Tone policing is driving me nuts today. Every place I turn, tone policing. If we have problems with tone, instead of ignoring the content, maybe we need to let the tone *highlight* the content, and ask ourselves, well, now, *why* would someone react that way? I find we get a lot farther by doing this than we do by critiquing the message format. I mean really, is it that hard to listen through tone? And is it that difficult for us to believe that sometimes people have a right to be annoyed out loud? Or even angry? Instead of getting angry at anger, maybe we should try to help alleviate it. I find that more often than not, tone policing is less about tone and more about searching out any excuse to stifle the underlying content. Remember, when we tell someone that their tone is not acceptable, we are invalidating a critical and informative aspect of their experience: the emotion. I know I fall into this trap in my personal life all the time, and I am trying to work on it, for sure. When we do this in the arena of social justice and public policy, we are essentially telling the populace that they arent accepting their own exploitation or oppression with enough grace for their oppressors comfort. And that is the way oppressors think. In order to not oppress others, we must disengage from tone policing, which privileges some forms of speech over others, often (even usually) along demographic lines. It is hard; I fall into it myself. Often. But the more I think about it, the more critical I think it is to discuss the nature of speech and communication as both of those things evolve before our very eyes. No conclusions, here, just a hope that communication becomes something we start to discuss in a deeper way as a society. When we leave it to the superficial textbook/dictionary/encyclopedia version of the world, we are failing to see the multi-dimensional nature of how words and non-verbal communication really work. There is so much fluffy noise masquerading as brilliance, and so much wisdom that is being overlooked. Decolonizing the world starts with explaining things. So when will we start to embrace the complexity of communication and redefine acceptable in a way that allows for the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest amount of people? And when will we start embracing this conversation as a necessary one, as opposed to the current dismantled and humanity-free concept of the humanities embraced by modern education policy makers and the pundit class alike?
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:54:17 +0000
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