Edited by author 03-22-2003 11:13 PM
Hmmm, reading your posts I feel I might be too quick to single out America. Other cultures probably share this tendency. When I think of my interaction (me representing American culture) with my Japanese friends (them representing Japanese culture) I guess I start to ignore the larger context. The extreme opposite in communication tendencies between Americans and Japanese make it easy to lose perspective, and gets me thinking down the dichotomous road of "Americans are loud, Japanese are quiet" -- which is oversimplification. Anyway, any culture has a variety of communication differences within it, because we are in the end all people.
Along the same lines, one thing I have been struggling with lately is the idea of protesting. While I respect the passion of people willing to get off the couch and do something, it seems similar (if I can modify kristen's quote a tad) to the "wait your turn, then yell" school of communication. Is it possible for progress to come from this, and is it sustainable without a change in base-line understanding of the motivation and feelings of both parties?
I posted a comment to Anti Celebrity's journal about this subject recently
http://www.deadjournal.com/talkread.bml?jo...thread=26415#t26415So yea, my question is what the hell can we do to listen to each other more?
Reading this post is a start for me to change. Thanks Ian!I can't tell you how much you've just made my day ^=^
