conversation

Deconstructing and reinventing conversation

Like fire, conversations are fun, bring us together, and make food taste better.

Also like fire, conversations require 3 main components to exist. You can't have

a fire without air, fuel, and heat. Similarly, you can't have a conversation without

Presence, Language, and Objective.

In this essay, I will try to deconstruct conversation into its three major

components, and then add a couple of disruptors to see how conversation takes

place "out of time" and "out of place" using the internet.

Fuel - > Presence.

Presence is what a person brings to a conversation. Its everything from their

clothes, their sex, their height, their skills, their baggage (that is known to others

participating), their history, their cultural context. It colors everything they

say. "Coming from you, that's a real compliment!". Presence also includes

reputation, and how you are perceived by others. It includes your accolades, and

in the most immediate sense, it includes how interested you are perceived to be

in the topic. Finally, it includes what is at stake for the participant in the context

of the topic. Again, all this has to be known by the other participants in order

to be relevant. Anonymous participants also have presence, of course, it's just

based solely on more superficial things like the sound of the voice, the accent,

the choice of words and phrasing *combined* with the other people's experience

when confronted with these things. If you don’t provide the details, the past fills

them in, so really in a conversation there is always presence. This blends a bit

over into language, but as anyone who is a reader knows, the "voice" always

eventually betrays the...

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...the fool who plays it cool while making his world a little colder".

At the opposite side of this spectrum is the empathetic participant,

who is truly participating in a conversation in order to help the other

person achieve their objective - or an objective in the best interest of

the other. This person may, in fact (perhaps ironically) use NLP like

techniques to kind of get the other to think the objective was their

idea all along, such as a parent with a child, but with an altruistic

motive. My sister, who excelled in her Early Childhood Education

program at college, told me they are taught to use phrases like "I

need you to do x" or "You are capable of x" instead of "Don't do that "

or "You cant do that" with children. While somewhat manipulative, it

certainly has a positive outcome, as long as the child fully trusts the

parent, of course…