…Yet while technology has greatly enhanced group and collaborative work – the bare essential people skills, the art of oral communication should not be overlooked. Librarians are educators. We must be capable of painting a portrait of the complex systems we curate, to prepare professional presentations, to bring new personnel onto a project, to assertively participate in a group environment and be productive and faithful teammates. This is true now more than ever, as group collaboration has shifted from mere good practice to a professional necessity given the breadth of our services and allied professions. How to communicate well orally is another matter.
I fall back upon old forms while considering the new. Many undergraduate liberal arts degrees require a study in communications. This style of instruction, to which I have been a part of, is often business centered. Issues center on group theory, dynamics, group manipulation, and coherent/effective transfer of information, contrasting against the various factors of noise, distance, time and medium. All well and good, but such instruction is fixated on professional rather than holistic ends; the goal is to do one’s professional job in a uniform and often stifling manner which is as expected in western capitalist culture. Personally I find it important to consider such studies as to ground oneself, but to look further back for a normative foundation in communication. While the modern study of communications may often reveal insights into human communication (a particular thing I learned to become wary of from my communication classes is “groupthinkâ€) it is prone to missing the heart of it. The greatest communicators were not businessmen but poets, warriors and philosophers. Aristotle immediately comes to mind as a model of a proper and well versed rhetorician or communicator. In his treatise On Rhetoric Aristotle argues that good rhetoric is based upon three persuasive appeals or “Pillarsâ€: