Opinion/Editorial
THE “RECEIVE” BUTTON
Years ago, at a motivation seminar I was forced by my employer to attend, I mentioned something that was of surprising value to me (I’ve always thought of motivational speakers as being made up mostly of people who’ve failed at everything in life except in getting other people to believe them). This speaker said this about verbal communications occurring between and among human beings: “When people are silent and giving the appearance that they are listening intently to the words of others, they are not thinking about what the speaker is saying. They are merely waiting for an opening so they can speak for themselves. When humans are thought to be listening, they aren’t really, they are merely waiting to speak.” What is the truth in the statement Zig Ziglar made so long ago? Was what he said founded upon his own life experience, or was it something that merely sounded right and good to a bunch of rather seasoned sales professionals?
Have you noticed, in thinking about your conversations with others, that you are rarely incapable of picking up exactly where you left off in a sentence or paragraph if you are interrupted? The simple fact that that is true, and it is for the most part, might form quite a foundation for the truth put forward in Zig’s comment. If you are holding on to the last word of the thought, you were verbally transmitting through speech until an interrupter is done (so you could finish) were you not just waiting to finish and most probably ignoring most of whatever the interrupter was saying while you wait? Are people capable of listening and evaluating intently what others say, or are they simply really good at making believe they are listening and evaluating intently?
Think about it. The last time you were interrupted and then later finished what you were talking about, were you not really just on ‘pause,’ waiting patiently, or otherwise, to continue what you were saying? You might have also been a bit disturbed by the person who interrupted you for doing that.
Have you noticed through the course of your social life that when a person tells a joke at a party, no matter how terrific and funny the joke is, another person almost invariably steps up to tell another joke (a ‘topper’ if you will)? Is the person telling the second or succeeding joke trying to top the first, or is Zig right in concluding that the following joke tellers are not trying to top the previous but merely getting themselves listened to because that person’s own need for recognition is so overwhelming?
Have you noticed, if you’ve traveled to Europe, that in almost every restaurant over there, the wait staff very carefully observe and listen to the verbal communications going on at the tables they are taking care of to determine an opportune time to break in and offer one service or another? Have you noticed in America that such a seemingly well-mannered kind of application of table service isn’t available at almost any restaurant anywhere? In fact, at most restaurants across the USA, wait staff appear almost aggressively proud to simply show up at a table and ask, “What do you want to order?” or some other service-related question at a time and convenience not necessarily your own. So, apparently, there are cultural issues at work in this rather complex verbal communication issue as well.
Why is it that radio and television have become so powerfully determinant of human behavior and response, all the while the members of the public exposed to these media categorically deny that these sources have any effect on their decision-making at all? Ninety-nine percent of all American households own at least one television, and that television is statistically on for more than seven hours a day. If surveyed, and this has been done by sociologists over and over again, only twenty-three to twenty-seven percent of these same Americans admit to owning a television at all!
Times have changed. The media complex, along with cell phones, the Internet, video games, and new movies, has all made communication much more complex and more dependent upon graphics and visual arts rather than on the intent of the messages transmitted by the spoken word. Where there was once a concentration on the words of a story or song by a listening or watching public, there is today a much more powerful concentration on the sound of the music or the special effects of the audio or visual medium.
In other words, communications are changing to more emphasis on the transmission of information and not on the reception of it. If you don’t believe that, then you might not be old enough to know what the word “service” used to mean when calling providers on the telephone about all sorts of things, inquiries about new service, complaints about existing service, etc. A person of relatively younger years in this current era remains unaware that in the “early days” of the Internet, the entities and sites used to put contact phone numbers and addresses on front pages for ease of service. Try to find such information on websites of the modern era. Try to find someone at an airport to complain about your flight seating, luggage, or whatever. They are not listening. If they are there at all, they are merely waiting for you to finish whatever you are saying to transmit what they want to say.
Modern human cultures are heading in a new direction, Europe is slower than the U.S., and there appears to be only one potential result to where we are all going. It can best be described as a cultural social phenomenon wherein people are being trained, modified, or forced to have no “receive” button. Any new information that gets into human brains in this modern era gets there only incidentally or as the result of an actively directed search. Gone are the days of browsing. Bookstores are almost all closed. Online sites for reading, music, or whatever offer no ability for customers to browse, so they might run into something they might want to have, read, or listen to, but didn’t know they did until they browsed.
The public of today goes to see a movie because of the graphics presented on television or the Internet about it. Think about this mental construct of a receive button being postulated in this article. Look at the next human talking to you without pause, and then imagine that human having a small “receive” button hidden up near his or her left shoulder joint. Physically pushing that imaginary button with your finger (even though the button only exists in your imagination) may be the only way you have of getting any real attention from any human in the future. Of course, pushing it may also get you arrested.
