Communication Means Talking, Not Just Listening

I want to talk a little bit about why it's so important to be able to converse in a given language (whether it be linguistic or technological in nature) through the creation of original content. To my way of thinking, true comprehension does not really exist until you are able to understand a language and use it to produce something truly original, whether you're writing a short story in Spanish class or working on a new line of code.

I think that it is the immediacy of my thesis project that makes it so vital. Rapidly shifting technologies and new forms of discourse have changed the ways in which we live, learn, and lead. The common and the comfortable are quickly being replaced by the new and the innovative, requiring new pathways of examination. The markets for print media and radio are hemorrhaging clients, thanks largely to the introduction of a vast array of communicatory web-based mediums. How we deal with such media, both in terms of what we say through them and how we learn to utilize them responsibly, depends upon careful steady and measured introspection. Such issues are at the forefront of our political and social landscapes, informing nearly every aspect of our culture.

In today’s complex political and social climate, little is more important than the capacity to effectively communicate. We live at a time when a blogger writing from his basement can drive the national debate, when a politician with intelligence and talent can mount a successful Presidential campaign using little more than stirring rhetoric and social networking sites. The Internet and global markets have left the world a smaller, faster, intensely more complex place, requiring multifaceted, broadly educated leaders.

Communication speaks to every major issue confronting contemporary society. In China, where you can be persecuted for accessing restricted Web content, communication speaks to human rights. In Pakistan, where disrupted discussion between uncooperative governments has hobbled our military’s ability to pursue the Taliban, communication speaks to national security. And in the US, where the divide between rhetoric and action, between politics and policy has become so wide as to seem nearly unbridgeable, the ability to communicate forcefully, morally and truthfully can mean the difference between an active, engaged polity, and an unwitting mob.

Communication is the modern political battleground. Communication can instruct, provoke, inspire, clarify and illuminate. It can also be used against us by those who value personality over politics, distraction over debate, pettiness over substance, and who invoke the veneers of sex and race to disguise inexperience or mask ignorance. Television, print media, film, and the Internet all offer immediate access, implied authority and political power; as a society, we have an important responsibility to utilize them ethically. In his essay, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology, author Dennis Baron makes an intriguing point. Baron argues that because the internet in particular is a source of information on many topics, both accurate and falsified, it is the responsibility of the user to verify the credibility of information as they interact with it. If we simply allow ourselves to be distracted consumers rather than passionate and engaged purveyors of web-based information, then we risk restricting both the veracity and direction of web-based content. Those who are “truly literate in the twenty-first century will be those who learn to both read and write the multimedia language of the screen," as Elizabeth Daley points out in Expanding The Concept of Literacy. In other words, we cannot merely converse within a new format, we must also work to actively construct it. Which is why working on that short story in Spanish class, or writing that new piece of code is so vital to comprehending the languages of computer programming and Spanish. Before we can comprehend we must create, because communication is more than just listening; it's taking the time and energy to synthesize what you've heard and to talk back.