death of conversation的作文
As our meeting places fall silent,save for tapping on screens,it seems we have mistaken ubiquitous connection for the real thing.
I first noticed it in a restaurant.The place was strangely quiet, and at one table a group seemed deep in prayer.Their heads were bowed,their eyes hooded and their hands in their laps.I then realised that every one, young and old,was gazing at a handheld phone.People strolled the street outside likewise, with arms crooked at right angles,necks bent and heads in potentially crippling postures.Mothers with babies were doing it. Students in groups were doing it.They were like zombies on call. There was no conversation.
Every visit to California convinces me that the digital revolution is over,by which I mean it is won.
Everyone is connected.The New York Times last week declared the death of conversation.While mobile phones may at last be falling victim to etiquette,this is largely be
cause even talk is considered too intimate a contact.No such bar applies to emailing,texting,messaging,posting and tweeting.It is ubiquitous,the ultimate connectivity,the brain wired full-time to infinity.
The MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle claims that her students are close to mastering the art of sustaining eye contact with a person while texting someone else. It is like an organist playing different tunes with hands and feet. To Turkle, these people are"a tribe of one".
Anyone with 3,000 Facebook friends has none.
The audience in a New York theatre now sit, row on row, with lit machines in their laps, looking to the stage occasionally but mostly scrolling and tapping away. The same happens at meetings and lectures, in coffee bars and on jogging tracks. Children are apparently developing a dexterity in their thumbs unknown since the evolution of the giant sloth. Talk is reduced to the muttered, heads-down expletives brilliantly satirised in the BBC's Twenty Twelve.
Psychologists have identified this as "fear of conversation". People wear headphones as "conversational avoidance devices". The internet connects us to the entire world, but it is a world bespoke, edited, deleted, sanitised. Doubt and debate become trivial because every statement can be instantly verified or denied by Google. There is no time for the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Socratic dialogue, the skeleton of true conversation.
There is now apparently a booming demand for online "conversation"with robots and artificial voices.
Mobiles come loaded with customised"girlfriends".People turn to computerised dating advisers, even claim to fall in love with their on-board GPS guides.A robot seal can be bought to sit and listen to elderly people talk,tilting its head and blinking in sympathy.
We have,says Turkle, confused connection with conversation-"the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship".Human friendship is rich,messy and complicated.It requires patience and tolerance,even compromise.As we push other people of into a world of question and answer,connection and information,friendship beco
mes ersatz virtuality.
In his history of conversation,Stephen Miller points out that "most Americans are nowadays concerned more with improving their sex life than their conversation life".Even the phone is passe.Those who used to call a friend in trouble now send a text.Phone calls are to register urgency or shout anger,with corresponding loss of nuance and sensibility. From Mailer to Eminem, the modern cultural hero is expressionist.He or she has "attitude", and to prove it uses the F-word as often as possible.
Miller notes that public discourse is dominated by contention, by "intersecting monologues".Anger,lack of inhibition,"letting it all hang out"are treated as assets in public debate,in place of a willingness to listen and adjust one's point of view.Politics thus becomes a platform of rival angers.American politicians are ever more polarised,reduced to conveying a genuine hate for each other.
Likewise,the lack of tolerance in American Christianity can be as frightening as it can in Islam.WhenI once professed support for IVF,a man glared across the table,tight-jawed, an
d asked:"What does it feellike to be a mass murderer?"With such people there is no conversation, only a tiptoeing from the room.
polarisedAll that said, the death of conversation has been announced as often as that of the book.Samuel Johnson and David Hume worried that the decline of political conversation would lead to violent civil discord. George Orwell concluded that"the trend of the age was away from creative communal amusements and toward solitary mechanical ones". The philosopher Michael Oakeshott professed himself desperate to "rescue the art of conversation". Somehow we have muddled through.

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