Communication is what holds groups of people together. Five teachers worth reading on listening, speaking, and the medium between them.
Jaron Lanier, 2018.
Find the book →Language is part of human nature. Steven Pinker · The Language Instinct
What others do may be a stimulus of our feelings, but not the cause. Marshall Rosenberg · Nonviolent Communication
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Dale Carnegie · The Art of Public Speaking
Across the philosophy of dialogue, the practice of nonviolent communication, and the critique of attention-platform media, the same observation keeps surfacing: communication begins not with speaking but with hearing. The hardest skill in any conversation is to actually take in what the other person is saying without already preparing your reply.
Bohm, the quantum physicist, spent the last decade of his life on dialogue as a discipline. On Dialogue is a thin book that argues conversation can be a collective form of thinking — but only if participants are willing to suspend their own assumptions long enough to actually hear each other.
Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior. David Bohm · On Dialogue
Rosenberg developed Nonviolent Communication while working as a civil-rights mediator in the 1960s. The method is deceptively simple: observation, feeling, need, request — in that order, without judgment. Decades of practice have shown it works in conflicts where almost nothing else does.
Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. Marshall Rosenberg · Nonviolent Communication
Lanier argues that the modern social-media stack is structurally antagonistic to listening. Algorithms reward provocation; provocation produces engagement; engagement produces ad revenue. The platforms are not designed to help us understand each other; they are designed to keep us watching.
Algorithms are designed to make you addicted, anxious, and angry. Jaron Lanier · Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts
The practice is older than any of these books. The Quaker meeting. The Socratic dialogue. The Indigenous talking circle. Different cultures, same finding: people change when they feel heard, and almost never when they don't.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Stephen R. Covey (after Carnegie) · The 7 Habits