Another advantage of social media conversations

I was happy to see that my blog post last Tuesday, “Are social media killing real conversation?” actually sparked an interesting conversation. Nice!

Another advantage of online conversation is that you only spend time in it so long as the conversation interests you. The moment you are bored you are off somewhere else.

In person-to-person conversations, one often finds oneself in conversations where the life has gone out of the conversation, but there is no way to escape.

Thus in 2009, I spent a term as a visiting fellow at All Souls College in Oxford University. This was a unique experience, as this particular college has no students and is in some ways dedicated to conversation. Thus there is a formal dinner each night and the fellows are expected to show up in their gowns. Spouses are frowned on and only appear on special guest evenings. One is expected to sit with people one has never met before and have conversations. Each of the fellows is a leader in his or her field, typically a professor. So I would find myself sitting next to a physicist, or a molecular biologist, or a medieval historian, or whatever, and have conversations with them.

The college has an informal practice known as “the seven minute” rule, whereby one talks to the person on one’s left for no more than seven minutes and then turns to the person on one’s right for no more than seven minutes, and so on. In this way, no one is ever left “stranded” at the dinner table for the entire meal with conversations taking place on either side of them to which they have no access. The end result was that over the term, I had a large number of fascinating conversations with people I would never have otherwise met.

Many of these conversations were very enlightening and parts of my new book reflect these conversations. For instance, the section on legal juries (an early example of self-organizing teams) flowed from one of these conversations. And the chapter on radical transparency was enhanced by a conversation about the history of science, in which I was astonished to learn how long it took for a commitment to truth to be the normal practice in science. Prior to this conversation, I had the misguided view that Francis Bacon announced the scientific method in 1620 and hey presto, the scientific method got implemented. In fact, it took centuries for it to really take hold. This gave me a sobering insight as to how long it might take for a commitment to truth to become the norm in management.

Although there were many wonderful conversations, which I mentioned in the acknowledgement section of my book, there were also conversations that frankly dragged. When you are talking to a molecular biologist whose only interest in life is his particular molecule, there can come a time when you have nothing left to say to each other. (Seating is random and you sometimes find yourself sitting next to the same person again.)

So I would on occasion find myself sitting next to someone with whom I had nothing to say and who had nothing to say to me. I would take my conversational pleasure with my companion on the left for seven minutes, but then I would be left with this deep black conversation hole on the right, with nothing to say. Even worse, there was the occasional misfortune to be seated between two conversational black holes. (The table is too wide to have a conversation across the table.) So a dinner like that would stretch out in front of me like a dessert.  

With online conversations, there is no such problem. Bored with the conversation?  No problem. I am off somewhere else in an instant. No harm done.

In face-to-face conversations, however, there is often no polite way to end a conversation even when the parties have nothing further to say to each other. And if they do break off abruptly, it can be impolite, and cause considerable social damage.

For instance, there is the famous example when Winston Churchill was boring a society lady (Mrs Braddock) to tears, she felt compelled to tell him, “Winston, you are drunk!” Given Churchill's attachment to brandy, the observation was probably well-founded.

Churchill replied, 'Yes, Mrs. Braddock, I am drunk. But you, Mrs. Braddock are ugly, and tomorrow morning you will still be ugly. But, tomorrow morning, I, Winston Churchill will be sober.”

The conversation was mercifully over, but at considerable social cost.

Comments

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