I’ve heard it’s pretty hard to have effective communication between the professor and students if the class is large –after all, larger class means more students to confuse themselves (I admit, I am one of them). But what’s peculiar, if not absurd, is that my largest classes turned out to have the most effective form of communication and my smallest (a class of 9) has the worst. Of course I’m not putting the blame on anyone for this but I will point out Thing One and Two (see? Not a person!) that I’ve noticed about communication loss across students…especially the ones that are subdivided poorly.
For the longest time I imagined communication for the masses looking something like a pyramid where the speaker projects his or her voice as loud as possible (via speech, SNS, or anything along those lines) and hopes the message is heard all the way to the bottom of the pyramid. So far this method has shown success in our daily lives –assuming that you don’t live under a rock or fail at being part of the masses like me occasionally. But since my class of 9 students with 2 amazing professors flopped with communication so badly, I’m at a mental breakdown about mass communication.
The first part of this debacle had me freaking out trying to figure out what to do, then I immediately proceeded to freak out my fellow classmates who were also confused and didn’t realize their doom until I ran across yelling “What are we suppose to do?!?” It didn’t take us long until we began pondering how a class of 9 will miss out on the same instructions given by two professors –this is what I’ve come to call Thing One of communication loss in the classroom.
(Thing One): most people remember the big picture and stick to the details later primarily due to the onslaught of information the brain receives on any given day. In a report by University of California San Diego (2008), the average American was consuming “3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes…on an average day.” Hence, if everyone at the Appalachian State game (106,811 spectators) said one word to a controlled test subject (possibly for Psychology) put into a soundproof box and allowed only to hear those words -the likelihood of that poor soul remembering anything of importance is slim to none. Take that into a societal perspective and you get a rather frightening picture…
(don’t worry it’s somewhat a happy ending) but now for the scary part.
What this implies, subtly, is that no one remembers or focuses fully -even if it’s just the 9 of us trying to understand our professors’ English as their 3rd or 4th language. Hence all first-hand information given to the masses is likely forgotten or mis-remembered (yes, I just made up a word for those times when you make up the missing parts of your memories).
Does this mean we should have information in the hands of few to tell the masses?
Doesn’t this contradict the freedom of information and therefore put censorship in the will of information holders?
Maybe.
But so far each class in the social spectrum, no matter how rampant communication loss is among them, seems pretty well informed and confident enough to make their own opinions…Which strangely reminds me of The Melian Dialogue where the Athenians argued that the Melian magistrates and chiefs will change the content of their negotiation to put the people on their side when delivering the news. Yet observe what happens today! The president gives a speech, reporters flock to the words and report however their editors want them to, and the people are mostly well informed (a little biased maybe but almost everyone forms an opinion they’re willing to defend). Oh? What’s that I hear, at the tail-end of my ear? Say, something’s coming? Running humming coming? Why its Thing Two about C.L.A.S.S.!
(Thing Two): Everyone in a subdivision is part of an interpersonal checks and balances process where each bit of information must be agreed upon to be true. For example, society has its handful of die-hard conspiracy theorists -they dig up “some stories that are too true to tell” which occasionally, and frighteningly turn out to be true (I’m sure the movie that line is from can put it more dramatically than I can with my Dr.Seuss). Alas, the reign of terror of Thing One is overthrown by Thing Two! But let me put sense into these words.
In the microcosm of my 9-in-all classroom, there are 4 subdivisions (I borrowed a bit from Caesar). Since 9 divided by 4 means groups of two with one group of three, communication between subgroups was more or less horrendous as it is; and when the terror of Thing One (or The Thing -a monster from a horror film) set in for our first big test, the walls came crashing down with confusion and outrage. One group thought this, the other that, and sooner or later we clashed for the right answers. On a larger picture, however, this is something we believe to be a virtue among civil Americans. Freedom of expression echoes in our social classes -we all fight over our interpretation of laws, events, and information in society just as we debate over who’s right and wrong about the details of an upcoming test. It seems to me from this experience that the theory of politics is based on individual input instead of a pyramid hierarchy of order.
The only reason Thing Two can trump Thing One is simply because larger classes in society (and at educational institutions) have an influx of confusion, complaints, and opinions that get funneled to the few in charge of giving out information. If the few in charge did not consider the concerns of the masses and simply gave out orders, it will be impossible to recognize the significance of those orders among the 34 gigabytes of daily information.
In a strange way, balancing C.L.A.S.S. solves itself if the expressed body is large enough to be a social class of its own. The Athenians and my two wonderfully confusing professors needn’t worry about everyone receiving information first-hand, they just have to react accordingly to our confusion.
Great societies are built on questions and concerns, where the medium is communication and progress is reaction not revolution.
When the Reaction is just Right, we’re all Happy
Touchdown Theory 
