Thoughts

Every now and then something jumps out at me repeatedly and I have no choice but to acknowledge it. For some time I’ve been aware of the decline in people’s ability to comprehend what they read or hear. I have a couple of theories about why this is… well it is actually one theory with multiple variables.

Theory:
A culture that doesn’t recognize, understand or value the circular cycle of life and the connectedness it creates (which allows people to make connections between concepts and to use past knowledge to build new knowledge or to use past knowledge in current applications) results in fragmented societies, individuals, and minds.

The school system is at its worse. There is little or no additional learning taking place outside of school for children or adults. People simply do not read what is written carefully. Our listening skills are near zero due to emotional discomfort, immaturity, selfishness, and the biggest of all … ego. Excessive television, video game, computer usage has lead to declining social skills.

Some examples:
I offered video services to a woman wishing to produce a video series. I e-mailed her explaining my availability. Pretty simple, I’m available on the weekends and I’m NOT available anytime during the week until after 4:30pm. I e-mailed her this three times and three times she responded with “Lets meet on “x day during the week” in the morning”. I was left thinking she was simply not reading what I wrote at all, have reading comprehension problems, doesn’t really want the services, or is mentally ill.

On several occasions where I currently work I’ve sent written requests and information to developers and sys admins and have had them ask me for details that are clearly written in the original text and we are talking about a 3-4 sentence paragraph here. Re-posting the same paragraph made them say “oh”.

The same is true for those writing or speaking to others with little or no context to their statements so others have a difficult time knowing what they are talking about. I knows some people who talk like this and I often have to ask for clarification. For example, have you ever had someone write or speak to you and leave out the who, what, when, and where? It would feel like this… You and your friend are talking about baseball and have been for the past 15-20 minutes and then the friend says something like “She really didn’t know what to do about that, you know? All I could say was “I would never have allowed that.”" The problem is 1. What does this have to do with baseball? 2. Who is “she”? 3. What didn’t she know what to do about? 4. What would they never have allowed? I have had many many people communicate this way and I must say it has been within the past 10 years. I don’t recall any of these communication and comprehension issues occurring this often prior to roughly 10 years ago. You are left having to ask 4 questions to learn what they are talking about instead of them saying “Let me switch up on you here because something just popped into my mind. This chick I know at work doesn’t know what to do about her rude boss, you know? I would never have put up with her boss yelling at me in front of our co-workers.” (a name is really only important if the other person knows them too. On the flip side, I have a friend who talks to me about people at work by name, who I don’t know as if I know who she’s talking about and that also leaves me asking more questions)

There are simply countless times where I’ve written a question in particular and have gotten back an answer that was so out in left field that I had no choice but to conclude the person did not understand the question. I feel I’m constantly left thinking “Now what in the world does that have to do with my question?”

These are just some examples off the top of my head. There are many more I have experienced. And we see some of these examples every day on the news.

Just a thought:
It’s just such a strange phenomena to me. Especially the issues with reading comprehension. I just remember it being such a big deal to learn reading comprehension in school. Besides it being an extremely important skill to have, regardless of in school education and this is even more true with listening comprehension.

This issue is significant to me. If we get to a point where we do not understand each other on a basic level, then of course we will have some serious problems. I also think we tend to overlook how important socializing is and we deny how easily our social skills are affected. But as a real world example, I recognized a decline in my own social skills when I moved from Florida, where I had many good friends, to Idaho, where I had a few friends and my social skills increased in leaps and bounds when I moved to Seattle and not only had many good friends but ones who had sociable hobbies (ones in bands, etc.) and who hugged a lot. It doesn’t take much.