the fear of 'hi'-ts

It strikes me that the impulse of many is to be heard and to be before others. Consequently, those opportunities to speak before a group of many become fear-laden contexts.

Why?

One explanation.

James McCroskey has made a career out of researching what he began to see persisting through his years of public speaking education--communication apprehension. Together with some quantitative researchers he determined that the unique contours of this apprehension were beyond encounter therapy and training--they were biological. A ripe moment in this research paradigm for McCroskey and his colleagues--one of whom chairs the Communication Department at UMSL--was a panel discussion at the National Communication Association's yearly meeting. There, in a Miami hotel room, McCroskey and his quantitative research colleagues bent the paradigm of human subjects research to its presumptions about communication apprehension. They stripped the face of communication to bone, sinew, veins, and nerve endings. They entitled the panel "biology meets communication" in which they proposed the paradigmatic shift to 'communobiology' in order fix the rhetoric of symbolic motives in the amber of biological function. McCroskey, who at this point was a lionized member of the communication research community, made a quip that represented the panel's focus during an anecdotal story about a student with communication apprehension. In it, he responded that a person with communication apprehension should take a specific beta blocker, and he mentioned it by its trade name. This revealed the funding impetus behind their work. What these quantitative researchers were doing was giving birth to a biological condition that manifests itself, patently, in public speaking contexts. In doing so they were expanding the patient base for a class of social-anxiolytic drugs by expressly establishing the research foundations for its existence. Oddly enough, every one of this group, by chance, taught public speaking, and not one thought to suggest that no matter how deeply biological communication apprehension was, this would all but cease to be an issue after their course grades were submitted.