Not so idle chatter
Eye to eye.
Your conversational skills….
I am making pages of notes on the comments that were left about the thought exercises earlier on this blog. Thank you to everyone who posted something, all of the replies have released a torrent of ideas – so I’ll be arranging sticky-notes with themes on them for a little while, trying to get a narrative together I think.
One of the many ideas that came up a few times is that of social interaction. Now, I know that there are many other blogs and published items about how social interaction may wane due to digital interaction taking over. Also the way we talk to each other, or write to each other has changed somewhat too.
In this case, I was thinking about Joanna Casey’s comment – these lines specifically…
“I ask myself often ‘do I really need to know what my Facebook or online friends are doing every day?’. The answer is ‘no, not really’ and it’s just become a habit. But I do like the random interaction that the internet provides .. if it wasn’t part of our lives I wouldn’t be writing this now.”
Thanks Joanna, more to keep me going!
I tend to keep in touch with almost everyone I know in some digital form or another – and this means that when I do get to see them physically, we chat but also recount which updates we already knew…”I posted that on twitter…”, “Oh yeah, I remember seeing your photos on Facebook.” You know the sort of thing.
So this made me reevaluate what I thought was conversation a little bit. What’s it like to catch up with someone you are not connected to online? Someone you don’t call regularly. Yes, a catch up.
I’d say I put aside more time for this – a long lunch or a visit or maybe an entire afternoon. It’s a bit like getting to know them again. Asking lots of questions so I can understand what they have been doing, how they feel, if they have changed and what they think. I like it – I enjoy it.
On the other side of this equation – Does an absence of digital updates mean you get to evaluate what you think as well? When you retell a tale, you need to set up the scene, then explain the story and the punch line. Maybe discuss the reasons. To this also seems to consolidate what you think as you are doing it. Maybe occasionally you are provided with an idea and you are surprised that you agree.
I know that some of this can be expressed via comments and online conversation, but it is not as immediate, and of course all of the non-verbal cues are missing. But, does it help us more to talk things through face to face and do we make enough of an effort to do this?
Just wondering what you think…though along these lines I should be making time to grab a coffee and ask everyone in person 🙂
JK
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One Response to “Not so idle chatter”
Your point about recounting Facebook updates, Twitter posts etc when catching up with someone over a coffee got me wondering – might that make it harder to catch up properly with people we don’t have a social networking relationship with too? Eventually, since these friends aren’t being kept up to date with the minutiae of our daily life through networks, we’ll eventually conclude that for person X who we love dearly but doesn’t do Facebook or Twitter, is just too much like hard work to get back in touch with?
It worries me, slightly. Not as much as the length of that sentence, admittedly, but still, a bit.