The short story “Speech Sounds” is a science fiction story written by Octavia Butler. This essay portrays a central theme that really opened my eyes as well as many others. This theme is to never take your ability to communicate for granted. Communication is a huge part of our culture and civilization. I never truly realized how important communication really was until reading this story. Without it, we cannot express our feelings in a correct manner. Not being able to connect with other individuals results in it being very hard to cooperate with others, causing chaos amongst society. In a short amount of time, the world would turn on each other causing mass amounts of violence. Likewise, this is similar to the story “Speech Sounds.” There are many takeaways one can have after reading this story.
Additionally, there is some background information about the author that is significant to the story. In June 1947, Octavia Butler was born in Pasadena, California. Butler had a very rough childhood. Moreover, growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena, Butler experienced ethnic diversity when racial segregation was at its worst. Being an African American and being diagnosed with dyslexia, made it extremely tough for Octavia at this point in her life. Also, she started working with her mother cleaning houses at age seven. “Speech Sounds” was published in 1983 which was during the cold war.
In the story, the unknown epidemic has civilization in chaos and severely limits humankind's ability to communicate. Many of the citizens are deprived of their ability to read or write. Others lose the ability to speak. Society identifies themselves by carrying items or symbols that represent their name. Furthermore, individuals communicate through common sign language and gestures that can commonly result into mayhem. Correspondingly, it appears common that the folks who obtain the illness, are the ones who are attacking the non-infected humans. One very important quote that directly represents the effects of the virus is, “The illness, if it was an illness, had cut even the living off from one another. As it swept over the country, people hardly had time to lay blame on the Soviets. The illness was stroke-swift
Communication is defined as ‘a transactional process involving participants who occupy different but overlapping environments and create relationships through the exchange of messages, many of which are affected by external, psychological and physiological noise’ (Adler, R and Proctor, R. 2010). Communication doesn’t just mean verbal communication, as non-verbal communication is just as, if not, more important as verbal communication. According to Albert Mehrabian, only 7% of a message is communicated through verbal communication, 38% is communicated through your tone of
Being on your phone too much takes away from your boredom and your own creative thoughts. In the month of April 2017, Manoush Zomorodi gave a speech at Ted Talks about how boredom can actually be good for you. Her purpose was to explain to people how being bored leads to great things. She also wants to clarify to people that being on your phone affects your boredom. She describes in her speech that while being on your phone is fun, it never gives you time to actually sit and think. Being on your phone never makes you bored, and Zomorodi wants to show that being on your phone too much doesn’t allow new thoughts to come about. Zomorodi’s primary audience was toward middle age people that could not keep their phones away from them. The theme
As statistics show, science fiction has long been a genre produced and consumed by nerdy, middle aged, white men, with little to no social skills. The content of science fiction has typically revolved around intergalactic interaction and male dominated adventure and exploration, most certainly do not imagine that science fiction can be used to write about feminist thoughts or ideas. However, this is exactly what Octavia Butler does in her short story “Speech Sounds.” Many scholars believe that feminist science fiction writers write toward a utopian society. Butler, however, tends to write more towards a confrontation with dystopia. A dystopian society, or anti-utopia, is a society
The date is June 6th, 1984, and American President Ronald Reagan stands solemnly before a massive stone monument on what he calls "a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France." On this historic day, the President of the United States stands solemnly before a small crowd of some of the bravest men living. The men assembled before him know these cliffs well. These are the Rangers who scaled the cliffs 40 years ago to do more than win the cliffs on the shores of Normandy. These are the Rangers who began the retaking of the entirety of Europe from Axis Control. That was 40 years ago, now only 90 of the original 225 sit before him now. All that can be heard are the crash of the waves on beach below and the occasional cry of a seagull
“The Sound of a Voice” by David Henry Hwang is a one act play telling the story of two characters, Man and Woman. These characters both live alone and isolated. Woman is rumored to be a witch, and Man is a soldier without a purpose who comes in hope of killing Woman. They both have a fear of silence and love. These unusual fears result in their fatal downfall. This play explores deep emotions, such as the fear of silence that Man and Woman share which pushes Woman to commit suicide. A fear of intimacy, felt exceptionally strong by Man, results in unfortunate timing leading to Woman’s death. Loneliness displayed by both characters is the underlying cause of the outcome. These feelings play together to contribute to Man and Woman’s tragic love.
Communication is an essential tool needed to advance several major processes in society. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, communication is the act or process of using words, sounds, songs, or behaviors to express your ideas, thoughts, and feelings to someone else. Such interaction between human being is significant due to the innate fact that we as humans are social beings. Communication not only aids human beings in expressing ideologies, but in everyday duties such as education, work, medical care, and other key aspects. A lack of communication is dangerous in many circumstances. In two essays, “When Doctors Make Mistakes”, by Atul Gawande, and “Columbia’s Last Flight, by William Langewiesche the reader can perceive how a lack of communication can be lethal.
On October 28th, 2015, Lone Star College of Kingwood hosted an event called the human library. It was held on campus for students who were interested to participate. The human library was created for students to gain knowledge of obstacles individuals experienced in life, such as living in the south as a black woman in the 1950’s, being homeless, and being a religion that is frowned upon in society. The purpose of the event is to teach students about other cultures, social classes, and hardship. The speakers inform our generation their own personal experience rather than information in a text book.
Last Friday, Serene State University celebrated it commencement ceremony. The event attendance broke university records with 832 graduates, with about 350 of them being first-generation college graduates. The total number of assistance reach 6,873 people.
Octavia Butler, the author of “Speech Sounds” and many other short stories, is a well-known author for her feminist point of view which might be attributed to her father who died when she was young and her mother taking on the role as the father figure as well as the mother figure. After the bus stop, Valerie Rye, the protagonist in this short story who goes by Rye for a lot of the short story, met Obsidian who Rye assumes his name to be; also, he used to be a LAPD officer. Rye immediately trusts Obsidian to drive her to Pasadena to see what is left of her family. In Octavia Butlers “Speech Sounds,” the men and women have reverse gender roles throughout this short story than we are used to because men in our world tend to have more power over women.
Week three’s lecture, received from Trish Hill-Wall, a member of the stolen generation, was an incredible speech. It was horrifying to hear about Trish being removed from her parents, growing up in an abusive orphanage, to being told she is good for nothing, but pregnancy. Nevertheless, despite her childhood, Trish is now studying at university, completing her master’s degree. Additionally, at a mature age, learning her Aboriginal language, culture and re-establishing her identity. Undoubtedly, Trish exhibits a resilient character, to survive her negative upbringing and push through historical boundaries. Trish’s strength is demonstrated, when she comforted an upset student, although, in the first place, Trish is the one that suffered. To a
Today, society has become a boisterous world of communication. From telephone conversations to live Internet chat and e-mail, the world has never before been quite so in touch. In the novel Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, Naomi Nakane does not have technology to communicate. Instead, she faces the dilemma of communicating at all. From her family, Naomi is shown the many faceted truths of speech and communication. From strong, silent Obasan, to stubborn, resolute Aunt Emily, Naomi finds that one can correspond with others through silence as well as through speech. As a child, Naomi spends much of her life in non-communicative silence, only to help further the distance between herself and her mother. As Naomi grows
As indicated in the quotation through the little boy’s gesture of covering up Rye’s mouth when she spoke, communication is rare in the dystopian society that Butler’s “Speech Sounds” took place in. Communication was rare due to an illness that caused language impairment which triggered the loss of skills such as reading and writing, and the loss of other intellectual abilities. It is indicated that due to the illness, society broke down, as shown by the lack of vehicles and the dissolution of law enforcement. Towards the beginning of the short story, fights erupt on the bus that Rye is in because of a disagreement, and with no form of communication available to solve the issue, the men on the bus resort to their fists. Eventually, the fight is broken up by an individual wearing a Los Angeles Police Department uniform, who throws gas into the bus to disperse people out of it. After this, the man who dispersed the crowd motioned to Rye to come with him, prompting the bystanders to group Rye with him, and they started making gestures accusing Rye of sexually being with the man. It is telling that even without a voice to speak, the bystanders automatically objectified Rye as a sexual object, and that objectification could be done with gestures. Historically, the dissolution of a society tends to change the power structures within it, here Butler shows how the association of women as sexual objects goes beyond the power structures of society, and how it is inherent in the
Nowadays, computer systems play a major role in our lives. They are used everywhere beginning with homes, offices, restaurants, gas stations, and so on. Nonetheless, for some, computers still represent the machine they will never know how to use. Communicating with a computer is done using a keyboard or a mouse, devices many people are not comfortable using. Speech recognition solves this problem and destroys the boundaries between humans and computers. Using a computer will be as easy as talking with your friend.
Communication is a part of everyday life. Not only is it present in our personal lives, but in the
Speech recognition (also known as automatic speech recognition or computer speech recognition) converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software. Recognizing the speaker can simplify the task of translating speech.