and denunciation you run across in
anonymous postings online,” he says.
“What I find unfortunate is the loss of
a layer of insulation where you’re cour-
teous and receive courtesy in return.”
Raw exchanges among strangers is
one thing. But is texting and other elec-
tronic chitchat such a danger among
family and friends?
Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., who has made
a career of unraveling the peculiarities
of how people talk to one another, is more
sanguine than gloomy about the future of
talk. In research on how sisters commu-
nicate, for example, she found that many
stay in touch via e-mail better than they
once did by telephone. “New technolo-
gies amplify different opposing things,
the good and the bad,” says the George-
town University linguist. “People should
not ask if conversation is in decline, but
how it is changing.”
A former editor in chief of Reader’s
Digest, Jacqueline Leo, agrees. She
cites grown children whose relation-
ships with their parents are flourishing
because of e-mail, where “ideas are
more important than tone of voice.” (In
person those conversations would likely
be reduced to “Why don’t you get a hair-
cut?” she observes.)
In Leo’s book Seven: The Number for
Happiness, Love, and Success, she coun-
sels putting people first—or at least
not eighth, since she deems seven the
maximum number of priorities you
can have at one time. For her, restoring
human contact becomes a simple man-
agement problem. We are so distracted
by digital traffic that we’re forgetting
the importance of listening—and of the
listener. “Our own conceit becomes one
of the reasons people can’t put their
machines down,” Leo says of our ad-
diction to electronic communication.
“They make us feel too important.”
It’s true: texting during a busi-
ness meeting has become a display
of power that trumps any perceived
breach of etiquette. And it wasn’t the
first blow to listening. Even before I
armed myself with an iPhone to try to
keep up with the e-mails pinging on
my computer, I’d find my hands typing
responses to one person while I talked
with another on the office phone; often
neither interaction made much sense.
We’re in danger
of becoming a nation of
hyperconnectedhermits,
thumbs furiously working our
BlackBerrys.
gle oval table, so each of us could face
the others. Every Friday one member
typically taps a wineglass and calls for
group conversation on a given topic. As
a carafe of white wine made its rounds,
a dozen of us tossed around the virtues
of talking. One member compared the
group’s often-wandering conversations
to pure science, a freeform inquiry
pursued for its own sake, without re-
gard to practical application. Then, as
if on cue, the conversation lighted out
for the territories, propelled by its own
curious logic. Someone told the story of
how a former club member, after being
elected to public office, was expelled
because of his tendency to speechify.
That led to some wistful observations
about the recent shuttering of one
of the city’s once-powerful political
clubs, and the vanishing opportunities
to hobnob with political figures in the
flesh. The retail politicking of the New
Hampshire presidential primaries
about their hobbies, their children,
their prejudices and passions. They
hadn’t shared only a few random anec-
dotes; they had shared themselves.
David Dudley is the editor of Urbanite
magazine in Baltimore.
