flâneur

Are you a jerk, or a liar? - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions

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On talking past each other

I can’t tell whether this is so obvious it doesn’t merit mentioning, or so fundamental it’s hard to see, but I’ve noticed recently that there seem to be two core approaches people take to establishing trust in communication. Call them “truth-seeking” and “community-seeking.” Most people seem to have a dominant social mode in which they operate basically all the time, to the extent that “what communication is for” doesn’t even register as a belief, more a background principle of the universe. Thus, when they see someone operating under the other model, it just registers as the other person…

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