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Showing posts from October, 2006

Teaching children how to dance nicely with others

Human beings interact with one another --inter-act. That is, when in the presence of another person, we are constantly responding to each other, to the words we speak, to the gestures we make, to the tone of each other's voice, to the clothes we wear, to the idea we each have of the other. Verbal communication, non-verbal communication, our ideas of our own social status and the status of the other person. . . . Each of these 'areas' includes a variety of symbols/signs/signals. Interaction between humans is mediated symbolically. We send each other signals and we respond to those signals. People in each other's presence --whether it is physical presence or presence mediated by text, or telephony, or TV or radio or film, or whatever-- are constantly engaged in a very subtle "dance" with each other. (The "realtime" media, of course, make possible more dynamic inter-action than the recorded media.) This is the dance of what sociologists call "s