
Saving the Lost Art of Conversation - zt
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-eavesdropper/355727/
======
moron4hire
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.

~~~
msutherl
I find that "interesting" and "artful", while not quite orthogonal, are not
exactly the same thing. There are many people with which I can have an
intellectually stimulating conversation, but really feeling cared for,
appreciated, seen is rare.

~~~
6d0debc071
"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,

Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;

So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another,

Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."

\- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1863

------
quanticle
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...](http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society)

------
jkarni
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.

------
dahart
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?

~~~
mhartl
I laughed at that last bit, too. "All the people at the car dealership just
keep talking about cars. Same thing in the nursery—it's all 'flower' this and
'planter' that. And don't even get me _started_ on that sex shop!"

------
minor_nitwit
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.

------
adamnemecek
> 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.

------
loomio
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.

------
6d0debc071
> 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.

\-----------------------------

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.)

------
pygy_
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSexRjTfmoE)

------
benched
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.

~~~
allochthon
_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._

Interesting insight. Would not be surprising if message boards like this and
some mailing lists socialize us in a way to say things that are relatively
anodyne, given the strong bias against trolling and off-topic, ill-considered
remarks. Also, we come to learn that we're writing for an audience composed of
anyone who might be on the Internet (!).

About this second point, I actually think that's a great thing. Because of it
we're motivated to avoid writing to a select audience, saying things that
would be hurtful to others if they were listening in on the conversation. It
helps us to consider our comments within a larger context.

The part about anodyne comments can't be overgeneralized -- think of the types
of threads on reddit and 4chan. It might have something to do with being
exposed to venues that are moderated or in which there is a reputation system.

~~~
DanBC
> socialize us in a way to say things that are relatively anodyne,

I freaking wish. Have you read some of the vile nonsense spewed out on HN
every day?

More seriously, people have a variety of fora, and so here they might be
professional but they keep a different name for Reddit to post to the trolling
subredits.

