Category: Longer Essays

I have written a book primarily for recent college graduates on how to write great résumés and cover letters: How to Write Powerful College Student Résumés and Cover Letters: Secrets That Get Job Interviews Like Magic. Read reviews at Amazon.

I have long worked closely with college students and graduates. I know how concerned they are about “looking good” on their résumés. I’ve witnessed first hand the difficulty of getting interviews let alone meaningful full-time employment. I yearn for them to find satisfying work.

Beyond the poor job market, there is another, often-overlooked reason why college students and graduates are so anxious when it comes to writing résumés. They are inheriting a cultural climate that emphasizes image-making over substance. Why else would a student add something to a résumé primarily because it will “look good”—even if the entry doesn’t reflect any significant work or life experience on the part of the writer? Students today feel the burden of having to prove their value to a potential employer. They understandably try to project a positive image of themselves.

This is not all bad. Résumés should be an opportunity for the writer to persuade by emphasizing  personal strengths. I would even hope that college students learn to communicate effectively as part of their formal education. Sure, students should be truthful in what they say in résumés, cover letters, and interviews. But truth can be expressed more or less persuasively. When it comes to résumés, truth is necessary but insufficient. Persuasively expressed truth is essential.

The problem today is that students are not as fully truthful as they could be for their own benefit in the marketplace. The “truth” is that current and former college students are experienced persons. Yes, their experience is primarily life experience, not academic or work experience. But a student is a person, and a person is more than a bundle of job-specific skills and academic accomplishments. Students are human beings who have learned primarily by experience, and hopefully by reflection on such life experience. Such learning can and should enhance the persuasiveness of a résumé.

As I point out in the book, employers, too, are looking at the whole person, not just at an applicant’s job-specific skills. For instance, they know that the traits of the people we work with are just as important as the immediate professional skills that our colleagues possess. We appreciate colleagues who bring life-acquired, positive virtues to their work—virtues like patience, gratitude, and kindness. We dislike laboring with manipulators and deceivers who care more about themselves and their own careers than anything or anyone else.

The best résumé writers—the truly effective résumés writers—address what I call the “Big Three”: skills, knowledge, and traits. And they do so not by worrying excessively about “what looks good” on a résumé but by aiming to represent their whole selves in all three categories. The result is a résumé that is a picture of the personal potential of a possible employee as a human being. This is why even activities such as travel, non-academic cross-cultural experience, hobbies, and volunteering can be so important to include on résumés and cover letters. Such entries round out the skills, knowledge, and traits of the writer.

I jumped into the already-loaded résumé-book market because none of the other books take this kind of holistic perspective. There are some fine résumé-writing books for a general audience of experienced workers, but not specifically for college students and recent graduates who lack much paid professional experience. Yet most people do have impressive life experience that reflects the kinds of skills, knowledge, and traits that can transferred to all kinds of careers.

To be true to ourselves and others we all need to consider what we’ve learned from life, not just what we’ve learned on the job. In the end, such self-reflection can lead us toward the sort of examined life the ancient Greeks considered essential. Writing a résumé or a cover letter is an opportunity for getting to know ourselves better, and representing ourselves to others more fully. It’s also a recipe for success that is deeper than image.

Best wishes on your life journey.

— Dr. Q

Michael Lotti interviewed me for this fine article about the need to apply age-old ethics to the new social contexts created by digital communications technologies.  You can find out more online about Mr. Lotti at the publisher’s (Effect Magazine, LarsonAllen) website.  Kudos to LarsonAllen for addressing ethics on behalf of society.

Ethics and the Information Age

by Michael Lotti

The information age has given us more than cell phones and emails. It has also dumped a bunch of new ethical dilemmas on us. A few thinkers eagerly look into an ever-more-electronic future as they ponder the rapid development of information technology. For them, the question is not about the right or wrong use of the Internet or a Facebook account, but how these things are paving the way for the next evolutionary step of the human species.

Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at the University of Hertfordshire in England who specializes in information theory, thinks that developments in information technology are ushering in an age where humans will develop “a new ecological approach to the whole of reality,” which will include the recognition that information systems have rights.

Arthur Saniotis, an anthropologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, looks forward to the day when there will be information technologies that “optimize human biology” and deliver “friendships with imaginative entities,” along with the ability to download a brain onto a hard drive.

If there’s an ethical imperative for such thinkers, it seems to be this: keep developing the technology so that the human species can continue to improve.

Nothing new

Besides being wildly speculative, such views make it seem as if the everyday ethical dilemmas of the information age are merely annoying speed bumps on the evolutionary highway.

For many, running into new ethical problems may be as common as answering their email messages. However, while the ethical dilemmas of the information age are very real, they pose no substantially new challenges for the people who face them.

Information technology has changed just about everything in our lives—the way we shop, educate, follow politics, and even carry on romances. We face a whole new landscape that has been radically altered by cell phones, satellites, and the Internet. But while we have new ethical problems, we don’t have new ethics. The categories we use to identify, evaluate, and solve moral dilemmas haven’t changed.

Why shouldn’t you take a call on your cell phone in the middle of an important business meeting? Because that would be unfairly taking away valuable time from your employer and co-workers. Why should businesses take significant measures to protect the electronically stored information of their customers? Because it would be a violation of trust not to do so. Why shouldn’t you text people in the middle of a family dinner or business lunch? Because that’s impolite. What’s troubling about pretending to be someone else in an online chatroom? That’s a form of lying.

Lying, impoliteness, trust, and fairness, along with concepts such as justice, self control, respect, generosity, loyalty, and many others, are part of the human fabric. Even for Plato and Aristotle and other long-dead thinkers, these terms had no discernible origin.

So when we need to answer a new ethical question, we don’t really need to invent new categories, because the familiar terms apply.

Big changes—especially big technological changes—usually outpace ethical reflection, but basic ethical sensibilities gradually catch up. The information revolution is not a revolution (or evolution) in creativity or consciousness or awareness, even if it has changed our lives an awful lot. It’s a bunch of new tools that, like the factories, telegraphs, and steam engines of the industrial revolution, can be used justly or unjustly, to spread truth or lies, or to find much-needed information or gratify the worst appetites.

The challenge of the medium

But even if Saniotis’s scenarios of “optimized human biology” are farfetched, can’t information technology actually change a person’s mind or “consciousness” for the worse? And can you tackle such a problem with familiar ethical terminology?

Quentin J. Schultze, the author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart (Eerdmans, 2002), is not against the innovations of the information age, but thinks we “should be just as concerned about the kinds of persons we are becoming as we are with being able to send messages quickly. In fact, our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.”

Consider the following experience a friend shared with me. He noticed that his 15-year-old daughter’s social habits changed significantly about six months after she got a cell phone and a Facebook account. She didn’t gossip, lie, cheat, or do anything that would be called unethical with her new tools. She texted people constantly and had lots of less-than-a-minute conversations on her phone, but complained about not having any close friends. As my friend put it, “She was alone in a crowded room.” Schultze would say, information technology, despite giving her dozens of new ways to communicate, actually served to amplify her normal sense of teen isolation. It hadn’t done anything to bridge the gap between communicating and connecting.

“… our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.” —Quentin J. Schultze

Marshall McLuhan, a professor from the University of Toronto who pioneered the field of communication studies in the 1960s and ’70s, articulated the problem this way: a medium of communication does not just deliver a message, it is the message. It shapes the person who uses it, and not always for the better. Television news is the classic example. On the surface, it communicates information about events, politics, weather, and sports. At a deeper level, it communicates a way of looking at the world—namely, that it is a bunch of unconnected events, political sound bites, weather radar, and sports scores that can be easily digested in 22 minutes, with 8 minutes of commercials designed to mold a consumer’s mind and motivate a customer. At first glance, it’s hard to say that tweets, text messages, and emails, along with the ever-present advertising on the Web, won’t alter mental habits in a similar way.

Schultze, for example, says that increased social isolation and attention disorders are predictable byproducts of the use of modern information technologies. Ron Greene, an associate professor of communications at the University of Minnesota, adds another worry: “Modern information technology intensifies fragmentation of community,” he says. “It produces an echo chamber effect as folks increasingly only communicate with those with like-minded prejudices.” Greene also thinks the easy access to information is leading students to think they are educated simply because they have accumulated a lot of data.

So can the old ethical tools possibly address these new problems? Or are these new problems at all?

For the past six decades, parents have limited their children’s time in front of the television. Why? Because they instinctively knew that kids who watch a lot of television don’t easily develop long-term concentration skills, and they, being responsible parents, wanted to do what was best for their children. And before the age of television, parents restricted time in front of the radio. And before the age of radio, books and movies were screened. Even Plato, way back in 380 BC, was critical of the stories, music, and plays that entranced so many in his day. In other words, people of every age—especially parents—have felt an ethical obligation to protect and guide children, and that meant managing the media of the day.

Information technology can disrupt or damage things that we value, like academic integrity and a workplace without unnecessary distractions, so we try to figure out how to productively combine it with those things instead of abandoning it. In other words, we’re taking a very old ethical concern—and applying it to a new situation.

And for what it’s worth, people are gradually figuring it all out. For every person checking into an Internet addiction center, there are millions who use the Web to find valuable information, send pictures to grandparents, manage finances, and connect with business contacts. Max More, an internationally acclaimed futurist who has written extensively about ethics in the information age, likens our time to Europe in the decade after the invention of the printing press. “I’m sure there were people worrying that with books so easily available, everyone would stop having conversations,” says More. “But people obviously adjusted.”

The deepest choice

Maybe it’s too simple to say that people are asking the questions that they have always asked as they navigate the ethical waters of the information age. Maybe it’s too easy to say that many things have changed—the boundaries between work and home life, the ways our private information can be misused, the sense of always needing to be plugged in. But the distinction between right and wrong has not changed.

If it’s not terribly complicated, why is there so much obvious misuse of information technology? How are we to make sense of humans, with their innate ethical sense and their notably unethical behavior? Plato writes that ethical concern about anything is rooted in two basic assumptions, so basic they can be hard to notice. The first is the conviction that, even if we don’t know all the details, there is a better and a worse way to live, a right and a wrong, actions that are good and actions that are evil. The second is the conviction that our lives ought to be shaped by what we find to be good, right, and beneficial to ourselves and our community.

Aristotle points out that these basic convictions are not automatically or continually held by people. He doubted they could arise in people who had been poorly raised and asserted that young people are too driven by passions to benefit from discussions about ethics. Likewise, Plato puts foes in his essays who shrug off ethical concepts like “justice” and “honesty” as inapplicable or even meaningless in the “real world.” Plato and Aristotle say, in other words, that people must choose to be ethical amidst the ease of being unreflective. They have to care about being good to even recognize an ethical dilemma, and lots of people don’t care (or only care in fits and spurts). So we have—as Plato and Aristotle had—a society with lots of good, bad, and thoughtless behavior thrown together.

If you do care about being good, though, the news from Plato and Aristotle is positive. Your concern for ethical behavior will certainly make you more prone to act well, and by acting well, you will, according to Aristotle in particular, “lead the life that is by nature pleasant.” You may not have all the answers to the ethical dilemmas of the information age, but you do have all the tools you need to figure them out.

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When I began studying communication in college I discovered various theories about the origins of human beings’ communicative capacity. I was intrigued — and still am.

We don’t know precisely how human language “evolved,” but we can discuss one interesting thought: Communication is a gift.

You and I did not create our communicative abilities. We did not fabricate the capacity for gesturing or speaking, lying or truthtelling, remaining silent or speaking up on behalf of others. The ability to communicate was forged before we came along, even before historical records. Communication is a gift that we have received and that we surely ought to pass along for the benefit of future generations.

A somewhat mysterious gift? Yes. At least I think so. I’m astonished that the ancient Hebrews described God as a speech agent, not just a thinker, listener, or creator. Perhaps there is something extra-biological in humans’ capacity to converse deeply, morally, and faithfully about nearly anything. Maybe even something extra-natural, supernatural. Consider prayer, one of the most widely practiced forms of human communion with God on behalf of others.

The twentieth-century rhetorical critic and theorist Kenneth Burke wrote about human beings’ symbol-using (and misusing) abilities. According to Burke, humans invented “the negative” (the capacity for moralizing, for saying “no” as well as “yes”) and created their own, unnatural communications “instruments” (or media). In today’s world, this is a compelling way to look at the origin of language as a purely human concoction. But as Burke adds, humans’ symbol-using and symbol-misusing ability, when viewed from such a purely humanly creative standpoint, results in a strange conclusion; humans are “rotten with perfection.” If we are a bit god-like (perfect) in our speech, we are also a bit devilish (rotten). We are simultaneously devils and angels.

While the research about the origins of language continues, we can still accept the gift, no matter how perfect or rotten the gift seems to make us at times. Generally speaking, gifts engender gratefulness even when they are not exactly what we wanted. We tend to be thankful enough to accept a gift because of the generosity of the giver. We don’t just study the gift. We don’t question the motive of the giver — at least not usually. Instead we celebrate the gift and, if appropriate, use it well in order to reciprocate by honoring the giver.

So I offer thanks to my parents for teaching me the value of language. To the teachers who helped me learn how to speak and write well. To friends who guided me as an adult to use the gift as wisely as possible. Indeed, I offer thanks to all of those who contributed along the line, through the centuries and even millennia, to the forms of speaking and gesturing that equip us to know and love each other, near and far. May we all have enough grace to avoid rotten communication while never pretending perfection. Finally, and most mysteriously, thanks to the extra-biological instigator beyond and before the apes.

— Q

Each time I listen, speak, read, or write, I assume that something positive could occur. I assume that I will be able to understand and to be understood. I believe that my utterances, like those of others, are worth the time and effort.

Why?

This is one of the great questions about human communication: Why do we believe that our communication can make a positive difference?

One answer is that our life experiences teach us that communication is worth the investment. We can recall when our communication mattered: when we successfully conveyed to a restaurant server what we wanted for dinner, and we thereafter enjoyed the meal; when we asked someone for help and they reached out to us; when a family member humbly requested forgiveness and we gratefully accepted their wishes; when someone taught us and we learned; when we told a story that our friends enjoyed.

Of course we all recall situations where our communication failed. When I grade student exams I realize that I have not always instructed well. Sometimes I assume that the students are at fault. That questionable assumption partly protects my ego until the next round of exams.

But whether I blame myself or others I still strive to communicate well. I continue trying even when circumstances seem to make communication impossible. I communicate faithfully, expecting to serve others and to be served by them.

For instance, my mother and I had a turbulent relationship. Partly because of her lifelong illnesses and partly because of my immaturity, our communication was stressful. Too often we ignored one another. Worse yet, we sometimes exchanged unkind comments, verbal jabs at the heart.

One day I was driving home from campus and thinking about whether or not I should stop to visit her. I felt obligated to do so. After all, I was her son, related by blood. She had given me life. How could I not commune regularly with her even if it was sometimes painful? While contemplating my mixed feelings about visiting my own mother, a strange thought seduced me. I felt called to ask her about her upbringing during the Great Depression.

Still driving along University Boulevard, I wondered where that thought had come from. To the best of my knowledge, I had not been reading, writing, or conversing about the Depression. Maybe the thought came to me because my mother suffered from depression; maybe I swapped one meaning for the other one. To this day, I don’t know the origin of that thought. In any case, the thought called me. I had to answer it.

Here’s what happened.

I stopped to visit my mother. I asked her about growing up in the Great Depression. Then I listened. She spoke emotionally for a long while. I paid attention, taking in her response. She told me amazing stories of family difficulties. In fact, I learned for the first time that one of my aunts was actually adopted because her own parents could not care for her during that trying time. As a result, my mother lost parental attention. And she grew desperately jealous. As I listened, I discovered that my mother was a hurt human being who needed to be heard, understood, and appreciated. For the first time in my life, I empathized with her beyond our blood relationship, beyond my obligation to respect her. For the first time in my memory, I had compassion for my own mother. I realized how her past, largely beyond her control, had affected her. My mother’s recollections touched my heart.

These kinds of heart-to-heart breakthroughs give us special faith to continue communicating. They point to better relationships that are more trusting, empathetic, and ultimately satisfying. From that day forward I was able to love my mother in ways that I never thought were possible for me. Our relationship was never easy, but it became ever more peaceful.

Years later I received a call from my brother who lived several thousand miles away. At that time our mother lived near him. Mom was dying, he said. He had taken her to the emergency room where doctors discovered that she was severely ill. Cancer. Very advanced cancer. Stunned, I booked a flight and began preparing emotionally to spend her final days with her. Sitting in the plane, jammed in a seat with little physical room, I exercised my mind and my heart. I contemplated that day when I had journeyed unexpectedly down University Boulevard toward her memories of the Depression. I wondered what else I could or should say to the dying woman who had birthed me. Time goes frightfully fast and painstakingly slow when traveling by memory toward an impending ending.

It took me the rest of the day to catch several buses over 150 miles from the big-city airport to the rural hospital. When I arrived, my brother and I hugged. I then leaned over my comatose mother, took her hand in mine, and said close to her ear, “Mom, it’s Quin.” She suddenly opened her eyes widely, looked directly at me, mumbled, and fell back asleep. It was the last time that she opened her eyes or spoke. She died that night.

I wonder what she said. But I also wonder if I really needed to know. I had already heard her heart speak to me on that day when I had asked her about the Depression. By faith, I had then reached out to her. I had listened, heart to heart. I humbled myself so that I could empathize with my own mother. That act of faith — a gift and a calling — gave me reason enough to go forward after her death, word by word. Faithfully.

— Q

Why did the monastics sometimes take vows of silence.   Is silence better than speech?  Is there anything fundamentally wrong with speech?

It’s probably true that if we are busily talking we might be less inclined to listen to others. To observe them. To pay attention to them. Monologue does not guarantee intimacy. (Does dialogue? That’s a topic for another essay.)

If we don’t listen to others we can’t get to know them as distinct persons with their own hopes and fears. We can’t love them because we fail to truly know them and how to serve them. Mutual listening is a kind of communicative foreplay for relationship.

The ear is just as important for intimacy as are the eye and the hand. By listening to others we can learn to caress them in our minds and hearts. To inch toward being one with them.

Perhaps human silence is not really empty. Maybe silence speaks in a special, sometimes mysterious language of the heart. We can then hear the birds. The wind. Our own thoughts. Who we really are. Whose we are. (Below is a video in which I address the topic of this blog post.)

Could it be that we fear silence because we fear ourselves — what we might think or feel or desire? Oh, lonely solitude! What is beyond your void? What ghost of ages past speaks through your discomforting resonance?

What if our silence is actually an opportunity to listen? What if silence is always important because someone has already spoken, long or shortly before we open our mouths and move our lips? What if the creator of the universe “speaks” through the creation? Could we even identify let alone understand that “speech” if we are noisy rather than silent? What does it mean to “listen up”? Why are we content to “listen here”?

Strange possibility: We in high-tech societies are becoming media-rich and relationship-poor. We are noise-oppressed. Silence-deprived. Love-challenged. Spiritually shallow beings in a darkening sea with rising miasma. Do the words “I love you” mean much today?

Maybe we can learn from the monastics how to regain the love in silence, to speak only if we can improve upon the silence. Maybe such silence can equip us for tasting heaven on earth, with open hearts to hear beyond our own words.

“Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,/ Take me to You, imprison me, for I/ Except You enthral me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.” –John Donne, Sonnet 14

To improve upon our self-induced silence, shall we first listen up?

— Q

Augustine of Hippo believed that human beings were originally created as perfect communicators, living in complete unity with each other and God. I’m not so sure he was correct.

How could we creatures commune perfectly with other persons, let alone God? We’re finite creatures. Even if we could communicate perfectly with each other surely we couldn’t commune with many people at once. We’re limited by the quantity as well as the quality of messages. Email today proves the point— lots of messaging but lots of confusion and ignorance, too.

Although we can imagine perfect communication in concept, we can’t imagine it in specific actuality. We get to taste a bit of intimate communication here and there, but the full banquet is beyond us. We’re physical, embodied creatures.  If we want to enjoy food most fully, we have to savor less than what we might desire. Similarly, we have to practice self-restraint in order to experience fuller communion.

We humans imagine communication only in terms of evaporating time, not in terms of the possibility of timelessness. We all wish we had more time to communicate what really matters in life, with people who really matter to us. We even hope to find more time so that we can matter more to others. Yet we seem to be limited by the daily avalanche of messages that demand our attention. We don’t have the time to imagine what our communication could be like outside of the limits of time!  Some of our most pleasurable intimacy with others — when we really connect — seems timeless at the time. But how could we  implement that timeless vision in our time-bound lives?

So here’s an irony: We humans are able to send and receive messages faster then ever, almost instantaneously from place to place, around the globe, and increasingly through space. Yet at the same time (in the same high-tech era, too) we don’t have enough time to discern how to use the speed more meaningfully. Meaning evaporates just as quickly as we can shower ourselves with messages. Time both equips us to communicate meaningfully and limits the intimacy of our communication.

Did Augustine contemplate this irony when his scribes furiously wrote his sermons, letters, and books for others to read? I can’t believe that he imagined five million-plus of his words still “in print” 1600 years later, communicating across geographic space and through the generations. His words, however much they are misunderstood today, still resonate with readers. By reading his Confessions (the first Western autobiography) we can transport ourselves to northern Africa, around the year 400 A.D. Perfect communication with Augustine? No. But pretty amazing nonetheless. Augustine’s body is gone but his ruminations endure.

How is that really possible? What does it say about our creaturely natures? I don’t know.  It’s time for me to go.

— Q