I got my teeth cleaned today.
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Don’t worry, I won’t gross you out. There was no evidence of any major dental issues. I did have a little bit more plaque than normal, which I attribute to a change in toothpaste to a gel that doesn’t leave me feeling fresh. Also, there were a couple of spots where I had some abrasion, but nothing too serious. No additional pits or pains, and I’ll be back in six months for some annual x-rays.
Still, that was probably more detail than you wanted.
I talked with Lisa, my long-time hygienist. We were joking about the fact that the Alice In Chains song coming across the Muzak was out before some of the staff could even write their names – and that the songs now on Oldies formats are better than the crap they call music these days…
…yeah, I’m old. So what.
Conversation Interruptus
It’s not easy to have a conversation at the dentist. Bill Cosby made that point years ago, long before there was even Alice In Chains.
After all, there is poking and prodding and big metal hooks in your mouth. It’s impossible to have any real meaningful conversation. Lisa and I tried, however.
What we ended up with was a compromise. She was careful about steering her sentences into declaratives, and was deliberately avoiding the body language and angling of inflection that you’d get in a real conversation. In a conversation, there are cues when it’s time for someone else to speak, and often we elicit them without a conscious intent.
While lying on my back, I found myself choosing my sentence very carefully. Note: it was a sentence. My responses to her statements were short and direct. I found myself exercising the same mental muscle that writes a Tweet. And it’s a similar feeling one gets when one is composing a polite interruption, or an interjection.
Join the Compromise
Maybe I am just on a rant lately, but the word “conversation” has been abused to the point of losing its meaning. Particularly when people are told to “Join the Conversation!”
Do we want people to communicate? Yes, as freely as they like.
Do we want people to participate? I would say yes, to the degree they want to.
But Conversation? Really?
There are many people I don’t want to have conversations with. They are rude, or they want to sell me something. Maybe they are just boring to me. Likewise, there are quite a few people who don’t want to listen to my philosophical blather, either.
From a corporate standpoint, there are also a lot of people who want to vent, and they don’t want you jumping in when they are clearly blowing off steam.
Listening is a very important thing.
The ability to publish to a wide, online audience is world-changing. And even the people who claim to know how world-changing it is are lying to you.
The ability to remain ambiently connected to so many people at once is staggering, and it will have profound psychological and sociological implications we’re not even thinking about yet.
What is it? I don’t know. It’s really important, but it’s not a Conversation. It’s still too sterile, too measured, too impersonal. And it won’t be a conversation as long as we have all these tools sticking out of our mouths.
Nice one Ike. The brutal truth is that what we are all doing is interjecting, broadcasting, postulating,opining, advertising and collecting names to interject, broadcast, advertise, opine or postulate to. Sometimes this is done with some vague selling endgame in sight and sometimes it just goes round and round to feed our narcissistic bent. Sometimes it is to reassure us that someone else is “listening”.The word ‘conversation’ has indeed been overused to a point of banality. Regardless, the next time you are in San Diego I trust we will have the opportunity to interject, postulate or opine together just to reassure each other that someone else is listening.