Often people will ask a question to elicit a response and not an answer.
They ask the question and then study a person's reaction. They're not
particularly interested in the answer just the emotional and physical
characteristics of the response and generally they don't even know that's
what their purpose was in posing the question or comment.
The bulk of our conversation is emotional. Whether or not this form of
communication has a purpose I don't know. Maybe in a medical situation,
where a medical attendant wants to see if the patient can respond, but in
a working environment it's counter productive. Often times people will
game to produce a response as a form of establishing hierarchy and
dominance.
Compare this to a form of intelligent conversations where the details of a
topic are discussed. Emotional injection into an answer carries far less
meaning than the data the language conveys. I'm thinking of chess as an
example of this kind of communication, where chess moves are communicated
in characters and numbers, Qp2 to Qp4, for example, and the emphasis of
tone or gesture is not as important, only the characters and numbers.
Workplace conversations strive for this perfection. Subtle, emotional
communication probably does have its place, but its often unmanageable,
and used purely as an extension of our physical and mental well being at
the time. Technical conversations seem much rarer and are a refreshing,
pure form of communication that I, and I think many other people, desire,
but rarely find.
