Epiphany

[flwyd]

Communication requires both parties to agree in advance about the basic constituents. Once basic communication has been established, more complex messages can be constructed.

Thus, when two people know each other well, they can communicate quite subtly. But when you'd like to send the message "I'd like to get to know you," doing so subtly assumes a shared communications protocol that hasn't been established. It's like trying to send your username before you establish an ssh connection. The message will not be understood and summarily dropped on the floor.

Comments

[neverireven.livejournal.com]

I like that. I think we're all trained - with varying degrees of success - to internalize communication norms in such a way that we assume they should be, both to ourselves and others, intuitive. However, this is a problem when there's a communication disconnect and we're left standing around going, "Why did that happen??" or even worse, "I'm so pissed off that that happened. Why on earth would they XYZ??" when in fact, they were trying to YZW, and we just interpreted it wrong because we had the wrong decoding system...

Um, anyway, I think the point I'm trying to get at is that...I think it's an awesomely helpful tool, for all sorts of relationships (or potential relationships), to be able to unearth the sorts of complex structures that make up our communication and think about them explicitly, rather than trying to deal with them on an almost entirely intuitive level.

also, it's just fun to think about. *g*