WHAT DID YOU SAY?

What makes a great conversationalist? We are said to be losing the art of conversation. It is dying in a hell's kitchen of mobile phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, emails, soundbites, chat shows and drinks parties. Nowadays no one converses. People shout and text.

I see a threat to conversation in every cultural trend, from political correctness declaring words and subjects taboo to the counterculture of the 60’s and its opposing obsession with authenticity, egotism and "letting it all hang out". Does Eminem do conversation? It is lost amid the cacophony of anger, attitude, rap and satire. When the American vice-president, Dick Cheney, was challenged by a colleague to conversational repartee on the floor of the Senate, he was at a loss. In that great deliberative chamber, echoing with the ghosts of rhetoric and near the mighty Library of Congress, he could only mutter, "Go fuck yourself!" It was "total language failure".

Because conversation requires a small mental effort, technology has produced "conversation avoidance devices". Talking to strangers is considered weird, so the wise traveller has an iPod or mobile phone permanently clamped to the ear. Interactive games replace human contact with the virtual sort, as texting and emailing replace old-fashioned telephoning.

In such a world, people congregate not to converse but to project themselves. We seem to be in perpetual conversation. The zombie army wandering the streets mouthing into space is conversing. The phone is no longer what it was to my parents, the means for some rushed emergency message. It is conversation.

Throughout history courtesy has granted human beings the confidence to interact creatively and thus scale the ladder of genius. Each generation rightly regards this ritual as sacred, and fears for its future. For the present, it seems in good health.

Until next time (and enjoying conversations),

Peripatetic Scribe