OFFICE COMMUNICATION

Overcoming Obstacles office communication

Overcoming Obstacles office communication

In recent years there has been much talk about the emphasis upon meaningless academic credentials in American life. [In] a cruel and largely unperceived way, the ablebodied world practices a parallel kind of credentialing on the disabled. All too often the child or the newly disabled adult learns that the prerequisite for being in social settings where a simple cry by a person with CP, a touch by a blind person, or a nod or grimace of joy is exactly right—and communicates far more than mere words—is a normal body. As much as anything our emphasis on the most mechanical aspects of communication reflects (or at least is congruent with) an important fact about cultural attitudes toward disability (Hardee, 2003).

To focus so exclusively on the sensory and motor obstacles to the message—and to overlook the sociological medium upon which all communication depends—is, in effect, to ratify the systematic exclusion of large numbers of disabled individuals from situations of genuine intimacy. It is to ratify their exile to the impoverished setting of the classroom, the doctor's office, the hospital ward, and the family bedroom which visitors are not shown. All too often we wind up helping the severely communication-disabled communicate as patients not as selfsufficient adults(Duffy, 2001).

In sum, even if we restrict ourselves to the considerations of the classically defined communications disabilities, much of what the individual experiences as the most limiting and destructive aspect of his communications disability is the result of an ultimately social and ultimately arbitrary set of decisions, not an inevitable consequence of his biological deficit. Society not biology decrees that individuals crippled by severe CP are denied access to the mainstream of life. Society not biology decrees that the deaf must use cumbersome visual devices or speech instead of sign language to communicate with the hearing (Hardee, 2003).

If most communications disabilities contain a sociological component of no mean importance, what of other kinds of handicaps? Might their not inconsiderable sociological component also produce significant obstacles to communication—obstacles whose ultimate origins are to be found not in the bodies of the disabled but in the minds of the able-bodied?

To broach these questions requires a significant expansion of the definition of communication common in the specialized literature which treats [of] communication disorders. It requires that we explore all kinds of communication, verbal and nonverbal. It requires that we recognize that each of us speaks many “languages” besides English—languages which communicate our self image to the other, our state of mind, our character, our social status, and our feelings about the other; language which communicates to the other whether we think he has a future and whether we have a future, in our private life and in professional life; language which passes judgment on the quality of the interaction between self and other, whether we might be compatible acquaintances, business associates, friends or lovers. And it is to recognize that each of us broadcasts this information on many “wavelengths” simultaneously, only ...