The Pregnant Pause

One ringy-dingy.

Two ringy-dingy.

Oh my. Alexander Graham Bell would turn over in his grave if he saw what his invention has become. After all, he was the one who revolutionized the way people communicate.

I doubt this is what he had in mind. The power to annihilate in the palm of our own hands with a point, aim and shoot. Or should I say, “click.”

On March 7, 1876 Bell developed the first working telephone. He was a Scottish-born person and a Canadian-American inventor who received a US patent for his invention.(wk)

His family had all worked on elocution and speech. Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone as well as the idea and practice of effective speech and its forms. It stems from the idea that while communication is symbolic, sounds are final and compelling.

(The juvenile of us in the reader audience would snicker at the f-a-r-t nature of certain sounds being compelling😂🤣.

My apologies. I digress from the historical nature of communication and connection.

Body language had yet to be a thing, yet to be read with the intensity of stares and glances and lip readers and opinion experts. The guessing aspect of thinking we know what another person “means.”

Today. How it often goes:

The eyes glance down. At the tiny screen connector in the hand. It rings. Or in some cases, buzzes. Again. Scam. Spam or Damn. There may be words. Maybe. The message is difficult to interpret. The message may be manipulated in order for the message and messenger to gain an upper hand.

Before.

It was a process.

To connect.

Then communicate.

Nothing burger compared to today’s instantaneous-ness of names, images and like-nesses.

Before.

When the box on the wall, with a chord, rang, we were required to get up, yes, get up out of our seats, walk over to the ringing box, pick up the “receiver” and speak into a jalopy of an apparatus connected to the box on the wall.

Once we did all that. Then we said,

”Hello”.

There was a chance the caller on the other end was not calling for us. Most of the jalopy boxes were shared by family members, or roommates, officer workers, and the like. Once the caller said,

”Hello. They would generally politely say, “Is so and so there?” To which we would respond by calling for the person aloud or setting the receiver down and go and look for the person to tell them they had a telephone call, a telephone caller.

Exhausted yet?

The conversation hadn’t even begun.

Once the caller and the recipient were “together”, the conversation could begin. Mind you, telephone conversations were timed with a polite generosity of no busy signals, usage availability, should another caller, be calling. For someone else. In the building.

Exhausted yet?

I though so.

Bell perfected the art of pitch and tone. The basic concept being that messages could be sent through a single wire if each was transmitted at a different pitch. Work on the transmitter and receiver was needed.

Ironic.

Human error?

Not exactly.

No two pitches are ever exactly the same. Bell was motivated by harmony. Specifically the idea of harmonic telegraph. Experimentation would require him to seek the best of the best.

Those humans of us who are hard of hearing. Which if we admit it honestly—we all can be. In his spare time, on the side, of his experimentations and inventions, Bell would tutor students of who some were unable to see, speak, or hear. he sought to assimilate the deaf and hard of hearing with the hearing world.

The telephone opened up world of possibilities of connection. Door to door, around the world. However. The telephone as tool did not guarantee a person to be heard. Would be heard.

On his estate in Nova Scotia, Bell conducted meticulously recorded breeding experiments with rams and ewes. He had a special interest in heredity and genetics and the ability to hear and be heard.

Bell. A busy guy.

We owe a debt of gratitude to his tenacity to help us connect. To understand.

More recently, as of 2011, Jason Munsell, a communications and speech professor theorizes that part of elocution is strategic movement and visuals.(wk)

(Please do not go middle-fingering anyone just yet.)

Munsell studies the idea that literary theory umbrellas a host of ways to communicate. Post-structuralism dictates a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. (wk)

😳

Yeah. Scary.

Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of structure that is modeled on language. (wk). As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a “third order” that mediates between the two.

Yeah. Scary.

Like I said. Bell may be rolling over in his grave at the complexity of hearing and being heard in the 21 st century. Harmony-ly speaking, of course.

Are our attention spans even able to handle any kind of content longer than fifteen minutes anymore? Does anybody read an entire book anymore? Left to right. Left to right.

Any tool is only as competent as its user. With the now smart-ness of the communication tool of today, we can all readily admit when we mis-use it. Hide behind it. Hide behind its meaning of blasting off the message with a tap and a “see ya later” kind of mentality, intention and motivation. Sometimes, we even stare down at the screen while our beloved, friend, or neighbor is talking to us.

How rude. We can be to one another when we pretend to be listening, but our attentions are divided.

Time moves fast nowadays. Rapidly even. Precious moments reduced to distraction and we miss the chance to connect meaningfully.

The good news.

Time are changing.

The bad news.

It will take a new kind of self-effort of meaning and meaningful meaning.

Huh?

Hard of hearing renders us hard to hear sometimes.

The pregnant pause. One way of filling the empty space of misunderstanding.