Quotes About Communication

Dr. Jack Sarfatti offers a different interpretation. The medium of the Bell interconnectedness, he says, is not consciousness but information. Now, information is very abstract in communication theory: it is the negative reciprocal of entropy, which means roughly that it is the opposite of disorder. It is almost what we call system or organization in daily speech. Information, Sarfatti proposes, is not bound by the same laws as energy and not subject to Einsteinian limits.

The difference between a great writer and a minor one is fundamentally this: that the minor writer always has answers—glib answers, slick answers, memorably-worded answers, resounding and pretentious answers. The great writer dares to stand before you naked, armed only with his questions.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.

Most of the world was illiterate until the 1970s. ~•~

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

So: if you have tried to abandon sexist terminology and have seen some changes in your perceptions and human relations thereafter, why not try getting rid of "is" and "all" and see what happens? As Benjamin Lee Whorf stated, "A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.

The world does not consist of words, graphs or mathematics, which make up the "tickets" or pookahs we most commonly use to file-and-index our experience. The world of experience consists of non-verbal, non-graphical, non-mathematical processes, encountered and endured, which we convert into words, graphs or math (or other, more arty pookahs or masks.)

All "paths of liberation" (brain-freeing schools) know that we cannot remain in the abyss of the nameless forever, unless we choose to become hermits. (Very few do.) Once we have returned from a school of brain-change to the ordinary world, we again must see and think in masks, or we will not have the ability to communicate with and deal with others.

Information, mathematician Norbert Wiener once said, consists of signals that you do not expect. Remember?

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.

It is possible that truth only exists when one has already specified the context or field within which one is speaking.

language controls our thinking.

Language structures demark our reality-tunnels. I mentioned that earlier, but it needs repeating.

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say I love fish, and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

What does common sense have to do with it?" he exploded. "We're talking about a job interview!

Jesus Christ," she said. "You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.

Mary sat, quiet and attentive and blank. It wasn't like talking to a dumb seventh-grader, it was like talking to a pancake.

To imply something," Jesse said, "you have to know something. I'm just trying to learn.

called Evan Malone at the number Epstein had given me and got his wife, and made an appointment to come up to his place on Bow Lake to talk with him. On the drive up Route 93, I called Epstein on the cell phone.

But if I were a man," she said, "I imagine you wouldn't let me say it." "No," I said. "If I didn't need your help, I wouldn't let you say it.

Are you trying to compromise my manhood?" I said. "Oh, yeah, that," she said. "Now and then I forget.