ALCStudies Journal

I once attended a business meeting in which we were invited for our opinions on email. You know the type:  the ones in which everyone looks down at the table and waits for someone else to talk. I spoke up  to say there were too many of them and I thought they usually didn’t communicate anything much new. Afterward someone who heard me commented that I liked to hear myself talk. My manager at the time promptly passed the comment on to me. (Thanks, Buddy.)

The feedback got under my skin. Did I talk too much (that is, obliviously)? We’d been asked for our opinions. Years later, guess what? We still send and receive too many e-mails, and most of them are redundant. We send e-mails, tweets and texts when we should be talking. As far as hearing myself talk:  I embrace it. I’m an advocate of sharing what we have to say through stories and live conversation. Studs Terkel did it for forty-five years starting in the 1930s. This year’s Nobel prize for literature just went to Svetlana Alexievich for her work recording everyday stories of the Soviet and post-Soviet peoples. I added a link to my Linkedin profile update to an article in the Financial Times. Very cool stuff.

Advanced Labor and Cultural Studies will offer selected blog entries as audio recordings and podcasts. If you or anyone you know is blind or vision-impaired, or just wants to listen to what’s posted here, please point ’em this way. Here’s the first one from December 24th on Doctor Who. Let me know how it works for you — CDL