CCK08: Shh. I’m listening…slowly

In which I explore the rudiments of a concept and reflect on connective knowledge through listening…

There’s slow food. Slow travel. Slow blogging. I’m a fan across the board. So it’s no wonder, then, that I’m also inclined toward what I’ve decided to call “slow listening.”

Someone I’d consider an internationally known “slow listener,” Studs Terkel, died last month. The Washington Post reported:

Terkel was an artist of conversation who once described his work as “listening to what people tell me.” He was unusually skilled at drawing out his subjects, who told him about their dreams and memories, their fears, frustrations and anxieties, the condition of their lives….

Despite his national celebrity status, his presence as an interviewer was barely discernible in most of his books. Like a psychoanalyst, he allowed his subjects to talk freely, with minimal questioning.

Anyone listening?

I still remember finding Terkel’s books in a small back room of the junior high library, and realizing we were probably being duped in history class with the incessant focus on military battles and famous people/men and grand pronouncements.

This encounter with Terkel, among other things, led me toward the small and local in studies and research, and to the use of oral interviews (i.e. oral histories) as a technique and a resource. I never fail to hear at least one fascinating concept, colorful adventure, or something deeply personal. Skin a skunk caught in the trapline on your walk to school? Apparently the teacher sends you home, right away. Need to smuggle liquor from Canada across border during Prohibition? It helps if you know a train conductor. Painful memories? Those shall remain private today.

Researchers have a deep appreciation for people who are willing to share so much of themselves in relation to someone else’s goals. But interviewing isn’t just about people “telling you stuff” and then writing things up. Interviewing in this context is also about listening carefully and deeply and repeatedly. This is how I define slow listening, and this is really hard work. As the Associated Press reported about Terkel:

For his oral histories, Terkel interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. “What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands,” he wrote in his memoir. “Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust.”

While I was drafting this post, one of the people I follow on Twitter noted that teaching, lecturing, writing etc., were easy, but face to face encounters with new people were exhausting. I identified completely. Because broadcasting, while “work,” is not nearly as exhausting or time-consuming as listening slowly… as sifting through the “ore.” And doing both at the same time? Almost impossible, even according to brain research.

Much of the listening I do nowadays is channeled through online environments, but the effects and affects are often the same. The whirl and world of online information is like one big, never-ending interview. It requires huge amounts of sifting. Some sifting can be achieved technologically, but some still must be done cognitively… through listening. And, for it to be of value to me, through listening slowly.

This has been a particular issue for me as I try to mesh my understanding of connective learning with others’ understandings. In particular, I “hear” an underlying popular assumption that connectivism can be “measured” or detected by language-based exchanges between people. How many blog responses, how many Twitter followers, how great the conference attendance, how numerous the posts?  

Connecting socially, listening slowly, or both?

I keep coming back to George Siemens’ description of three facets of connectivism. Social connections are one type, and biological/neurological and conceptual are other types. These layers or facets seem important in understanding listening. Certainly there is an overt social act involved in “active” listening, where the speaker talks and values the attentiveness of the listener, and the listener elicits and appreciates the sharing of the speaker.

But an understanding of slow listening seems to relate more to the conceptual and even neurological facets of connectivism. For me, slow listening is a major tool in the development of insight and intuition.

When I began working online in small venues a while back, I thought that it was the relative newness of the digital experience that made it seem “off.” Through slow listening, I realized that I was frequently encountering explicit and tacit statements that said lurkers must step forward or they were cheating the group, that we should share raw thoughts as they pop into our heads for the sake of knowledge production, that we must connect socially and emotionally. It turns out these things go against some very situated inclinations that I have as an introvert, a learner, and a modeler (be it as a parent, a professional or an educator).

Listening, and, hopefully, listening well, comprises a large part of what I have been able to contribute to past ventures. (Yes, “listening” to dead people included.) After a “long” while in digital terms, discussing what I have heard, or what can be interpreted or inferred from what I have heard, is another part. 

It takes time to listen to a range of voices, or to one voice with enough thoroughness, to adequately discern the emergence of broader contexts or messages. At the same time, listening is not all about words; it’s about subtexts and gestures and tone of voice and style and behavior and immediate context. This is what makes listening, whether in person, online, or in multimedia environments, so intense. Many times these non-verbal things contradict the actual words. But these intersections are where the insights are the greatest and, sometimes, where the most internally consistent patterns are discovered. Additionally, slow listening is not a single act; it’s a cumulative process, one in which premature statements are simply not valid, because patterns and themes are not yet apparent.

But many days, my processes for listening and sifting seems to run up against a culture that promotes and even demands high-speed, high volume transparency and production. There are days when I wonder if this culture is suggesting that if the development of my thoughts can’t be documented and updated like a Wikipedia page, I’m not “participating.” 

The “contribute more and quickly” phenomenon may be an issue of perception. But even so, it feels a bit like living in a foreign country (or eating at McDonalds). I can adapt for a while to the understanding that, for many in this country, immediate transparency and visible mutual reciprocity is the measurement of validity. But “home” for me is where validity is conceptually cumulative and tested over time. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive views, but they do not always align on a temporal and affective plane.

This perceived push for rapid disclosure and exchange is not necessarily an unusual phenomenon in a world where an estimated 60% to 75 % of the population is considered “extroverted.”  Seeing this iterated in the online environment doesn’t really come as a surprise, either. But it does, perhaps, have some implications for the ideas of “community” that are being considered, studied, defined and sometimes even prescribed for online life.

Yep... slow listening.

Does this mean it’s OK  to “just” listen slowly and never let people know what I’m thinking? Well, sure, it’s “OK.”  But this doesn’t do any good for causes and ideas that are important for slow listeners. Advocacy of slow listening does not imply advocacy of doing nothing else. I would say that slow listeners are busy and contribute in their own ways, on their own time… but we need to know we’re not going to be meeting some widely assumed hallmarks of community or participation, and sometimes this will have a cost.

There’s no real resolution to this post. It may serve, perhaps, as an explanation of one particular flavor of brain. And maybe one could draw some practical or cautionary conclusions about the “implementation” or “use” of connectivism as an educational or community framework. Certainly, community building, on or offline, is a worthy endeavor. But requiring or tacitly expecting overt social connections and behaviors (whether as posts or conversations or anything else, especially at a certain volume or rate) seems to neglect two-thirds of connectivist theory. And I can guarantee that this won’t bring out the best in those strange, slow listeners.