Posts by Marcus Turner
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Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Stephen Hill,
North of Canterbury...
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Speaker: The Public Broadcasting Imperative, in reply to Russell Brown,
Regarding older people and ad agencies: I remember hearing an interviewee on National Radio saying that the main reason that ad agencies don't target older people is because the people that work in the agencies are young, and don't think it's cool to deal with older people. Simple prejudice. I seem to remember this person making a cogent argument for the "older demographic" as a lucrative market.
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Regarding academic publishers: http://royalsociety.org/news/Royal-Society-journal-archive-made-permanently-free-to-access/
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Some more old stuff. Fridayish: http://www.sergent.com.au/music/nzmusic.html
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What would be some good ice breakers that aren't of the How are you?, What do you do variety?
Richard Briers suggests "Did you know that the male spider has his penis on the end of one of his legs?"
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I recognise amongst the postings here a certain amount of bewilderment and possibly even pain of being excluded from something. Small talk seems so pointless to many people: it seems like a key to some club from which they're excluded. A club to which they don't know if they want to belong, anyway.
I think it comes down to the difference between communication and communion. Language can be used to transmit relevant, important information. Communion is something else: it's somehow simply affirming that we're part of the same group, sharing the same space at the same time. I don't know if everyone has quite the same need for this, but I do know that humans are essentially a social species. Even if you don't think of yourself as a people-person, you are social.
Men in some villages in Vanuatu get blotto in the evenings on kava. They don't talk; they just sit together, experiencing being together. Similar situations apply among men in some Australian traditional aboriginal communities: men sitting silently together for long periods, content in each other's company without a need to express this in words.
Words don't seem to be able to express the need for communion as well as many of us would like, so we've developed codes. When someone asks how you are, it's not unreasonable to assume that they don't really want to know, but they do want to somehow share being human with you. These codes are found all over the place. In some parts of China, a standard greeting is "Have you eaten?"; in some parts of Japan it's "Are you making money?" An answer is expected, and there are standard-forms in which the answer is generally given.
But this small talk isn't about the literal meaning of the words. And perplexing though it seems, it's an important part of being human. Some people seem to be able to read non-verbal signals (intentionally given, or not) and find the right thing to say. Perhaps they've deliberately learned how to do this, or are somehow just gifted with perception and skill.
To those who have difficulty with small talk, I'd simply suggest trying to be polite. Small talk might be learnable, but the real skill is in the perception of how other people are. I'm not sure about the extent to which this perception can be learned.
Sorry for the long post.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Russell Brown,
Fair enough. I learned something. Thanks.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
To be honest, I don't know what anyone would do about it. I don't even know if there's a problem. It might be NZ's destiny to originate some things that will be taken on by the world, so that we're no longer leaders in the field (Have Argentina ever beaten the All Blacks yet?).
I suppose that might be part of the feeling against Quade Cooper, but I don't know. I do wonder, though, whether there'd have been quite the same fuss if he'd been pakeha.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Russell Brown,
Do you ever worry that we might do to rugby what we did to kiwifruit, by exporting the expertise?
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I'd agree with Jackie's comment. And I was impressed to hear Peter Fitzsimons learning some Maori language. Rugby might yet be as influential as music in interesting people in the language.