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How to be Heard. Julian Treasure
Читать онлайн.Название How to be Heard
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isbn 9781633536722
Автор произведения Julian Treasure
Издательство Ingram
In some societies, this powerful oral tradition still exists. Indian classical music has no written form at all: all the complex, lengthy ragas are learned by rote, transmitted from guru to shishya by word of mouth and demonstration. The same applies in many surviving folk music cultures, including that of Orkney, my home, where it seems almost every child plays an instrument, but not many play from sheet music. Traditional folk music often encapsulates old stories in its lyrics, even if we don’t understand the references now; the same is true of many nursery rhymes. The indigenous peoples of Australia can safely navigate the vast expanses of the outback on ‘song lines’, paths that they follow by reciting the words of songs that list landmarks, waterholes and other way finders. Even in the text-obsessed West, there are still many professional storytellers plying their trade, and storytelling festivals exist in the US, UK, India, Dubai and many other countries. Stories still have power!
The problem
Speaking and listening are natural, fast, efficient, powerful, nuanced and rich ways to communicate, and yet we barely give them a thought; we certainly don’t generally teach them with the same devotion we award to reading, writing, mathematics or motor skills. Yes, we joyfully celebrate our child’s first words, but as soon as conversation is flowing we take it for granted – meanwhile, we have many milestones spread over years in reading, writing and mathematics (we call them exams) and in motor skills (from walking to riding a bike to driving a car to athletic or sporting achievements).
Wondering why this was so was the reason I got into the sound business in the first place: it seemed so clear to me that we were missing out on something really important by taking for granted listening and speaking. I have thought a lot about this and over the next few pages I will try to unpack the key forces that are working against the ears.
SPEAKING VERSUS WRITING
Speaking is ancient: expert opinion on the dawn of complex language varies from 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. Writing is much more recent, developing around 4,000 years ago. For most of human history, all knowledge has been handed down orally – but writing has sprinted past speaking in its short existence and it now dominates communication in our ocular world.
I absolutely accept the benefits of writing. It can be propagated, copied and published, and many of the world’s greatest revolutions in thought or belief result from this. It is fixed and can be referred to, as with a contract. It can be asynchronous, so I can email you while you sleep in another time zone and you can read my message the next day when you wake.
However, I do believe the pendulum has swung too far, which is why many organisations are now training people in listening and speaking skills – though mainly the second. It’s interesting to note that my TED talk on speaking has been viewed more than 3 times as many times as my TED talk on listening. We prioritise sending over receiving, just as we prioritise written communication over spoken.
I think there are several reasons for the dominance of the eyes over the ears in the modern world.
NOISE
The world is noisy, and getting noisier. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been surrounding ourselves with mechanical, and now electronic, noises, some of them very loud indeed. Transport has always been noisy – the Romans had to introduce ordnances to control the clatter of carts in the streets of their capital 2 thousand years ago – but now we have pervasive jet engines and tyre noise to contend with. My friend Bernie Krause, the world’s most eminent nature sound recordist, relates that it once took 20 hours to get 15 minutes of usable recorded material. “Now it takes 200 hours,” he says.
Once we needed to listen carefully, because sound was meaningful: if you were sharing a cave with some bears or tigers, you’d better be listening carefully! Now most noise is meaningless, so we have developed the habit of suppressing it, and we move around the world simply not listening.
The result of this of course is more noise, to the point where the World Health Organisation (WHO) rates noise pollution as the second-largest global threat to health, just behind air pollution. The WHO estimates that in Europe over one million years of healthy life are lost every to traffic noise pollution. As we’ve seen, 8 million Europeans are having their sleep disrupted night after night by traffic noise, with drastic effects on their health, as well as huge resulting costs – up to 2 percent of GDP according to official estimates, which amounts to over 300 billion euros a year.
Noise pervades many vital spaces because we design them with eyes, not ears.
In classrooms, acoustics are often so bad that speech intelligibility is less than 50 percent for pupils more than a few feet from the teacher, while noise levels during groupwork are exceeding levels dangerous for the health of teachers and children.
In hospitals, noise levels are up to 12 times the WHO recommended maximum, which means patients struggle to sleep – and sleeping is how we get well. It’s no surprise that noise is the number one complaint of patients in US hospitals. Studies have shown that simply sensitising staff to the sounds they are making can cut noise levels by up to 3 quarters, so just listening can make a massive difference.
In offices, noise is again the number one complaint, with millions feeling the frustration of trying to concentrate in open-plan spaces that are designed to support only one kind of work: collaboration. We clearly need much more quiet working space.
The story goes on, in hotels, in shops, in restaurants, in airports and train stations, and even in our homes. Noise is all around us. We need to start listening in order to control it and stop these negative effects on health, effectiveness and happiness.
TECHNOLOGY
The breakthroughs in communication of the last several decades have almost all been text-based: email, SMS, instant messaging and social media all rely on eyes and fingers. The result is that millions of people would rather have a conversation in writing than in sound.
The Sound Agency did some research with our friends at Edinburgh Sterling University into preferred channels and messages and it yielded some fascinating insights. Older people were wedded to email, while the middle generations loved SMS and the youngest preferred IM or social media platforms. This brings a whole new dimension to the generation gap: not only do the generations have different attitudes and vocabularies, but also entirely different channels of communication. All the samples agreed on one thing: they preferred to ask someone out, or break up with someone, in writing – possibly because in a scary conversation like that, it’s safer not to be around to experience the response in person!
MIT professor and TED speaker Sherry Turkle wrote an excellent book called Alone Together on the effects of technology on our relationships. She suggested that, far from bringing us together in a global village, technology is increasing alienation and pushing people apart as we move from a few deep relationships to many shallow ones. I agree with her. In my workshops, I sometimes ask for a show of hands if people do email in bed at night while lying next to their loved one. Increasingly the majority of the people in the room own up to this very destructive behaviour, which I see as another nail in the coffin of spoken communication, driven in by the irresistible hammer of technology. Professor Turkle’s follow-up book, Reclaiming Conversation, is a wonderful, passionate plea, based on 5 years of research, for us all to rediscover the critical humanizing art of conversation. Highly recommended, and absolutely in tune with everything you will read in this book.
EDUCATION
We have 4 communication channels: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Two send; 2 receive. Two are for the eyes; 2 for the ears. Reading and writing are considered core skills in every curriculum in the world, while speaking is barely taught in schools – listening, even less so, maybe because it’s a silent