Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2002-06-06 02:41 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2002-06-06 02:41 pm
Sociology Reading Log, 2001 03 25
The primary basis of communication is the agreement on common symbols. My high school friends used to come to me to translate between different worldviews. I could translate between Youth For Christ and random semi-pagan curious person, or Administrator and Unruly Student With No Respect For Authority, or even Hyper Drama Student and Normal Person. In one notable instance I took three sentences to translate to Hannah what Brian had been taking all morning to try and tell me, and she grinned and finally got it, and he gaped at me and invited me to his youth group, at which point I had to explain the essential difference between agreeing and understanding.
I am grouched when someone keeps me waiting a long time, especially when they could have gotten to me more quickly and I know it for a fact. If someone calls at 2 am and I have not told any of my friends that I will most likely be awake at 2 in the morning, I will assume it is an emergency. If someone calls at 2 pm, I will usually be irritated, because everyone who should be calling me knows that I invariably take afternoon naps, and if the caller is not on the very short list of people I will talk to at any time of day no matter what, I am often rather short with them.
The American culture I encountered at school assumed that everyone was of the same background as them, with a limited range of possible expected and acceptable pasts and preferences. Since my father's background is Quaker, I did not participate in much of the materialistic and pop-culture fervor of the 80's, and my classmates did not know what to make of this. I was unable to adequately communicate myself, because I lacked experience in communicating with others of cultural backgrounds as different as my classmates'. Alaska often considers itself almost a separate country from the continental US because of its vast physical and cultural differences.
I'm glad this book is mentioning communication as a function of time. My mind takes a long time to contemplate various emotionally loaded communications, and I have occasionally produced a different response for each day of the week following a very short message from someone else.
One of my all-time favorite books, Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh, mentions that it's very important to know where your fundamental beliefs come from, for no one comes up with everything that's in their mind, no matter how complex that mind is, by themselves. There had to have been some seed idea, and if you contemplate yourself an entire mindset based on one piece of information, and you later learn that this piece of information was inaccurate, then you had better take the time to re-examine your mindset.
The author associates the phrase "the race track" with horses; I associate it with car racing and would make a comment about Dale Ernhardt.
I work for a public opinion research company, and I am a telephone interviewer. I've been discovering exactly how great our differences and similarities are, both from the way the questions are worded to avoid ambiguity, and how the people respond.
My Epic Novel is about, at its heart, how my internalized view of the world was more influenced by the books I read from the ages 10 to 16 than it was by my parents; as my parents did not discuss some of the more important things of culture with me, it was up to me to find them on my own. As they'd set up my initial values, they were comfortable that whatever I found and internalized would be acceptable to them.
My former fiancé did not know what to do when I turned out to not have the same expectations of my role as the woman in our relationship as he did. One of my co-cultures is that of the technocracy, the computer high priesthood, the hackers; I share the hacker ethos though I am not well-versed enough in computers to actually be one. This hacker culture is not the one depicted in the movie "Hackers," it's the original meaning of the word, meaning something along the lines of "someone who works with computers and computer programs and fully understands how they work and how to make them work," whereas the computer breaking-and-entering is properly called "cracking" or "phreaking". Though my ex is highly computer-literate and can pass in casual conversation for a hacker, he does not share some of the underlying cultural values such as the silent response, the respect for one's machine, and (what got him his user privileges on my computer restricted, then revoked, then got him minus one fiancée) the asking of permission before you make any change, even seemingly minor, to a system or install any programs. I could respect his religious differences, but I could not live with that.
I am grouched when someone keeps me waiting a long time, especially when they could have gotten to me more quickly and I know it for a fact. If someone calls at 2 am and I have not told any of my friends that I will most likely be awake at 2 in the morning, I will assume it is an emergency. If someone calls at 2 pm, I will usually be irritated, because everyone who should be calling me knows that I invariably take afternoon naps, and if the caller is not on the very short list of people I will talk to at any time of day no matter what, I am often rather short with them.
The American culture I encountered at school assumed that everyone was of the same background as them, with a limited range of possible expected and acceptable pasts and preferences. Since my father's background is Quaker, I did not participate in much of the materialistic and pop-culture fervor of the 80's, and my classmates did not know what to make of this. I was unable to adequately communicate myself, because I lacked experience in communicating with others of cultural backgrounds as different as my classmates'. Alaska often considers itself almost a separate country from the continental US because of its vast physical and cultural differences.
I'm glad this book is mentioning communication as a function of time. My mind takes a long time to contemplate various emotionally loaded communications, and I have occasionally produced a different response for each day of the week following a very short message from someone else.
One of my all-time favorite books, Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh, mentions that it's very important to know where your fundamental beliefs come from, for no one comes up with everything that's in their mind, no matter how complex that mind is, by themselves. There had to have been some seed idea, and if you contemplate yourself an entire mindset based on one piece of information, and you later learn that this piece of information was inaccurate, then you had better take the time to re-examine your mindset.
The author associates the phrase "the race track" with horses; I associate it with car racing and would make a comment about Dale Ernhardt.
I work for a public opinion research company, and I am a telephone interviewer. I've been discovering exactly how great our differences and similarities are, both from the way the questions are worded to avoid ambiguity, and how the people respond.
My Epic Novel is about, at its heart, how my internalized view of the world was more influenced by the books I read from the ages 10 to 16 than it was by my parents; as my parents did not discuss some of the more important things of culture with me, it was up to me to find them on my own. As they'd set up my initial values, they were comfortable that whatever I found and internalized would be acceptable to them.
My former fiancé did not know what to do when I turned out to not have the same expectations of my role as the woman in our relationship as he did. One of my co-cultures is that of the technocracy, the computer high priesthood, the hackers; I share the hacker ethos though I am not well-versed enough in computers to actually be one. This hacker culture is not the one depicted in the movie "Hackers," it's the original meaning of the word, meaning something along the lines of "someone who works with computers and computer programs and fully understands how they work and how to make them work," whereas the computer breaking-and-entering is properly called "cracking" or "phreaking". Though my ex is highly computer-literate and can pass in casual conversation for a hacker, he does not share some of the underlying cultural values such as the silent response, the respect for one's machine, and (what got him his user privileges on my computer restricted, then revoked, then got him minus one fiancée) the asking of permission before you make any change, even seemingly minor, to a system or install any programs. I could respect his religious differences, but I could not live with that.