Watch: What’s Wrong with Our Communication?
Transcript:
Dear faithful communicators, what’s wrong with our communication, our human communication? What’s wrong with it? Well, if you look at the field of communication studies, the scholars that really study this field, they say it’s primarily barriers, external barriers outside of ourselves, external to us. There are problems out there that we have to contend with. There’s noise in the system is that we, even in the field of communication, they will say, all victims of selective perception, we see what we want to see or we see only that which we can recognize through our experience, that’s internal in the field. They also recognize selective retention. We remember those things that we want to remember, those experiences and those relationships and the communication we retain what we want to retain. That’s internal too, isn’t it? You see, even in the communication field, we recognize that there are some internal problems of some kind with human beings. But how about this? We lie, we gossip, we even ridicule other people. We can do some pretty nasty stuff with this gift of communication that is internal, isn’t it? We’re down to sin, sin, our broken relationship with God, and our desire to do what we want to do rather than what we should do. Our difficulty in listening, especially to God, Doesn’t this come down to something inside this sin? We could say that there are in communication sins of commission. Or we do something like we lie or we gossip, we do something we shouldn’t. Then there are also sins of omission. Maybe we should have, in a given situation, offered a word of encouragement or something else positive, and we didn’t communicate when we should have, in a way we should have, we have some deep internal problems when it comes to communication. This sin runs right down to our hearts. We can even ask ourselves the question, do we really want to know others and to be known Really down deep. The story of the fall from grace, or the fall into sin in scripture, suggests two things about our communication. One is that we tend to pull into our cocoons, we hide. We don’t want to communicate. Adam and Eve run off, they don’t want to communicate with God. And they’re even a little reluctant in terms of communicating with each other, so they cover themselves up. We try to protect ourselves, but we also criticize. We cocoon and we criticize all the time. We criticize, we try to build ourselves up by putting other people down, if you will. This is part of human nature living under the shadow of the fall. We have an ego to use that Freudian term. We desire to do things in the way that we want to do them. And we desire to do things for ourselves to avoid difficulty and to get what we can. It’s a very selfish business communication, those of us living under the shadow of the fall. It’s very interesting that in the account of the Tower of Babel, in scripture with this community that was building this tower, it was evidently a pyramid like structure into the heavens. This was the first in Silicon Valley. They thought they had it all together. They were going to make a name for themselves. They were going to be godlike, and meet God into the heavens. And shake hands up there and say, we’re like you, And what does God do to protect them? To protect them, he divides up their languages and says you’re not going to be able to communicate with each other. So well, here’s something to think about. The fall creates real problems for us. But living under the shadow of the fall also helps us from doing untold bad with our communication. Because the hindrance of communicating with each other keeps us from doing the worst awful evil. That is, to pretend that we’re God, and that all other people should be under us to make a name for ourselves. Shalom
Petersen identified several communication traps that create barriers to effective interpersonal communication. Additional ones were addressed by France & Weikel and Schultze & Badzinski, who also argued that extensive use of social media may reduce emotional intimacy formed through in-person interaction. Drawing on the course resources, identify and describe two communication barriers or issues that are particularly challenging for you and explain how they impact your interpersonal communication.
