YOUNG VOICE
The Cookie Jar
Imagine the world without cellular phones. Almost a fourth of our population would either lose their social lives or die without finding out the wonders of thumb reflexes.
Imagine the world without telephones. Almost half of our society would probably wind up with unrelieved anxiety due to unshared gossips.
Imagine the world without any form of conversation. People might end up living as zombies with dried up saliva and bad breath.
Communication remains a vital process that keeps us sending messages without limits. Man is considered a social being that needs to interact with others in order to survive.
Frederick II, an emperor of Germany, proved to the world after his unusual experiment that communicating is worth more than annoying telephone rings and a stockpile of snail mail. He wanted to know if language intuitively existed. In his experiment, Frederick II used several newborn babies to be raised normally. They were fed, bathed and put to sleep when tired, all but the part where they get to be exposed to any form of communication. In the end, Frederick failed to discover the oldest language and alongside are the cold and lifeless bodies of poor infants. Surely, to never get the chance to hear an actual conversation or even just to see a nod of agreement from another person would offer a sense of ignorance that could kill a child more than hunger or thirst.
Communication is omniscient, it is everywhere, and continues to be one of the forces that turn the world around so it would once again face the glorious day. But, although its goals may be pure, man's wrecked relationships are rooted from the misuse of communication.
Technically, communication is composed of the sender of the message, the message, the receiver, and the feedback. If done ideally and in a two-way mutual process, it could bridge new friendships, cease ruthless wars and even unite a multitude of differences. Communication starts with the sender sending the message to the receiver who, after getting the point of the message, sends back a feedback to the sender. But, sadly such ideal communication rarely takes place.
I have observed and I myself had experienced that we never really follow how an ideal communication should be. Most of the time, it begins with the sender sending the message but with an added twist; the sender already has a fixed expectation of what the receiver should respond as a feedback. So, when the receiver replies differently to what was expected by the sender, chaos takes place. Almost always, my mother and I argue on petty things, and now I know why. How silly of me to ask my mother's opinion if I should say yes or no, when in fact I am constantly hoping for a 'yes'. Danger comes when my mother answers a cold 'no' and I begin to breakdown. Thinking about it, I shouldn't have asked in the first place.
People nowadays say that major problems such as our country's fractioned government couldn't be anymore solved with a simple gathering around the table to talk things out. I disagree. Those problems could be solved only if one listens to what the other has to say, not just to what every one expects someone to say. The process of communication could not get pass through the sending phase, because we never accept the message as it is. Rather, we find faults in the message. Message sending failed.
I am in awe of ants for they can communicate better than us. And to think humans are rational beings. One minute you see them all scattered and lost in direction, but then they stop to wiggle their antennas to hear what the other ant has to say, then the next minute you'll see them all lined up straightly and orderly marching towards the nearest cookie jar.
Indeed, we communicate and it allows us to exercise ourselves as social beings but its goal of effective understanding, of clarity, of unity has been toned down to the minimum. We often have miscommunication because we only await messages that we would agree to. If not, we conclude that the other doesn't understand or the communication was useless.
Wouldn't it be better if after we receive the unexpected message, we try to pause and really listen to what it meant? Wiggle your antennas if you have some, whether or not the message was useless, accept it and later on just send the appropriate feedback.
Communicate and live.
Find the nearest cookie jar.
(For comments and reactions please send an SMS to 09186363090 or an email to reylangarcia@gmail.com. View my blog at http://theyoungvoice.blogspot.com)