Saving the Lost Art of Conversation

If you find yourself having dull conversations, stop socializing with dull people.

My entire quality of life improved dramatically when I stopped going to the same, old wells for my friendships.

First, I stopped trying to be friends with everyone I met. Not everyone is going to fit in your life. I don't mean that there will be arguments, just that things you find interesting won't be interesting to some other people as it would be to some other-other people. So, the pursuit of making everyone like me required that I focus on their interests and be deferential to them. Well, turns out, most people don't like a carpet as a friend. It's far better to be interesting yourself, in some specific way, forgo the potential friendships that don't "get you", and cultivate the ones that do. In other words, I was trying to make quality out of everything, which is impossible. It's better to winnow quality out of quantity.

Second, I stopped prioritizing friendship based on length-of-time. Most of the kids I grew up with grew apart in college, as people do, but afterwards we clung to this idea that we were once friends, thus should always be friends. It became a serious issue of clashing ideologies, and I realized that, if we had met today, we would have been much more polite to each other than we had come to be, and we would not be trying to spend a lot of time with each other. This notion of eternal friendship was exactly the reason why we were arguing so much all the time. It made us refuse to see the differences between us.

I just stopped spending effort on relationships that weren't going anywhere. The interesting people who were interested in me were out there. I just had to find them. Once found, the conversation was, of course, interesting.

Gwern addresses this issue in his essay, "The Melancholy of Subculture Society" [1]. In it, he focuses on this very issue. Society is fragmenting as information technology allows people to congregate by interest rather than by geography. As a result, we have deep conversations online, with others in our subcultures, but shallow (or even nonexistent) conversations with those who happen to be geographically close to us, but with whom we do not share interests.

I've noticed this in my own life, to a certain extent. I have deep and fascinating conversations with people online about all sorts of topics. But off the Internet, when I don't know if you're interested in the same things that I am, I'm a bit (well, more than a bit) boring.

[1] http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So...

I'm convinced there's a one-line version of this article that is no less informative than the original.

Somewhat ironically, I would have appreciated it if the author had been under SMS/Twitter length constraints.

This article, while cute, seems vacuous. 'We should talk to each other more, look into each other's eyes, and be comfortable with awkward silence.' Uh, okay.

The link was clicked because its great to hear real advice on how to be more engaging, how to find more interest in others and keep them talking, how to be interesting and how to help & encourage others be interesting. None of that useful advice was found here, nor anything else particularly helpful, just someone's opinion of what others should be doing.

Just to play a little devil's advocate, it takes energy, motivation and interest to talk to people at length on random subjects. While that might be occasionally fruitful, it could also be argued with an equal white-horse, academic, and holier-than-thou essay that searching for dense and meaningful conversation online with people who care about the issues you care about... like hacker news... is a far better use of your limited time than perfecting the art of wasting it on chit-chat. Maybe the waxing nostalgic arguments about the doom of the world our electronic devices are bringing about, and how great things were without all this newfangled technology, are getting a little sleepy?

Anyway, the last line made me laugh out loud.

> “Everybody’s talking,” she muses. “And nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines.”

While in an Apple store. Seriously? You were expecting what? Philosophy? Commentary on international news? Intimate bed-side chatter? Deep eye-looking with sales people? Anything other than waffling on whether to spend several hundred or thousand hard-earned bucks on what the store is selling?

In the future, psychologists will ask, "Why don't you point to the meme that matches your feelings about that?"

Seriously, in some of the most-heavily travelled corners of the internet, its endless image-macros filled with random animals and long irrelevant photos. What started as an internet version of the inside joke, has morphed into an impact-text filled super-emoticon. It's almost like cockney-rhyme slang for the internet, if you're not familiar with the original image, you have to climb into knowyourmeme in order to figure out what anybody is trying to say. If you head to somewhere like facebook, you'll find the same photos posted by women in their 50s, now completely decoupled from the original meaning. (We've all seen them abused in tech powerpoints, which is a separate story.) The strangest part about this is that I've now seen it leaking out into the real world, where people will use the catch-phrase as if we're all becoming our own meme-generators, with the pre-canned images burnt into our temporal lobes.

> In a fast-paced digital age, an MIT psychologist tries to slow us down.

In a cliché-filled age, an MIT psychologist goes balls to the wall cliché.

Just like in meatspace, conversation online is exactly what you make it. If you create online social spaces for yourself full of superficiality and narcissistic triviality, that is what you will experience.

Just like how whether your in person conversations are substantial or not depends completely on who you chose to associate with and how you chose to communicate with them. Surely the author and the psychologist have observed countless people blathering on in person about utterly trivial topics, or sharing the equivalent of "verbal selfies" with their self-centered monologues?

You can easily create deep, personal, high quality conversation online, but it takes conscious effort, just like in the rest of life. The same goes for whether your online usage is isolating, or serves to deepen your in-person connections - it's totally up to you.

> The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this [electronic] talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.

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Electronics aside, is that new? If you read books like How To Make Friends and Influence People, it seems like most people were horribly self-centred even back then. If you've listened to Ira Glass' talk about creativity, one of the points he brings up is essentially that a lot of people lack interest in things other than themselves. He puts it a little more gently than that, but that's the core of it.

Heck, I remember the idea that we're all looking for the unconditional love we thought we deserved as children.

Now, I'm not saying that we're all like that, or that the majority of us are like that. But if you want to sing the praises of what we had before you have to paint a fairly rosy picture of humanity. Your null-hypothesis, so to speak, isn't electronic communication alone - that might just be making the pre-existing social dynamic easier to see.

If you want to make a strong argument, general rule, if you want to make a strong argument - to be persuasive to people who value no-BS, "just the facts please mam" - you have to either prove that you don't live in the situation where your argument would be really difficult to empathise with, or show that your argument still works even if you're in a situation where your argument would be really difficult to empathise with.

(Of course, for different people, different things are persuasive - one of the reasons this is written in the style of a story is that stories help us empathise with people and filter larger things through that empathy... I'd say there's too much of the reporter in this story for that to work as well as it should. But you can certainly get a lot of distance out of packaging up quite abstract thoughts into anecdotes. Even if, or perhaps especially, if they're not anecdotes about you. You may need a little bit of yourself in there as a hook but interesting people talk a bit about themselves and use that as a hook to talk about others - because they've got these interests in the world around them.)

Sound track of the article, courtesy of the witty Neil Hannon:

The Divine Comedy: The Lost Art of Conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSexRjTfmoE

This thread seems like a good place to vent anonymously about something that's been eating me. I want to see if anyone can relate or will even have any idea what I'm trying to say.

I have this friend. We've been friends for a long time. I think we must have had a lot in common some time ago, but it's hard to remember for sure. Around 1.5 years ago, I began to notice a change in this person's way of speaking. They became perfectly inane, as if in a studied, practiced way. They never say anything the tiniest bit controversial or opinionated, or revealing they slightest bit of personality. It's as if they became a P.R. department for themselves. They utter many trite well-wishes, a lot of overt gratitude for very simple things, simply phrased banal questions, and absolutely nothing else. Nothing that any civil person could disagree with ... and to my ears, nothing worth spending the breath to say. A continuous stream of equivalents to "nice weather!"

I don't understand it. As a somewhat eccentric person, my reaction to hearing this kind of talk over any length of time is like I'm quaking with frustration bordering on rage inside. I don't say anything about it, because I feel like that could only be hurtful.

Explanations I've come up with include the fact that this person has adopted Facebook very heavily, seemingly getting a significant amount of social interaction through it. So perhaps they've adopted the voice that you have to when you're constantly speaking in front of an audience full of all your friends, family, co-workers, and even bosses. But it's like this person carried that voice into their offline life, and never, ever breaks out of that bland, trite, soul-less mode. It's all, "Happy about this nice weather!" and "This pie is yummy." forever and ever....

Ah well. I just thought I'd drop this here and see if anyone has ever encountered something like this. I feel like I lost a friend.