12.23.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 12:29 am by Rosepixie
I’m not sure what to think of the reader’s guide at the end of the this book. It wasn’t awful, but it made me wonder more about who made it than it made me think about the book. Who was the interviewer and who wrote the questions? They were very reporterish questions and fell into many standard press pitfalls. It was really odd and did not feel like a “reader’s companion”. I guess I just felt like in some ways they missed the point. And what was with the question about the framers of the Constitution? It made little to no sense and even Tannen kind of said that! The whole thing was just weird. I think I stick by my position of disliking reader’s guides.
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12.21.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 12:19 am by Rosepixie
This is an interesting book. I certainly agree with her assessment that schools and the culture of academia are very adversarial. I rather wish they weren’t, but that’s one of the biggest things that I dislike about our educational system, beginning to end. I was surprised when Tannen mentioned that disagreeing with something is the most common way to write a paper, and often done even when the writer does not genuinely disagree as they claim to. Such a thing has never occurred to me and few of my papers center around a disagreement with something else. I would feel too weird lying in a paper like that. I couldn’t do it. I have written papers I later came to decide were incorrect in their logic or interpretation of something, but I always wrote it honestly believing it at the time. I just can’t imagine flat out lying in a paper. I hope that I never feel the need to do that or, worse, actually do it!
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12.17.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 3:16 am by Rosepixie
I would agree with Tannen that the many advances that we have made in communication have all served to make it easier for us to participate in the culture of critique. Cell phones, email, instant messaging, and perhaps especially text messaging all make instant reactions and unchecked emotional responses far too easy. Her brief piece complaining about video games was less enlightened, which is annoying, but perhaps she has learned more and changed her thinking since she wrote this book, since blaming video games for violence was comparatively new then.
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Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 1:09 am by Rosepixie
Tannen gives many interesting examples of rituals and traditions from other cultures concerning aggression and opposition. She favors Japan a little heavily for my taste, but perhaps she truly had more information about Japanese culture to choose from for the book than anything else. I find it interesting that gender differences came in even here. This is a fascinating book.
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12.16.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 12:49 am by Rosepixie
It’s so hard to pull apart the gender differences of communication and explain why the happen that way. Tannen says a number of interesting things about why men tend to be more aggressive than women and why they enjoy aggressive games and entertainment more than most women. I guess the best many of us can really do, though, is try to understand. Some of the studies did sound absolutely fascinating!
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12.15.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 1:10 am by Rosepixie
The chapter about the legal process was interesting. I find our system of law very troublesome, and I suppose that makes sense now. There are real issues with our adversarial system. The European system isn’t perfect, but perhaps we could adapt some of it to much improve it and maybe craft a system where justice does matter!
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12.14.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 12:23 am by Rosepixie
Tannen makes many good points about politics. The partisanship that we focus on today is particularly bad in that it makes the business of actually governing the country particularly difficult (and it only seems to have gotten worse since she wrote the book). She makes some interesting suggestions, like that perhaps eliminating primaries would lead to more party unity (which actually makes a lot of sense). In general this was an interesting, although slightly depressing, chapter. Things have gotten worse rather than better since she wrote this.
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12.12.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 12:16 am by Rosepixie
This was a very good chapter. It did a good job of showing the toll that press attacks, or fear of them, take on people. It also discussed the consequences of a press that attacks more than it gives real information - uninformed voters, among other things. Her point that the press needs to be watchdogs rather than attack dogs is well made, but I’m not sure how to switch them at this point. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of convincing!
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12.10.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 12:23 am by Rosepixie
The press may not mean to create a culture of argumentation, but they certainly don’t do anything about it when it’s pointed out to them. They still use images of war and conflict and they still set up and foster confrontation. They are convinced that it sells and until someone can convince them on a massive scale otherwise, nothing is likely to change. And how do you convince the media of something when they really only know how to talk, rather than listen or observe? The answer is you probably can’t.
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12.09.06
Posted in Linguistics, Sociology at 1:15 am by Rosepixie
This is a really interesting book. It’s particularly interesting to read right now given how every day the news talks about how partisan politics is or interviews someone railing against the other political party. Too bad every politician and journalist doesn’t read this book.
I would love to play with the idea of a war or a political coup or something with more than two opposing sides. Maybe I’ll play with a story based on the concept. It could be really interesting. There might be all sorts of complications and such, it could be fascinating!
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