Listen to the lyrics to Sounds of Silence, written by Paul Simon in 1964.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
To me, that sounds like people walking around texting, tweeting, or posting on their smartphones; Paul Simon was a prophet. Not only are they not listening to one another, but they also are not even trying for the most part to dialog.
Most of social media is just shouting our opinions at each other. The one's who agree with us we friend and like. They can validate our assumptions; this leads to confirmation bias. The ones we disagree with we block, unfriend. But before we do, there is the tendency to call them a derogatory name because they were not smart enough to agree with us.
We half listen, and we do that with bias and tendency to infer and read into the context of what they are saying. We as people love to make judgments, and at the same time, we are terrible at it.
We never pick up the phone and try to get to the bottom of an issue. That could facilitate real dialog and understanding. But then you would have to speak when talking and listen to hear.
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