#05 - Conversations and culture
The theme of this week is conversations, a core part of community and possibly more. (Intended as a "short" essay. We're apartment hunting! And it has eaten up large chunks of my free time.)
1.
Fresh talk
My friend Lina sent me a podcast episode where Dan Gilbert, the happiness researcher, briefly discusses his latest research on conversations. Though language has been researched thoroughly, Gilbert noticed that we really haven't researched why and how we converse. Is conversation merely for exchanging information? In some cases, such as asking for directions, it is. But in practice, when we ask someone how they are and they tell you about their weekend, what we're actually doing is investing in a relationship.
Sometimes we don't have much to say. We find things to say just to make a connection. We repeat ourselves, telling the same stories, because we engage in more conversations than we have stories. That's ok because there's what Gilbert calls a "fresh talk" illusion. In his experiment, people told the same personal story repeatedly, 10 times. A different group listened to random takes and had to guess the take number. They generally guessed that it was the first, second, or third take. Even when we repeat ourselves, we remain somewhat inarticulate and we remain excited and enthusiastic, causing people to think we're saying something new.
2.
From Medium to Culture
I also just started reading, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which a friend lent me after I mused that modern social media could only host certain thoughts. Postman, writing in 1985 on the rise of television, uses "conversation" to refer to "all techniques and technologies that permit people... to exchange messages." Next, he writes "all culture is a conversation... conducted in a variety of symbolic modes."
Postman postulates that medium determines the type of information that can be transmitted. I would go so far as to say that medium determines the type of thought that can be even formed in the first place.
It's interesting to think about how conversations and culture have been shaped by more recent media. After smoke signals, telegrams, and television, we now have SMS, tweets, TikToks, Zoom calls, podcasts, Substack, Clubhouse, etc. Where are our thoughts headed?
3.
Ideation
This last nugget has no citation. I've been thinking about how my best ideas arise spur of the moment when I'm talking to other people. I have, personally, never been the type of person that can sit in an ivory tower and be productive. For me, conversation has always been special and uniquely generative. I don't know much about ML/AI, but one musing: today, ML/AI for the most part learns and creates on its own, in an ivory tower. Could we design systems that learn and create in conversation?
◼︎
The ideas I've been writing about have been shaped through years of conversations with many of you. Recently, I've also been getting a ton of insight and feelings of connection out of this long form essay format and from exchanging emails with some of you in response to these essays. Thank you.