We never stop being an AUDIENCE
It’s funny because all this talk about audiences has got me thinking about my engagement from not just media artefacts but also my engagement with others.
At my place of employment, gossip is the go-to juice in revitalising the mind and body to progress through the dragging hours of one’s shift. Every seems to accept what is being said passively, and not just so, but also spread the gossip as if they had experienced rather than heard what was said.
This has made me think about how in everyday life we are an audience to the people we engage with. And we have a choice in whether to accept what is being told to us, reject it, or apply our own experience/understand to it.
With this thought, I’ve been trying my best not only to apply the latter to the stories I hear, but deliver them in such a way too.
I don’t enjoy gossip, I think it is nasty and poisonous and not in a ‘Maleficent’ played by Angelina Jolie wants revenge for being wronged kind of way. But in a teenage high school girl doesn’t have anything better to do kind of way.
But I will admit, there are times where something happens or when I encounter an altercation with another employee that aggravates me to the point where if I can’t talk about it I’ll explode.
So when I do talk about it to someone else, I make a point of ensuring the person I’m telling the story to, my audience, that this has been my own personal experience with this person and it should in no way alter their perception of them.
This has just been something on my mind for a long time. It just the lecture that prompted me to put it in words.
