on technology is changing the way everyone communicates.
What effect does this have on our conversational skills?
That said, there’s a strong indication that the rise of technology, social media, and texting has led to a decrease in a few critical components of effective communication.
One of those components is empathy.
In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan compiled the results of seventy-two studies conducted over thirty years. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with the vast majority of that decline taking place after 2000.
“The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems,” noted an author of the study, “a behavior that could carry over offline.”
I find this development to be extremely worrisome.
Empathy, at its most basic, is the ability to sense someone else’s feelings, to be aware of their emotional state, and to imagine their experience. Not just to recognize that a coworker is sad, but to imagine what he or she may be going through and what it would feel like if you were going through the same thing.
To experience empathy, we must establish a connection between our idea of ourselves and of another person.
We have to ask questions like, “Would I like it if that happened to me?” “How would I feel if someone ran over my mailbox?”
Ronald Sharp, a professor of English at Vassar College, coauthored The Norton Book of Friendship with his lifelong confidante, Eudora Welty. He touched on this evolving definition of friendship in a 2016 interview with the New York Times.
“Treating friends like investments or commodities is anathema to the whole idea of friendship,” Sharp said.
“It’s not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence. The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art. People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships [through texts and tweets] that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.”
As Sharp points out, meaningful connection requires an investment of time. Conversations are uniquely human and, like us, they are complicated and sometimes chaotic and often rambling. That’s why another essential ingredient for good conversation is attention.
In one study, British researchers asked pairs of strangers to sit down in a room and chat. In half of the rooms, a cell phone was placed on a nearby table; in the other half, no phone was present. After the conversations had ended, the researchers asked study participants what they thought of each other.
Here’s what they learned: when a cell phone was present in the room, the participants reported that the quality of their relationship was worse than those who’d talked in a cell phone–free room. The pairs who talked in the rooms with cell phones “also reported feeling less trust and thought their partners showed less empathy if there was a cell phone present.”
The researchers concluded that the presence of a cell phone hurt the quality of the conversation and the strength of the connection between the people talking. With a cell phone just sitting on a table in the room!
Think of all the times you’ve sat down to have lunch with a friend or colleague and set your phone on the table.
You might have felt virtuous because you didn’t pick it up to check your e-mail, but your ignored messages were still undermining your connection with the person sitting across from you.
Even if we can manage to keep our phones in our pockets, pay attention to the person talking to us for more than eight seconds, and muster up some empathy to forge an emotional connection, there’s one more obstacle that technology presents: our willingness to have a conversation in the first place.
A 2014 Pew Research study found that people are less likely to share their views in person if they’ve discovered that their opinions aren’t popular on social media.
It’s an ironic development, given that in its early days, it was widely speculated that social media would serve as an inclusive forum for more diverse perspectives. But in practice, fear of disagreement online is shutting down the potential for lively conversations.
You can’t learn to ride a bike by reading about it. Biking is active and requires practice. The same is true of conversation. Thinking about it is not enough,
says Celeste Headlee.
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