Tone Does Matter...

[savageseraph]

We had a training session at work the other day, and the presenter started off the two exercises with the following quote by Maya Angelou:

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

I was a little sad when he asked the room as a whole if they knew of Angelou, and only a small group did. But that's another story.

For the exercise, the presenter asked for four people to come to the front of the room. The volunteers all had to say exactly the same thing: "Can I see you in my office?". However, the volunteers also each had a slip of paper. The paper said one of the following:

Reprimand
Console
Share a secret
Seduce

The person had to say the same sentence, no added words or embellishments, but to say it in a way that conveyed the word they had. After each person said his/her line, we had to vote for which prompt they had.

When delivering the line, each person did something different. The person consoling put a hand on the shoulder of the person she was delivering her line to. Her head was partly bowed, and her tone was soft and soothing. The person sharing a secret glanced around, leaned into the woman he was speaking to, cupped a hand in front of her ear, and very softly and eagerly said his line. The person seducing delivered the sentence like a pick up line, and while the person reprimanding was tense, kept some distance between him and the person he delivered the line to, made little eye contact, and spit out his words.

Inevitably, the audience picked the correct prompt, as they did when the next group of volunteers had to say, simply, "Okay," with the following prompts. The way it was delivered follows the prompt.

Do you understand? - A tip of the head and tone going up at the end questioningly.
I don't understand. - A bit hesitant, furrowed brow, bit questioningly.
Fantastic - Delivered enthusiastically with a big smile and a thumbs up.
Mocking - Delivered sarcastically with a roll of the eyes.

The purpose of the exercise was for people to consider that how they say something is just as important and conveys just as much as the words themselves. That's important in a business like ours where cross-departmental and remote teams are pretty much the way we work. However, I think it also applies to a lot of rather specious arguments I've seen in fandom this last year.

It seems there are quite a lot of people who think others should completely ignore the "deeper meaning" they convey in their posts and comments. They believe that when others respond to and comment on the "tone" they are using, those others are trying to hold them to some garden-party-in-the-Hamptons standards of politeness. That whole chain of reasoning rang false to me every time I heard it, but I wasn't able to articulate why until the seminar at the office.

If you expect people to listen to what you say and to be open to your views and ideas, you damned well better take into account both what you are saying and how you are saying it.

Now, I'm not saying that we have to all live in a happy place where no one pisses us off or we can't respond to anything except with Stepford-wife smiles. That would be creepy and more than a little disturbing. It would also be false. We all have issues and behaviors that make us see red. However, if we unleash that anger--no matter how easy or satisfying doing so might seem--we gain nothing except perhaps momentary catharsis. We also guarantee that the person we are talking to will either shut down completely or respond in kind. We are also likely to turn off and turn away people who might support us or might want to engage/explore an issue but no longer feel comfortable doing so.

Now, I'm not saying we should ignore it when people piss us off. I'm not saying that we don't have the right to be angry when that happens or that we don't have the right to vent about it. What I am saying is that processing our anger, pain, sorrow, etc. and engaging with others on the issues that cause those things are separate sorts of discourse. They're both important; they're both necessary. However, they have different purposes, different audiences, and by conflating them, which seems to happen an awful lot, we do a disservice to each of them and to each other.

Comments

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Interesting exercise: I remember you talking about it.

My major problem with it as presented is that it assumes there is some single/universal ways of conveying "reprimand" or "seduction" or any of the other subtexts/intentions that are beyond the word limit: this information, that MOST of the communicative information in a statement is body language and does not lie in the words spoken is old hat in linguistics (and of course cannot possibly work in text environments to the same extent).

HOWEVER, there is also a lot of linguistic scholarship on how different genders, ages, cultures, and sub-cultures "read" the subtext (your message to fandom puts all the onus on what is said and how it's said on the communicator and none on the recipient, despite the known fact that meaning is constructed interactively).

To get to the specifics of some of the fandom issues you reference:

What some (white women) (white men) read as "anger" in women of color's discourse is not in fact intended or felt by the women of color (this debate has played out in feminist circles since the first critiques of Second Wave White Feminist Discourse).

How middle class white women are trained to be "nice" and "polite" and "sensitive" and to interpret utterances that way means nothing in other communicative circles and cultures.

So, as you and I always come down to, you are a structuralist who assigns the majority of meaning and responsibility of meaning to the writer/speaker/Person A in the linguistic interaction; I am the interative/reader response/poststructuralist who sees that communication is never that easy, intent never that universal, and body language and "tone" never that singular. I agree with the basic principle, BUT not the false universalizing and essentializing of the dominant group's meanings.

Not to say that people don't get angry, etc., but for a person of a dominant culture to believe that THEY are communicatively competent enough to know the intent/body language/unspoken levels of meaning in an utterance by an individual from a minority culture (or even two individuals from equivalent dominant groups in two different cultures) is beyond arrogant and privileged: it's believe that all the world should communicate/intend by the dominant individual's cultural rules.

And that was a huge problem in the Racefail 09 discussions.

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

See I don't buy the fact that it is as subjective and relative as you maintain. The seminar at work was not about race, and it included people who were white, black, Indian, Hispanic, and Asian. It included men and women. It included people from various regions of the US and several different countries, and there was not a noticable difference in how those people participated or responded.

Frankly, I think some of the posturing that says issues of tone and politeness are so group specific that no one can make judgments across groups is an excuse for people to behave like assholes and have a reason why they should not be held accountable.

Also, that while my thoughts on this might have started with the race discussions, the same patterns are now cropping up in discussions on gender and sexuality issues, and I purposely didn't reference one set of discussions because of that.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't buy the strawman that you set up here unless you can prove to me by actually linking to the posts where somebody actually says something close to this extreme position, that: "issues of tone and politeness are so group specific that no one can make judgements across groups."

No one I know is saying that--the problem is that the most privileged people are too ignorant to make judgements across groups because they've never head to learn the other group's specifics. That is something entirely different.

I've been reading the mm/slash and gender stuff, and haven't seen the same ongoing patterns of accusations by the more privileged group(s) (hard to determine in this very intersectional debate) about the less privileged group's tone. Links, please?

And a lot of scholarship in a lot of real world situtions in fact focuses on just this: NOT that it is not impossible to learn about another culture's communicative principles, but that it's hard work and it's not something that we can just intuit.

Just a few moments on an academic database which I'm privileged enough to have access to will show that "fact" is in fact true:

Cheng, Winnie, and Amy B.M. Tsui. "‘ahh ((laugh)) well there is no comparison between the two I think’: How do Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English disagree with each other?." Journal of Pragmatics 41.11 (2009): 2365-2380. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Grieve, Averil. "“Aber ganz ehrlich”: Differences in episodic structure, apologies and truth-orientation in German and Australian workplace telephone discourse." Journal of Pragmatics 42.1 (2010): 190-219. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Brown, Lorraine. "A Failure of Communication on the Cross-Cultural Campus." Journal of Studies in International Education 13.4 (2009): 439-454. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Koda, Tomoko, et al. "Avatar culture: cross-cultural evaluations of avatar facial expressions." AI & Society 24.3 (2009): 237-250. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

oops, c'est moi!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Ruttkay, Zsófia. "Cultural dialects of real and synthetic emotional facial expressions." AI & Society 24.3 (2009): 307-315. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

White, Marjorie A., et al. "Family dynamics in the United States, Finland and Iceland." Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 24.1 (2010): 84-93. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Aguilar, María José Coperías. "Intercultural communicative competence in the context of the European higher education area." Language & Intercultural Communication 9.4 (2009): 242-255. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Reilly, Richard R., and Karen Sobel Lojeski. "leading the DISPERSED WORKFORCE." Mechanical Engineering 131.11 (2009): 30-34. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Smeets, Monique A.M., et al. "Mental body distance comparison: A tool for assessing clinical disturbances in visual body image." Acta Psychologica 132.2 (2009): 157-165. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Freeman, Jonathan B., and Nalini Ambady. "Motions of the Hand Expose the Partial and Parallel Activation of Stereotypes." Psychological Science 20.10 (2009): 1183-1188. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

LoBue, Vanessa, and Judy S. DeLoache. "Open Peer Commentary: On the detection of emotional facial expressions: Are girls really better than boys?." Behavioral & Brain Sciences 32.5 (2009): 397-398. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Dovidio, John F. "Racial Bias, Unspoken But Heard." Science 326.5960 (2009): 1641-1642. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Sinke, C.B.A., et al. "Tease or threat? Judging social interactions from bodily expressions." NeuroImage 49.2 (2010): 1717-1727. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Montirosso, Rosario, et al. "The Development of Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition at Different Intensities in 4- to 18-Year-Olds." Social Development 19.1 (2010): 71-92. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Weisbuch, Max, Kristin Pauker, and Nalini Ambady. "The Subtle Transmission of Race Bias via Televised Nonverbal Behavior." Science 326.5960 (2009): 1711-1714. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

Tamietto, Marco, et al. "Unseen facial and bodily expressions trigger fast emotional reactions." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106.42 (2009): 17661-17666. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

LEE, JIEUN. "When linguistic and cultural differences are not disclosed in court interpreting." Multilingua 28.4 (2009): 379-401. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Feb. 2010.

That's what happens when I click over from emamil, sorry!

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

How middle class white women are trained to be "nice" and "polite" and "sensitive" and to interpret utterances that way means nothing in other communicative circles and cultures.

This is what I'm talking about when I say that folks are saying that tone/politeness is relative to groups. I've lived in different parts of the US and outside the US. Yes, there are peculiarities of politeness unique to groups (ideas of personal space and eye contact come to mind immediately), but in my observation, there are a lot more commonalities, and we seem to ignore them completely or dismiss them.

Thanks for the references! I'm sure I'll look into them if my research interests ever move into this area.

Btw... Love the lilacs. ^_^

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I am in a lilac mood.

Purple flowers always good.

My perspective is a lot more people tend to dismiss the importance of differences to insist upon (their) sense of commonalities being most important.

I doubt you'll ever do this kind of research (I don't), so I don't really think you're trying to be anything more than polite!

I didn't give these to you to say "read them" but to note that a lot of people have spent a lot of time on these issues, and that dismissing their work (which supports a lot of the experiences of people in minority cultures interacting with majority groups) based on your single personal experience is problematic.

If someone who had hardly read any more than one Stephen King story tried to stand up and lecture as an expert, you'd probably not pay much attention to them. My sense is that in this area, you are in somewhat the same situation: you have your lived experience, but your lived experience does not trump other's who experience differs.

For example: all the places you've lived.

How many times and in what situations have you been the only white person in the room/group?

(edited slightly to make one paragraph clearer)

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

I think maybe you're misreading what I said. I'm not dismissing other people's experiences or research. This was very much a post about my own experience and how it lined up with some things that have been tickling in my mind. Like anyone's personal opinion, your mileage may vary.


I also don't think my experience trumps anyone else's, nor do I think theirs trumps mine. We're all patchworks like that, our stories our own and overlapping with others. However, we can have contrasting stories that don't necessarily invalidate either.

How many times and in what situations have you been the only white person in the room/group?

Quite often at lunch at work. Sometimes in meetings.

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you jump immediately to discussions about racial issues because you and savageseraph have been talking about those topics. From the outside looking in it feels like an attempt to "derail" the conversation she originally started in this post, which is not specifically related to any of the current hot topics on metafandom although it may apply to them. But as the comment below by deangirl1 proves, fandom discussions are far ranging and do not have to solely be connected to any -ism. (And yes, I am being a bit sarcastic when I use the word "derail" but only a bit.)

Since you brought up Racefail, I read more posts and comment threads than I should have, and while I did see some people being accused of having an unacceptable tone when I didn't notice anything negative or offensive in how they were expressing themselves, I also saw a lot of comments that were problematic and unhelpful from my perspective, primarily because of the tone that oozed from them. Here is where I'll be asked for citations. When my mood can handle wading through all of that again I'd be more than happy to provide a few. I very rarely engage with most of the people who enjoy these discussions but when I feel the need to because someone seems to think they speak for all people of color, I get the lovely dismissive and condescending response of "YMMV". Which is the internet version of "she's not black enough, we can ignore her opinion."

I must admit to having a very negative personal reaction when I saw the long list of citations. I'm sure it's a kneejerk response predicated more from my own self-esteem issues than anything else. Nevertheless it gives the impression that the point should be conceded because a lot of people with a lot of education have an opposing view. To which I always immediately think I don't care how much education someone has, my opinions and experiences are no less valid just because I only have a high school education. (And since it's also the current buzz word, being "privileged" to have a higher education shouldn't mean that their points of view are any more correct than those who aren't as fortunate.)

Because online we don't have the benefit of hearing someone's voice and seeing their expression when we talk to them, I do think on the internet more of the responsibility falls on the person doing the talking to best convey what they mean and how they feel, rather than on the person doing the reading. The only thing we have to go on are the words, and to me that means having to take the time to choose words that come as close as possible to how we're feeling at the time. Yes sometimes people deliberately misinterpret what they read, but a lot of the time they're not understanding not because of malice or hate, and often they're not getting it wrong at all and it's turning them away rather than keeping the lines of communication open. Too often people are told to shut up, stop asking questions and go find the answers for themselves before they can participate in a conversation. In my opinion that just sounds too much like "if you don't know what you did wrong then I'm not going to tell you" and no one grows from that.

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

I often get angry and express that anger here on LJ. But I think there is a way of doing it that doesn't drift into becoming dismissive and rude, that doesn't immediately turn off the person you're talking to. I believe you can be angry and not be rude, that you can be angry and still be open to not only listening to others but still want to engage them and show them a different point of view. I have failed at this more times than I have succeeded but I still believe in the basic premise.

People speak too much in black and white, there is no middle ground. It's always either you agree with me or you don't, and if you don't then I no longer have to treat you with respect. The minute that happens then all reasonable discourse is done and all you're left with are people retreating to their respective corners with their friends telling them how right they are and how stupid the other person is. It's perfectly fine to say "I'm too livid, I can't talk about this now" and then come back later to start the discussion again. But condescension, dismissive sarcasm, judgment, none of that fosters understanding. Unless the whole idea isn't to get people to understand but rather to score points. Then I suppose that kind of talk works perfectly.

I'll turn your question to savageseraph around and say I'm often the only black person in the room. I grew up in a town where we were the only black family. And I still believe that how I talk to people is an important part in how well they understand what I'm saying and what they take away from the discussion. Sometimes you have to meet brutality with brutality, hatred with anger. But online "sometimes" often becomes "every time" and that's not a good thing in my opinion.

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

People speak too much in black and white, there is no middle ground. It's always either you agree with me or you don't, and if you don't then I no longer have to treat you with respect.

What you've said about respect here really hits the nail on the head. Once the don't agree bit is established, all sense of respect is lost. There are plenty of people with whom I don't agree on some pretty fundamental things. However, I still respect them, and that informs how we disagree with each other.

Sometimes you have to meet brutality with brutality, hatred with anger. But online "sometimes" often becomes "every time" and that's not a good thing in my opinion.

Absolutely. Yes.

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

I'm terribly opinionated and often have a hard time seeing someone else's side. But one thing I'm pretty good at is stopping myself before I speak and trying to make sure whatever I say and how I say it doesn't end the conversation where it stands and gives me a chance to better understand where they're coming from (and of course try to convince them that my view is the right one *g*). To me what I wrote here is fairly innocuous especially when compared to what was rolling around in my head. The voice in my head feeds off my temper and is a bit of a street fighter. :-)

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

I can't say how much I agree with what you're saying here. Online communication is a lot harder than face-to-face communication.

I'm sure it's a kneejerk response predicated more from my own self-esteem issues than anything else. Nevertheless it gives the impression that the point should be conceded because a lot of people with a lot of education have an opposing view.

It isn't just you, and it isn't a kneejerk response. It bothers me whenever I see it no matter who is directed at. What I find problematic about it is the fact that in many of the discussions where it happens (I'm thinking various "fails"), people are quick to valorize the personal experiences and stories of people they agree with; however, when a person offers up a different perspective, they're told they don't know enough to have an informed opinion and are pointed toward the library.

That isn't playing fair. If everyone's experiences and perspectives have value, then EVERYONE'S experiences and perspectives have value.

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

when a person offers up a different perspective, they're told they don't know enough to have an informed opinion and are pointed toward the library
Or Google, which we all know only spits out intelligent and reasonable bits of information. Or not. *g*

I've started writing something about this whole "I'm not going to explain, you have to learn for yourself" thing so many times and just keep putting it aside. I feel inspired to try and do it again. I find it hard to stay on point because it frustrates me so much, precisely because of what you said. Only the people who have a different point of view are the ones who are told they just don't know what they're talking about.

I have to say I can't think of many things more racist than being told that my opinions about a race issue don't count because they don't mesh with those of other people of color someone respects.

[deangirl1.livejournal.com]

Bravo. This has been a disturbing trend in online communities -- that utter lack of restraint coupled with an inflated sense of entitlement.
I love social networking and think it opens us up to other cultures and perspectives while still showcasing how we can find so many people we have so much in common with. I'm also interested in the communication aspect as this is the first thing I try to teach in every writing course I teach. Know your audience. Know the effect your words will have on your audience. And these are things I wish many of those in fandom would take note of. It is just too easy to hide behind your computer and take virtual potshots at people with no consideration to the real person's feelings.
Of course you can take issue with something that has been posted - but would it kill people to consider the best way to channel that dissatisfaction. Do you need to start a flame war on someone's LJ? Could you direct message them to continue a disagreement rather than have a flame war in a very public forum/thread? Do you really want to drag an entire community or flist into the debate? All good questions...

[savageseraph.livejournal.com]

The Internet does offer a mixed bag as you've said. I've met wonderful women I wouldn't have otherwise. However, as you've said, it's so easy to behave in ways we never would in face-to-face interactions with another person.

Yeah. I think you can disagree with people, air your views, consider theirs, and not let the conversation go up in flames.