Be the biggest tool you can be

I liked the title of Bomer's article, "Things that make kids smart," and immediately began thinking of everything as a tool of some kind. After all, we're born here with nothing and must learn how to survive with what's around us. I've always had a certain fascination with personal objects, but had not considered them as medium affecting our thinking. Strange, when you consider the pinnacle of caveman days the invention of the wheel, after which we viewed their comic grunting as the beginning of intelligent thought. I suppose earlier tools would include clubs for wife-beating, stick for hunting, etc. Before that, finger for pointing. And as the caveman begins to walk more upright he gains control over more tools, more implements, fire, spear, boat...and as we stop crawling and start pulling ourselves up on chairs, we progress until we're simultaneously driving, listening to the radio, reading signs, and talking on our cell phones.

The internet as a tool has infinitely affected the way that we think, as Bomer says, "this symbolic, theoretical aspect of a tool and its use is an instance of the relationship between the material and the idea, or materiality and ideality" (226). Both the opportunities and needs for use and the ideality between its function are staggering--many people probably no longer compose on paper, do their taxes by hand, apply for jobs, use the Yellow Pages, research papers, pay bills, shop, or write letters anymore. But the issues of past weeks' discussions concerning language and communication were still on my mind--a few days ago I subbed for an older teacher as she struggled to log into a website where she would take an interactive test (TOPS Protocol? Any other English teachers heard about this bullshit?) after completing a review session with video clips, mini-quizzes, slides, etc. It literally took her all day. Had I known she needed help, I would have easily rescued her by clicking the correct part of the menu, turning off the number lock, logging in, and skipping through the slides, which I did when she finally asked at the end of the day. Easy, right? No. What comes easily to me, almost naturally, did not to her. Even as I write this, I read an email from my mom asking how to use the word count. I realized that in the last year I've continued to pick up online tools without formal guidance, just by playing around. I don't say this to brag, I know everyone who reads this also knows how to do those things. My point is...well, it has something to do with play, learning, and tools. Let me talk about play first before I finish that thought.

"A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality," said Vygotsky. I truly believe the best thing you can do for a kid as a parent is give them a good childhood, including lots of time to play. I thank my parents for long summer days, sprinklers, tree-climbing, snow forts, library trips, and mud pies. Most of my toys were ten year old hand-me-downs, including the Ken doll whose head popped off. A Playskool record player with accompanying Disney books and records. Kickball. As I grew older, my best friend and I played restaurant, school, hotel, secret detective, and casino. More kickball. As I grew older still, we didn't really play anymore, but we sat around and talked about boys and music and social events, and played sports. I think this has fostered my imagination and creativity, made me into a well-rounded person: I've had a lot of different jobs and roles in my life so far. What did you play when you were little?

"While playing at using the associated tools, they appropriate not just the tool and its proper functioning but the kinds of cultural and relational uses to which the object could be put. They rehearse not just the intellectual skills of writing but the subjectivity positions, attitudes, relations, and purposes that people take on when they write" (pg. 229).

While subbing I thought about tools, signs, mediums of knowledge and functionality in a school setting. I thought about the tools in place but not used, such as the motivational posters on the walls, the movie left for the sub to show the class, the websites the kids choose to use on their own. My favorite poster:There were opportunities for learning in discussing these things rather than taking them for granted. I thought about how frustrating it was to watch the kids lose, steal, or demolish school supplies such as pencils, binders, books. I thought about how the district misuses tools for assessment, from TAKS to TOPS Protocol, wasting time and losing good teachers. "The teacher could not limit the nature of the instruction students received. The larger culture teaches even what school does not" (p. 245).

In terms of teaching and closing the achievement gap, we've spent considerable time discussing how to be culturally-responsive, and should include the tools, actions, discourses, and activities students bring to the table. This is especially valuable because of the schism between home culture and school culture and the need to soften the transition. We should also dispose of what doesn't work, starting from the top down--God knows public education is way too cluttered anyway.

To get down to brass tacks, we are put here with each other and the earth and have to learn how to work with both. Since most of our conflicts deal with miscommunication and greed of some kind, it makes sense that if we could learn to do those things, it'd be a closer-to-perfect world. Then we'd be smart.

The world on paper, part 2

David Olson discusses ideas about communication, understanding, and interaction that are not only interesting but relevant to everyone, in every walk of life, in every place. Even as I sit here, watching the CW Saturday afternoon movie Contact, as Jodi Foster tries to explain the message from outer space and how it is to be interpreted, interpretation touches me. You could say it's the reason we're here, to try and understand it all--life, the world, the past, the present, ourselves, each other...I thought the fact that our modern understanding of the word "interpret" is the same as "to construe" or see in a particular light, while the older meaning of the word is "to reveal," "to understand." Sort of suggests that maybe the fuckedupness of the world could be related to our view of what truth is...we're all so modern and communicate with a million people from everywhere a million times a day, overpopulated, overstimulated, overworked, overpressured. Stay home from work one day and watch daytime television--between Divorce Court and Springer you'll see how shallow and pedantic we've become. There's too much to make sense of, and our making-sense skills have been corrupted. Makes one wonder what does matter, what is true, in the end, bottom-line.

"The seventeenth century view which many writers refer to as 'Modernism' was the invention of a new solution to the problem of interpreting texts; what these same writers refer to as 'Post-modernism' is recognition that there is no ultimate solution." I was happy to have this succinct handle of post-modernism, as it has become one of those words people just toss around to sound smart. I Googled 'post-modernism' for images only and found everything from crappy art to a naked woman doing a headstand. I liked this one for some reason:
Even Wikipedia says, "Postmodernism is an idea that has been extremely controversial and difficult to define among scholars, intellectuals, and historians, because the term implies to many that the modern historical period has passed," and warns readers of weasel words. How many other words and ideas and gestures have lost their black and white, becoming a gray mess dependent on the context and diplomacy of interpreters?

I thought Chafe's "idea unit" idea (unit) was interesting, but what if your idea consists of more than one noun phrase, more than seven words, and more than seven seconds? That's all a speaker's consciousness can handle?

On page 120ish, Olson talks about conversation implicatures, the stuff you just know how to interpret, the structures of interacting. I like how little kids make up jokes, knowing and playing with the rhetoric form of joking, but not making sense yet. My older brother and sister still tease me about the dumb unfunny jokes I told as a kid, and now my four year old nephew is doing the same thing. I also think that if we could keep our first-order metarepresentations like when we were kids, where we didn't delineate a different between what is said and what is meant, we'd be a little happier. Of course, the givers of messages would also have to have this naivete, a lack of wanting to deceive or confuse...I remember reading that I Love Lucy was the first television show featuring schemes and secrets of a housewife, intended only for humor, and how this show's impression of societal consciousness led to more widespread and unabashed dishonesty. Kinda of harsh on Lucy, but still an idea worth examining--how does what we watch and laugh at affect us? Has literacy done the same thing on a much more general, diluted, and unintentional level?

The world on paper, part 1

"Only in times of war do we allow ourselves the liberty of thinking that other societies are composed of or led by '"madmen.'"


So far I have read five chapters of Olson's book and am impressed at the vastness of writing's implications, touching on primitive cultures, the Reformation, Early Modern Science, heresy, Classic Greek civilization, art, memory, the alphabet, etc, all accompanied by a slew of writers and researchers. Unfortunately my own thoughts about writing are a little cranky right now, as the blog that I was working on about Olson somehow disappeared to the Island of Lost Documents. Thought I had saved it....nonetheless I am flipping through my heavily highlighted pages to toss up what I thought were the most salient and interesting points. Again. Actually, this has happened to me several times, I write what I think is a fantastic blog and somehow between composing and publishing, my mojo gets cross-modulated and I end up having to start from scratch. After the first two times, I began to realize that whatever crap I had written about my life or whatever was still there, it just had to be written again, and sometimes the second writing yielded better results, a clearer alphabetic picture of what I had in my mind anyway. I've always used writing as therapy, so I'm with Olson when he says Carruthers' assumption that "writing something down cannot change in any significant way our mental representation of it" is completely false, but her ideas about memory and writing as mnemonic arts sound interesting.

I wanted to think about my own concepts of writing and speaking before going on, in hopes that maybe Olson addresses them at some point. I am tempted to believe that words have a certain power on their own, and that saying words or phrases often can increase or decrease their power depending on the context in which they're used. The book spends considerable time discussing religion, specifically the Reformation. I was raised in a "Reformed" church, although I never really delineated our catechism from other denominations, I knew Calvinism and predestination had something to do with it, so I wasn't too jazzed. However, I do sporadically attend an Episcopalian church and feel a spiritual difference in myself, especially when reading from the prayer book, repeating ancient words and phrases, together, to God. Don't get me wrong, I have major beefs with organized religion and think that many, many terrible things have been done by Christian white men in Jesus' name, but this kind of communication does has transformative powers. After all, the Word was God and the Word became Flesh, right?

Another example--I attended the anti-Walmart rally in my neighborhood the other day. This was a case where a large number of people had a message to convey and did so by physically coming together, holding signs, maybe chanting...the cool thing was while I stood there, countless cars honked and waved at us, some giving the thumbs-up or yelling encouragement. They didn't know me, but they knew the context, the neighborhood, the story, the implications. I didn't know the people in the cars, I didn't know the people I was rallying with, but we all came together and communicated our message, without orality or literacy, really. And that feeling, the community-feeling, almost made me a little teary, a group of people trying to stick it to the corporate a-hole, supported by strangers of the same mind.

Anyway, the first page of Olson's book was fantastic--all the examples of just how significant and ubiquitous writing is. He makes his case clearly, and I like the quote on page 3, "The assumptions about literacy that we may have to abandon are not worth holding in any case. Indeed, they underwrite poor social policy and poor educational practice." Those are two compelling reasons why we should be discerning. The idea that literacy is not all it's cracked up to be is a frightening one. A cultural anthropology prof in undergrad once raised a similar question about agriculture (a dangerous suggestion when you teach at a school in the middle of Iowa) and if overall it was really a good thing. Seems like any new idea or invention is met with resistance and fear...it's no wonder we consider unfamiliar cultures "savage" or "heathen." I admire Olson for couragously posing ideas such as "Literacy is functional if one is fortunate enough to obtain such a position and not if not" (11) while also reminding us that the relationship between functional literacy and personal/social competence is not necessarily synonymous. In Chapter 3, Olson dissects the theory of Piagetian development as applied to cultural progress, pointing out that "all stable cultures are mature," and that a pyramid model of cultural stages would not have Western culture at the top. The voices being heard in the world for the last thousand or so years has been primarily rich white men, but more voices are being raised and listened to now.

Whether we're talking about literacy, orality, technology, writing, speaking, performing, whatever, what we're really talking about is thinking. I think, therefore I am. To do is to be. It's very basic and yet very complex. What with all the various facets and options of communication today, and all the information being thought, conveyed, and acted upon, it's no wonder we're causing the global warming. We make meaning, search for answers. I haven't read or seen this, but it was on Oprah....anyone?

"Whereas spoken utterances tend to indicate both what is said and how it is to be taken, written ones tend to specify only the former." (pg. 91) Ch. 5 described how texts are to be , and Olson discussed many deep ideas such as the functionality of non-literate cultures, the concept of verbatim and how it relates to memory, and how we construct truth. Rosaldo's claim that "what is true is what one can get another to accept, not an objective account of a pre-existing fact," is certainly evidenced in our world of truth and lies. And again, ethnocentrism is echoed on pg. 100, where Olson writes, "It is we, modern literates, who hold special beliefs about reading and interpretation that make other orientations to writing seem faulty or primitive.

recording and reckoning

Performance, the enactment of the poetic function, is a highly reflexive mode of communication...performance is seen as a specially marked, artful way of speaking that sets up or represents a special interpretive frame within which the act of speaking is to be understood. Performance puts the act ofspeakin on display--objectifies it, lifts it to a degree from its interactional setting and opens it to scrutiny by an audience...performance heightens awareness of the act of speaking and licenses the audience to evaluate the skill and effectiveness of the performer's accomplishment" (Bauman/Briggs 73).

I chose to record an oral performance I hear many times a day, the spiel of how things work at the Alamo. I was already vaguely aware of slight differences in my conversational style when I had to talk to customers, but wanted to also look at another performance in comparison. The technicalities worked out easily, as I set the tape recorder on the table behind the people I spoke with, about two feet away, and they were none the wiser.


For those who've never been, the Alamo Drafthouse is something between a hot spot and an old favorite here in Austin. It's a movie theater that serves moderately expensive food and alcohol, and as a server it's an interesting social community. Restaurants are well lit, you have to constantly check back with customers who are focused in conversation with each other. In contrast, you only really talk to customers before the movie, only making contact during if there's a flag up (a piece of paper with an order written on it), and they are focused on the movie. And it's dark. So servers have a lot of downtime behind the scenes, negotiating around the lobby and theaters, swerving around each other and ignorant customers with large trays of food and drinks, then dropping off checks, and then cleaning the theaters, functioning together in a specific time frame to get our collective job done just in time to seat the next showing. As anyone who's worked in the service industry knows, there's a fair amount of teasing, comradery, tension (both sexual and professional), bitching, and silliness. The movie "Waiting" is a fairly good representation, except no one really spits in your food.

So here's the spiel, in a nutshell: introduce yourself, ask if the patron has been to the Alamo before. If so, welcome back, if not, explain the ordering process and take their drink order. This can take anywhere between 5 seconds and two minutes, depending on how talky you are. I taped myself first, and approached three young women there to see "Because I Said So" (the horribleness of which warrants an entire other post). This sets up the entextualization process, the performance repeatable out of the specific context with these three people.. Nothing out of the ordinary, two of the women had been there before, one had not, so for the purposes of the assignment I went ahead and told her about the process. They seemed very nice, made eye contact, smiled and nodded, thanked me and called me by name, engaging in contextualization and making the performance decontextualizable to be recontextualized it again for the next customer. Shortly thereafter, a coworker let me tape his presentation to a middle-aged couple in the same movie.

Listening to the tape, I heard what I knew I would: an exaggerated (in the sense that I don't normally talk that way) Texan drawl. Thinking back, I remembered several instances of customers commenting on my accent, long after I failed to notice a typical Texan accent. I also have a tendency to talk fast, but realized by drawling my words, I was forcing myself to speak more slowly and enunciate more. My initial greeting of "hi ladies, how are ya'll doin?" starting in a high pitch, a (forced) cheerful tone. I've waitressed my fair amount in the last 12 years, and as anyone can tell you, it involves a large amount of bullshitting, much like any other job I'm sure. Since your money is earned in direct relation to your performance, you find yourself really stretching your patience thin at times to accommodate people you might not give the time of day in real life. I repeated the phrases I say many times a day as they nodded and smiled: once the lights go down, we communicate by flags....just stick it in the clip....won't bother you unless I see you need something....will do a last-call 45 minutes from the end...done. There was a slight pause, while I imagine the ladies had nodded or smiled, then I heard a "great." Another lady supported her, "Yeah, isn't that cool?" My tone continued to be very sweet, almost bouncy, as I asked what they'd like to drink. A bucket of Miller Lite with lots of limes. May I see your IDs please? Ok. Great. Anything else I can get for you ladies? Ok, my name's Jen if you need me. Lots of Ok's. Lots of questions and forced turn-taking. I imagine customers have to play the BS game somewhat too to insure no one does spit in their food, maybe in real life these women wouldn't be polite or nice at all, who knows. The context put up in this situation, and the context/structure of our language (especially my presentation of how to use me, essentially) is shaped by their responses and involvement, according to Baumen and Briggs. But they thanked me and I walked up the aisle, grabbing the recorder on the way.

My co-worker approached the older couple as I sneaked down the aisle after him with the recorder. His presentation was essentially the same as mine, although he did not ask how they were doing, just "Hey guys, have you been to the Alamo before?" They had, so the directions were not necessary, he just wrote down their drink order and asked if they needed anything else right now. His voice was softer and his tone more evenly-pitched, maybe because his voice was naturally lower than mine. His customers responded, the usual adjacency pairs, and it was business as usual.

There's nothing exciting or funny or interesting about these recorded performances, they are motions repeated dozens of times each day for us, and for the most part the responses are the same. It's an exchange of service--Iget you what you want to drink and eat and play along like I like doing it, and you leave me some money. I think restaurants are an interesting place to observe communication, between co-workers, managers, customers, etc. Many times if there is something out of the ordinary going on at work, the story of whatever interchange occurred (a drunk guy getting kicked out, a celebrity showing up for a movie, or whatever) is repeated down the line, often changing slightly during its migration, like the classic game of Telephone. Restaurants are rumor mills, and although you don't necessarily dig everyone you work with, many people date or are good friends with co-workers, which adds a whole 'nother strata of context to conversations. There is also a sort of social and professional hierarchy, dependent on when employees began working, how much they work, and how friendly/good at their job they are (because if you suck, you make more work for everyone else).

In terms of the context and contextualization, I guess the latter is more relevant in this interchange than the former--indeed, I'd go so far as to say that the context of this performance is essentially the same as anyone speaking to a customer in any service-type industry. There was context at work when I walked up to greet the table, my plans for what to do next, orders I still had coming, etc, and they were probably thinking about the movie and the food and reading the menu, but for the purposes of the conversation, it doesn't really matter because every performance at every table is essentially the same. But if "communicative contexts are not dictated by the social and physical environment but emerge in negotiations between participants in social interactions," (Bauman/Briggs, 68) this functional speech "can help researchers to determine how individual cues are linked in created larger formal and functional patterns" by being more attentive to contextualization cues. The audience, as quoted by C. Goodwin in Bauman/Briggs' article, is "shaped by discourse in keeping with the differential involvement of members in what is said: the audience also plays a key role in assessing the significance of the talk" (70). The smiling and nodding, the answer Customer X gives after the spiel (usually "great," "ok,"etc) is this idea at work.

According to Bauman/Briggs there are 6 elements to consider when decontexualizing/recontextualizing, and 4 factors that "bear centrally on the construction and assumption of authority" (77). And as this blog is already pushing the limits of readability, I'll hold off on discussing these ideas in case there's a paper assigned on the topic.....Remember the Alamo!

Smitherman, Grace, and Louis articles. and Bauman/Briggs.

Currently, all classes are pointing towards multiculturalism lately, not only for this semester but my others as well, as did all my classes last semester as well. It seems to be at the forefront of every academic conversation, and I wondered if constantly discussing the need to be culturally responsive would actually backfire, all the attention being drawn to cultural differences making them more obvious and detaching. Or maybe it's just overload, as Men at Work would say. My multicultural experiences were somewhat sparse growing up in a small Midwestern town, but significantly richer upon moving to Austin and teaching for a few years. Aside from working in a very racially-charged school and city, we are in a time of increased national attention and legislation concerning immigration and diversity. I see it continuing to be an issue of major importance for everyone, not only in the education field. Framing multiculturalism in communication/conversation study is perhaps the most direct and helpful way to understand each other, and that's really what we have to do if we're gonna make this all work.

Grace's article reminded me of the month I spend teaching summer school in Gardner-Betts, 9th grade boys' English. I uncertainly designed a poetry unit, not knowing how these boys, locked up, all African American or Mexican, would react. To say they took it and ran would be an understatement--they continued reading and writing poetry after we had moved into the next unit, some of them passionately. Many chose to write about their experience of getting arrested, how they felt about it, what they wanted to do, and what they felt about their families. One boy, severely dyslexic, chose to freestyle rap his poetry, which he made up on the spot. Like Ajuah's poem, this "showcases oral-based literacy skills that are often left unexplored, uninvited, and undervalued in literacy instruction."

"Griot - African storyteller, cultural historian, and educator. Although griots were known for the entertaining way in which they told stories, their intention was to assist their people in maintaining self-awareness...What the griot gave to African society in oral history, cultural information, and ancestral wisdom and knowledge is the key with which all people of African descent can progress and maintain a high level of understanding of their true heritage." I've always been interested in the urban legends, fables, mythology kind of literature and stories, and the purposes they serve for the culture in which they originate. I had an African-American lit class at UT Arlington several years ago and discussed to connections to music, religion, etc. I definitely want to read Raw Head, Bloody Bones: African-American Tales of the Supernatural.

What Ms. T did in her inner-city classroom is exactly what I wrote in the margin of my Lit Acquisition article--"How do we make school more like home?" All children are more voluntarily verbal before they enter school, playing with their language, learning, asking, etc. In school they must sit and be quiet, answer briefly when called upon, and that's it. When children have reading problems, this is usually when they surface. Ms. T make her classroom like a home, comfortable, informal, caring. I was impressed also with how Ms. T used personal narratives to connect with her students, and incorporated media that was relevant and interesting to the students. I think too many times we dismiss music, movies, and shows as being without educational purpose, when with a little creativity there is much to be learned from these societal and communicative tools of our shared cultures.

For some reason I thought the Smitherman article was written by a white author, so as I read the first few pages I became increasingly offended at the usage of black nomenclature. Then I figured it out and felt silly. Then I wondered why I felt that way, and realized that the nonexistent white author did not own the language he was using. When I figured out Smitherman was black, then it was ok. I should have known that a white author would never try to describe a traditional African world view.

As I read about the African culture's reliance on the spoken word, I thought about how blacks were not allowed to learn how to read or write during slavery and for a while afterwards, and how that must have shaped opinions and perspectives of literacy. To read and write was a highly sought prize, yet as Smitherman writes "blacks are quick to ridicule 'educated fools.'" I wonder if and how things would have progressed if they had been allowed literacy, if they could have literally found their escape through reading and writing, communicating with others and coming together. I loved the following quote: "only those blacks who can perform stunning feats of oral gymnastics become culture heroes and leaders in the community. Such feats are the basic requirement of the trade among preachers, politicians, dis jockey's, hustlers, and lovers." If you haven't already, I suggest reading "Jazz" by Toni Morrison as it's written as speech, impromptu like a jazz riff. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you." More?


I like this quote too: "My dear kin' miss, has you any objectives to me drawing my cher to yer side, and revolvin' de wheel of my conversation around de axle of your understandin'?" The part of the Smitherman article about black men's raps was also interesting, particularly the romantic raps, the sly talk designed to snag the object of affection. Smitherman says that female agressiveness in this context is also becoming more accepted, which I see in progress when teaching middle school. Undoubtedly, being an oppressed culture led to a stronger reliance on religion, as Smitherman says, "throughout Africa, there is no dichotomy between sacred and secular life, and there are no 'irreligious people'...for to be without religion amounts to a self-excommunication from the entire life of society." Excommunication is the term that really got me, and got me thinking about religious community and communication in general...

Notes:
Units of expression
exaggerated language (unusual words, high talk)
mimicry
proverbial statements and aphoristic phrasing
punning and plays on words
spontaneity and improvisation
image-making and metaphor
braggadocio
indirection (circumlocution, suggestiveness)
tonal semantics

*****
Bauman/Briggs
Timing is a funny thing. My boyfriend is currently writing a paper for his mass comm class about the myth of the liberal media, and discusses the role of persons and "news" shows such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, etc. Performance. Context-sensitive meanings. Poetics vs. functionalism. "We attempt to provide a framework that will displace reified, object-centered notions of performativity, text, and context--notions that presuppose the encompassment of each performance by a single, bounded social interaction" (Bauman/Briggs). One could extrapolate the importance of clear communication and the difficulty of obtaining it as the central issue of our species' problem. "Decentering and recontextualization have powerful implications for the conduct of social life." As much as multiculturalism seems to be at both the top and the center of the human agenda, politics is the first bullet point underneath multiculturalism. In Bomer's Teaching Lit course last semester, I thought writing for social action sounded like a very fulfilling and promising field. J. L. Austin's book sounds equally fantastic. Thanks to whoever took those notes.

The article included so many great examples of research studies I found it a little overwhelming, so I skimmed through some of that part. But the various theories and ideas presented from studies of all cultures and perspectives brought up a general idea for me, the idea of ritual's role in culture and identity. The first place I think of when I hear ritual is church. Church is one of many arenas in which a culture or subculture's communication is stylized for a specific purpose and effect. The concept and institution of the church, however, has been around much longer than coffeehouses, internet chatrooms, formal education settings, grocery stores, talk shows, etc. It's been a factor in human culture for at least as long as the bar scene has. Smitherman's article also focuses on the necessity of organized religion and its communicative call-and-response style in African American churches. In essence, church is shared communication with a Higher Being--how unique a situation! I very randomly attend an Episcopalian church, primarily because the reading from the prayer books, together, of a like tone and inflection, ancient-seeming words, combined with kneeling and a choir singing changes me. I feel different afterwards, peaceful, humble. I have my own beefs with organized religion, but I can't deny the power of performatives. I've always sort of held this theory that saying something over and over can either increase or decrease the power of the words spoken, so maybe if I went all the time like I had to as a kid it'd be different, who knows.

conversation contemplation

Reflection:

I had told Adam a little about the classes I was taking and the assignment about the conversation transcript, but had originally planned to tape a different interchange between my landlady/coworker/adopted momma Christie. However, being a sixth grade school counselor does not allow much time to sit down and chat during the day, and since we typically discuss school stuff at school (although very informally) I didn't want to have to alter our natural style for the sake of the transcript (confidentiality, blah blah blah). Instead I thought I'd capture the unique repoire of two friends having a beer before going to see a movie.

This was a pretty typical conversation between my best friend Adam and me. I see that most people taped other people talking, and I knew I was taking a risk in making myself a participant. I thought I might not really be myself, knowing I was taping myself and would be analyzing myself and having others analyze the conversation later, but luckily Adam just carried on, completely natural, even though he didn't know beforehand he would be taped. His nonchalant attitude put me at ease as well, and I really didn't even think about the recorder as we talked.

Similar to writing, taping a conversation (and transcribing it) take what is private, between two people, and makes it public and out of context. Looking over the transcript, I became more aware of my own style, how much I laughed, how much I swore, how much I encouraged with "yeahss" and "uh huhs." I also examined what our quasi-familial friendship sounded like to others, knowing that the tone, the inside jokes, etc would not be explainable from a transcript. Adam and I (and David, mentioned in the conversation) often skip the formality points we've talked about in class--we don't knock on the door of each other's houses, we don't always even say hello or goodbye. David and I would have entire phone conversations made up of weird noises and laughing. We make fun of each other a lot and don't hesitate to criticize when we need to, but very rarely have an actual disagreement. It's sort of an Elaine/Jerry type situation, even to the point of using each other's respective gender knowledge at times to aid in dating.

I think spending so much time over the last 6 or so years with these two boys/brothers has had a definite effect on my conversational style, and I tend to speak and think more like a male than a female at times, so gender differences in speech patterns interests me. I noticed in our conversation that the usually-female tendency to end statements with a raised, questioning tone showed itself in both my and Adam's longer stories, especially when Adam was talking about his tax return. I also noticed that I did the "um, like" thing a few times, which I really can't stand. I also realized I cut Adam off, talking about the cost of printer ink, but he didn't try again to make his lesson about pickles. I think it would be interesting to study conversations in families and among friends or acquaintances and look at the differences. I would feel offended if someone else criticized my fridge space or implied I couldn't put in a new faucet by myself (which is true) but I don't with him, because he's like family. Obviously the context of the conversation plus the parameters of our friendship allow for not following "the rules" of speaking. Pauses, turn-taking, and topic shifts all seemed natural, even during what would have been a conversation of elevated self-consciousness.