The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [4]
It’s only fuddy-duddies who think it’ll kill socializing. Did they say that about the telephone, or faxes? It’s building relationships. I wake up in a cold sweat sometimes—if Facebook disappeared, those friends would be gone.
If that’s building, the foundations are weak. And where’s the time or space to socialize, if like him, you have 453 friends to hold vigil over? You hire a barn? Or are these perhaps imaginary friends, pulses of light on a screen?
As distractions multiply, fewer receive our full attention, and nuances are neglected. We don’t look at the man selling us coffee, never mind shoot the breeze; we’re too busy fiddling with our iPod. I’ve witnessed wedding guests with more qualifications than they have chromosomes text-messaging during the vows.
Developments, yes, but progress? Although these innovations crowd out conversation, it isn’t redundant; rather, like an ancient, still mighty beast, it is endangered unless we appreciate it, and carve out space for it. The nuances are no less valuable to us than they were to our forefathers, nor are the joys. Abandon them, and we miss out.
Admittedly, there are superficially sound commercial reasons why conversation should be whittled away. Business disdains it because, unless flogging goods by that unsteady Zeitgeist vehicle word of mouth, it is hard to monetarize (oh, woeful word). Worse, it guzzles airtime, face time, eye time; attention that could be consumed consuming or ogling ads. So fast-food joints have their fast-forward music, agitations of beats designed to drive you through your hapless meal and out the door as soon as possible. And J. D. Wetherspoon, owner of 691 British pubs, has announced that families will be served no more than two drinks:
Once they have finished the meal with the child, we would expect them to leave.
It is surprising formal restrictions should be necessary. Modern life may seem like a conspiracy against conversation, but we are complicit, and if we learned its skills by osmosis, this is less likely to be the case for our children. Psychologists fear that families are talking to each other less than ever, and there is plenty of evidence to support this.
Two trends pull us away from conversation: Either it is under-appreciated or so highly rated that it seems daunting—as if, compared to email, it were a luxury, couture form of communication, requiring special training, perhaps at charm school (yes, these are back in vogue).
Technology plays a large part in this. We want our toys, but short-term pleasures too seldom serve long-term interests. Nobel laureate economist Gary S. Becker observed:
Individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it, whether they be selfish, altruistic, loyal, spiteful, or masochistic.
Many twenty-first-century delights are individualistic, not to say onanistic; distractions that narrow horizons and, with them, social arteries. As Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society of Arts put it:
We have to ask ourselves why the internet is so good for wankers, gamblers and shoppers, and not so good for citizens and communities.
If language was born of the evolutionary accident that our species thrived better in groups, then so, as we cease operating that way, conversation becomes less incidental. It cannot flourish in isolation. Nor can we.
A communication-fixated culture leads us to expect, by right, levels of understanding in our relationships that our grandparents would hoot at. Unfortunately, we’re less practiced than they were at the conversational give-and-take that might enable such understanding, and feel—irrationally—crushed, even cheated, when our lofty aspirations aren’t met. This is so prevalent as to seem almost banal, rather than what it is: sad.
Isolation magnifies disconnect and disenchantment. Many more of us live alone, frequently bombarded by images of lifestyles to dream of, all of which feeds a sense of existence as a performance that we’re failing at. Television scarcely features sociable conversation, because disagreement,