Are We Losing the Art of Listening Argumentative Essay

In a earth where everyone has a voice what happens to the art of listening?

We now 'hear' more than ever before. But how does the advent of ubiquitous, contiguous, continuous media effect our capacity to listen and sympathise? What happens to the quality of our appointment?

Media producers — and that is just nigh all of us now — remember a lot about getting attention. We now have the information to empathize that as a procedure. We tin can see where people click and how long they read. Merely shouldn't we all — as 'consumers' also every bit producers — be thinking more about why nosotros listen?

This is nearly paying attention but too nearly an substitution. That discussion 'paying' takes on much more meaning in a globe where attending is the currency of the digital economic system. But giving your fourth dimension and your involvement to someone in mediation is an action with all sorts of associated significances, not just a statistic.

Information technology is too a feeling, so emotion is critical [see this article I wrote nigh the role of emotion in journalism]. From the producer or speaker's bespeak of view it is also nigh design, virtually creating messages that attract a listener and, ideally, keeps them listening. That blueprint tin can be functional, for example based on audience data management systems. Or it can be more imaginative, even ludic. ['ludic' networks]

(Leon Kroll, 1940)

Just what virtually the listener themselves? How should we recollect as listeners?

This is partly about literacy. We are not just traffic, we are digital citizens. Yep, in that location are people who grew up with the Internet, merely there is no such thing as natives 'wired' for the digital. We all reply to the online world in ways that are related to our offline, material, social selves. How we heed is well-nigh who nosotros are and our personal resource.

And so in the face of the practical limits on our powers of listening what do we exercise?

There is a danger that we do forget how to concentrate, how to empathise, how to be however. Every media innovation since printing poses the aforementioned claiming.

Listening As Pleasure

One key to unlocking literacy may be to think about it like literature. Retrieve about a literacy that is about the pleasance as well as the utility of listening.

I say all this as someone who loves the sound of his own phonation (or his ain silence). Simply also as someone who has learnt, partly through journalism, to listen well, in a technical sense. More important is when I have discovered through diverse passages of life how I had to listen in a different manner to understand what goes wrong and what might be correct.

Our civilization tells u.s. to pay attending to who is speaking. Retrieve school? Or your last team meeting? Fifty-fifty when physically close or brought virtually by media, there is a gulf between us: in a sitting room or a chat room.

Here Nosotros Become, National Theatre
past Caryl Churchill

In the first act of Caryl Churchill'south challenging new play, Here We Go, guests at a wake attempt to bring together up each other'due south half-sentences, responding automatically to the other archetypal characters' remarks. They aren't listening despite the ritual momentousness of the occasion. That sounds digitally familiar.

Humans have ever had this existential disharmonize betwixt our social lives and our individual existences. Always trying to connect, always separated — ultimately, as Churchill's play shows, by our mortality. Meanwhile, social media exemplifies and amplifies this condition. Giving ever greater opportunities to connect, and nonetheless emphasising our personal, selfied lives.

Listening Must Adapt

Then listening is intuitive but also learnt. When the voices modify, the mediation changes, and then the listening must adapt. Nosotros are all having to cope with this equally real people, non solely as office of Facebook's algorithm or The Guardian's metrics.

Listening is consumption simply it's also nigh meditation equally well as arbitration. It'due south about bureau. How might you respond to what you listen to? Over again, new media technologies allow united states power to deed, but is a click or a retweet testify of listening or simply reaction?

This is a practical, political, cognitive claiming. Merely let's dream a fiddling commencement:

Think of yourself as a child listening to bedtime stories.

Call up of yourself as a lover listening to someone explicate their joy.

Think of yourself as…..

Listening will about always be practical, routine and regular: a asking for payment in a store, a chance remark about the weather. Even so it ever has that possibility of something more. Are we losing that sense of listening as beyond the usual?

Reaching Out?

We know that listening at its best is a profound land where your self is suspended, open, reaching out to someone else's voice and another human being.

Are we losing the ability to focus, to care, to reverberate? Is the blizzard of digital distraction, the blooming of a meg networked blossoms, stopping us from listening in a way that empowers, ennobles and excites us?

It could be the task of journalism to create not just the content and the voice merely also the human relationship, the space, that allows us to heed ameliorate. Not just so we pay attention only to listen with all the wonderful inventiveness, vulnerability and perplexity that our digital homo condition allows.

[This article is based on an thought from @MatildeGiglio]

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Source: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2015/12/06/are-we-losing-the-art-of-listening-and-how-journalism-can-help-get-it-back/

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