Is it just me or does it seem like effective listening is becoming a lost art? Just plain listening to what someone says has gone by the wayside. While my family seldom eats in a restaurant, at least once a week we get take out from a local establishment. I have completely given up trying to call in an order and arrive just in time to pick it up. The reason is the operator or serving taking the order over the phone either cannot hear you over the kitchen or bar noise, or they just absolutely lack the mental capacity to listen and write at the same time. Just getting the name on the order correct has become a crapshoot. My name is Steve….not exactly an uncommon or difficult name! However, at a local steak house, two times in a row, I clearly said my name was Steve (I had to repeat it several times too) and yet both times my order was in the name of Dave!
In my darker moments I swear the whole world is “blonde” and I am speaking German. However, I think the real problem is that today’s society has become so fast paced that people do not take the time to listen. They are too busy trying to think of the next thing to say than to listen to what is being said. It’s not like people have become non-conversational, it seems to me that due to the bombardment of noisy information 24/7 from TV, Radio, ipods, etc. most folks cannot allow a moment of quiet contemplation in a conversation. It’s like if there is a moment of silence, then someone is not keeping up their end of the conversation.
I once took a history class in summer school that focused on the period in US history from World War II to the present time. The teacher used some interesting tactics to make the material interesting. The most memorable was he had developed a montage of television commercials beginning from the 50’s through the late 70’s (I took the class in 1976). In the 50’s the commercials were live, were a full one-minute in length, and were geared to providing meaningful information about the product being advertised. As time went on, the commercials got shorter, the pace of speech increased, and the information was being delivered at the staccato pace of a machine gun. By the end of the class that evening everyone in the room was visibly agitated, just from the pace of the ads we watched.
Today TV ads are approximately 20 seconds long and they cram anywhere from 4-6 into a commercial break. The ad content now consists of just sound bites. Advertisers understand that the purchasing decision makers of today (people in their 20’s to mid 30’s) don’t think in complete sentences. Next time you talk to your son or daughter (or your friends, if you are young and reading this) pay attention to how many sentences just trail off with the phrase “…uh and yeah, ya know”. Most young people do not finish a complete thought, because the greatest influence in their lives growing up, television, presents information in sound bites or incomplete sentences.
Gen X and Gen Y (and whatever my kid’s generation is called) have been raised in this frenetic environment. So it is no wonder my twins cannot have a conversation where one waits until the other is finished to share his thought. They continually talk over one another until someone shouts “shut the f**k up and let me finish”. My sons are 20 and it is their peer group that are taking our orders at restaurants and fast food outlets. I am a firm believer that this current generation is so unused to listening that they are functionally incapable to take a simple dinner order. Their mind wanders because of the lack of auditory stimulation.
If anyone who reads this think I’m nuts, I challenge you to go to a Starbuck’s and sit within earshot of a group of young people having coffee. What I think you will find is they can sit there for hours, talking over one another and NOT SAY A DAMN THING WORTH REMEMBERING! They will gripe about their boyfriends, their lives, whatever, (which youth of all generations have done when hanging out) but most of the time they just make noise so there is not a void in the chatter.
Maybe this is just the rant of a middle aged man whose has become as intolerant as I used to accuse my father of being, but I don’t think so. Let me know what you think.
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