Chapter 2 Blog 2 Pragmatic perspective

I think it absolutely makes sense to think of communication as pattern of interactions. Communication is very much like a game: it requires more than one person to be involved, and often our choices are influenced by the other players. What i like about the pragmatic perspective is that this model says you can't NOT communicate. Even a lack of communication can be counted as communicating with another person. If I'm in a disagreement with my husband, his silent treatment speaks volumes. I know that through a pattern of communication or interacts that we have gone through over the years. When he stops talking, that is when he is the most angry. He knows that he might say something out of anger that he regrets, so he waits until he cools off and can have a two sided conversation. Since I'm having a baby any day now, i can't help but think about how the text refers to crying as a communication game. Even babies can communicate using the pragmatic model. They cry to have their needs met, and their cries are different. As parents, we respond to the cries and that is our interact. As patterns develop, both babies and parents learn to communicate using this game. The baby knows that if they cry, the parent will come to them. If the parent chooses not to go to the child, for example at bedtime, then that to speaks volumes to the child. That new pattern may teach them that there are certain times which the crying game will not work, and therefore they stop using it and just go to sleep.