Okay, so let's enter the dark side. First of all with the proposition that we're actually losing our listening. I think this is absolutely true. In the modern world, there are so many challenges to listening. And I think it's worth going through some of them with you right now. First of all, we invented ways of recording things.

Thousands of years ago, there was no recording at all, there was no writing, there was no audio recording or video recording. And if you missed it, you missed it. If somebody said something or taught you something, you have to listen really carefully. Now, the premium on careful listening has really disappeared. I mean, look at this course. If you go to sleep at the moment, you can always go back and restart it.

You can check it again. There's not much that you can't check on YouTube these days. So the premium on careful listening has disappeared in most cases. Storytelling, of course, is still around. Nevertheless, in most cases these days, you don't have to listen as carefully, as you once did. Then there's impatience.

There's lots of research showing that attention spans are relatively short. There was one very spurious one a few years ago, attributed to Microsoft, but not actually from them, which purported to show that human attention span to eight seconds less than that of a goldfish. Well, first of all, I don't know how you measure the attention span of a goldfish. And secondly, that was absolute nonsense. The original study actually said eight minutes, not eight seconds. So these things do become kind of urban myths.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty convinced that our attention span is shorter than it once was, with this fast edit fast cat lifestyle that we're in. We're used to advertisements cutting every second or two. It's just rapid fire at us all the time. And in politics, we are much more interested in sound bites. We've got time. oratory, oratory doesn't exist anymore really, it did up until the maybe the 70s 80s.

In the UK, there were people who would stand up in the Houses of Parliament and declaim, and people would come and listen to them because they were such brilliant speakers. Not anymore. People just shout at each other. And we've seen that in politics all over the world. And think of the way that you consume music. Now, when I was growing up, I would play a record.

And that was a piece of vinyl for those of you who don't know, where you have to get up halfway through and turn it over, and then go back and sit down and you listen to it in order. It was a an exercise in concentration, probably reading the back of the sleeve as well. Now, it's playlists tracks. We don't really listen to albums so much anymore. It's track by track or even getting bored with a track the way we channel hop as well. When we're consuming visual media, the idea of the whole country sitting down to watch a program of an evening has gone because we timeshift channel hope Watch bits and pieces, and so forth.

A lot of younger people children are not satisfied in this they've got two or three inputs going at the same time in a multiple devices. This is becoming a well known scenario in the marketing world where they're having to take cognizance of this and research in different ways to find out what attention people are paying to what, are they really watching TV, or are they chatting about the TV that's going on in the background? So our attention spans are shorter and I think this cartoon unfortunately is pretty true. And then we have the media sensationalism. Now, there's a married dance well, actually, it's a it's a macabre dance between us and the media. And the result of it all is numbing.

It's desensitization. So the media love to use these sensationalist words. These are words used by what's it called the red tops in the UK, the popular press, which tend to have red banners at the top of them, it doesn't seem possible for anybody to be mildly annoyed anymore. It's always fury. You go from zero to fury, in no seconds at all. And that kind of dumbing down, unfortunately, diminishes our ability to hear subtle, understated stories.

Hyperbole becomes the norm as we'll discover in the seven deadly sins. Politicians become celebrities, not states people, dialectic rhetoric. Where are they these days, they've been replaced by gossip largely. So, you know, the whole of life becomes a soap opera, where everything's got to be sensational. I think there are some journalistic practices which are contributing to this, but we're also responsible. So if I point the finger first at the journalists, editorializing instead of writing factual stories, its opinion, opinion, attack journalism, where people are brought on to be interviewed and just attacked, whatever they say, which often involves interrupting.

There's been a lot of stories recently in the UK press about the frequent See of interrupting something in the region of 18 seconds politicians are getting and this is on, you know, high level highbrow intelligent media not popular media interrupting is enormously prevalent, and cockfighting by which I mean, bringing on two people who are naturally going to violently disagree with each other and just setting them at each other, to have a good fight. Well, that's easy. It's lazy journalism. And it polarizes everybody. And at the foot of all of this kind of stuff, is an addiction to outrage. Now, there's a reason for that.

And indeed, the blame hunting or blame throwing that goes on. In modern society, you know, who's the guilty party somebody has to be to blame. It's a seductive listening position, which we're going to deal with in a bit more detail later on. And it's called being right. The easiest way for me to be right, is to make somebody else wrong. And that puts us on a bit Have a slippery slope if that's where we're coming from, where it starts with perhaps caricaturing somebody's position, then polarizing them.

And those very easily slip into becoming prejudiced, bigoted, hating people who are different. And we've seen the results of that around the world. Unfortunately, as you know, you disagree with me, I kill you. That is no way to have civil society. So our fault in this is the being right and the judging and the blame seeking the the media's fault in this is their addiction to fast cat always on 24 hour news, you know, people standing outside the house where something may have happened yesterday, saying, well, nothing's happened today. Well, it's not actually news.

But you know, it has to be always on it has to be immediate. Now, that's a little diatribe on modern media which affecting our ability to speak effectively and listen, because they pervade and they change our content. text and what? what's normal for us? I think it's quite important to be aware of that process. I mentioned headphones earlier on headphones can damage our hearing headphones can save us from noise.

But headphones have a third very important effect. And that effect is to turn large social spaces into loads of little sound bubbles, where I'm in my little sound bubble playing the soundtrack of my life as I walk around or incredibly dangerously, as I see more and more often cycle or even drive a car. I mean that it's illegal to drive a car with headphones on it should be illegal to cycle with headphones on, because that is just insanely dangerous. Hearing is your primary warning sense if you can't hear what's going on around you. You're desensitized now, the research shows that many people use headphones for this reason to cut out intrusive sound around them and that I completely understand it's taking control again of the sound. But at the same time you need to be aware Sometimes, especially if you're cycling of the sound around you.

So it's a question of balance. Talking a balance. There's another effect of modern living, which is something that Marie Schaffer, the great Canadian writer and musicologist cause schizophrenia, which I think is a lovely term, it's a divorce between what you're hearing and what you're seeing. Obviously, the most common case of that is headphone wearing these days. Mary Schaefer actually coined it to describe the experience of sitting in a room listening to a symphony orchestra through loudspeakers, because clearly the orchestra are not there with you. So you're hearing something that doesn't exist physically or through your eyes.

So there's this disconnect with becoming more and more used to this now. It's something that's used enormously in in films, where very often you'll hear a sound effect come in before the visual cuts to that scene and you'll get primed or the music will change in order to tell you something is about to happen. There. Clever with that in motion pictures. schizophrenia isn't in and of itself a bad thing. But it is important to start to become more conscious of this pernicious trend to divorce, what we see from what we hear, very often you'll be in a hermetically sealed building, it'll be raining outside, you can't hear a thing.

So it's disconnecting us from the real world in some way. And there's something which concerns me about living in that state. I think it's quite important, at least part of your day, to unify your senses and be surrounded by what you see what you hear what you smell, touch, and even taste being in unison. Now let's move on to talk about technology, which I think is one of the very biggest things that's disconnecting us and getting in the way of our ability to speak and listen, this kind of thing. I'm sure you've never sent this text and I hope you've never received this text but it does get sent and it does get received. That's not a question.

Session as it was the listening in that it's actually an issue. I've done some work on this over the years. And we've done research, which showed that people are using different communication channels. So it's not any longer just the issue that maybe young people have got different vocabulary to older people. They're also using different channels of communication. So the generation gap is becoming wider and wider, younger people prefer text or instant messaging, then there's a sort of middle aged group who prefer email, and then older people prefer telephone letter and so forth.

Those more old fashioned communication mechanisms are dying out, then when did you last send a letter I received very few I send none. Now, email, of course, is enormously dominant. And it drives this kind of text based interface that we have with the world. Our relationship is driven by our eyes so much. So much of our communication comes in In this way eyes, and fingers tapping on keyboards, it's changes the way we behave a great deal. And I love this picture from the American photographer, Eric pickers Gill, he takes the technology out of the picture and then leaves you thinking how ridiculous people's behavior is.

Obviously, if they had their phones in their hands, you'd know that they've just got married, and they're texting all their friends and so forth. But just married, is that the way you want to be? So I think we have to be, again, very cautious about the way technology is taking us. All of these things are very much in the line of what I call personal broadcasting FOMO drives them. We want to broadcast with this fund fantasy that the world is out there waiting on a latest tweet, or post or tag or whatever it might be tapping away, I'm on a train, who cares? Actually, very few people, and we get this kind of fantasy that we're the stars of this year.

Universe where we're we're broadcasting out to avid fans. That's one way communication. There isn't a great deal of listening in those media, unfortunately. And there's a great book by Sherry Turkle professor at MIT, and also a TED talker whom I've I've met. And she's got another book as well after this one, which is called reclaiming conversation. Sherry used to be a big proponent of technology, believing that it was going to create this global village where we would all be communicating with each other.

Now, she believes actually, technology is dividing us. It's not bringing us together. You have the phenomenon of two people, as you saw in that car, picture with the married couple, two people sitting next to each other texting people who aren't there, but not connecting with each other. And this is a threat to communication. Now, it's not just us as individuals who are poor at communication, it's endemic in the world. My next book, I hope is going to be about organizational listening.

And it's true to say that organizations are terrible at it. I mean, you and I know this, how many times have you attempted to complain or get something fixed or get through to somebody at an organization, they're terrible at listening. They're obsessed with outbound communication, and very poor at inbound communication. And I'm talking about internally as well as externally. You know, there's a balance between speaking and listening isn't there. And unfortunately, the research shows that that balance is not 5050, as in this kind of Zen diagram.

It's more like this, about 8020. Speaking to listening in organizations, that's the balance of the effort. They put in the budget, they put in the focus that they put in, and that was self assessed. So I would imagine that's probably highly exaggerated. Most organizations would like to think they're good at listening. Most of them are appalling at it, and I think that 20% is probably a problem.

Big over estimate.