Converse 'Till It Hurts

Contentious, formerly an e-newsletter devoted to issues of content development and delivery, went blog last week, after a year's hiatus of the e-newsletter. And this reader just isn't interested. The reasons are several: the hurried, unstructured prose that characterizes many blogs; the technical hurdles RSS and blogging software still represent; the difficulty in searching and finding content easily (although I wonder how wrong it is to expect websurfers to know their software, at least enough to use "find in page"?); and so on. What strikes me most, though -- and it's a complaint I've seen in other forms frequently around the web -- is the following comment:

I find blogs to be generally unstructured and difficult to find things in, especially with unchecked and/or unmoderated comments sections. How many megabytes of, "Ooo, me too!" should I be expected to look through to find someone who may have made a useful addition to the conversation?

OK, no accounting for matters of personal taste, but it seems to me that this kind of sentiment is less about taste than it is about a deep-seated fear of conversations. I'm the first to admit that comments can turn into mob scenes, but they can turn into remarkably cogent discussions, bringing to bear expertise that the blog-owner didn't have or didn't know how to bring into play. For instance, an incredible discussion was launched at Alas, a Blog in response to a post (which, alas, seems to be no longer at the URL I bookmarked at the time) on transexuality, feminism, and gender construction. A real conversation developed, with commentators drawing on their experiences as transvestites, transexuals, homosexuals, and heterosexuals from all over the political spectrum in dealing with one of the fundamental -- and thus most uncomfortable -- ambiguities we are confronted with in modern life.

Conversations scare people, I think, for the same reason trans-vestitism/sexualism do -- conversations are ambiguous, shifting, never quite "fixed" in place, maybe -- like the Internet -- always already broken. There is no predicting just what will happen in even the most banal conversation. All over the world, marginalized groups -- African-American urban teenagers, Yemeni tribalists, Brazilian working men, and others -- have raised to the level of an art the practice of raising the stakes in a conversation higher and higher until just before violence erupts. A tricky proposition, to be sure, and if you play the game wrong, you end up with a busted jaw, or worse.

Conversations are, by their nature, not only unpredictible but uncontrollable. We may fool ourselves with etiquette and political correctness, but we know that even within the lines we define as "proper" a lot of damage can be done -- and we also know that those lines are more "suggestions" than real barriers. This unpredictability and uncontrollability are part and parcel of conversation. Although anthropologists recognize a "phatic" function of speech (the exchange of formalities being a good example, where following the form is far more important than the content of the exchange, the intent being to recognize and reinforce social bonds rather than to communicate knowledge; the "me toos" the letter-writier above cites are also an example of phatic speech), most conversation is meant to work through or towards the unknown -- whether that's what we should get for dinner or what kind of society we should live in. Our partners introduce even more unknowns -- we never know precisely what someone might choose to take offense at (try it with your significant other some time...) or exactly what they know or don't know. So conversations involve risks, and danger, and for that they are pretty scary. But consider the alternative -- the one-way flow of information that characterizes most media communication. Is there any less risk or danger? Well, given the results of PIPA's recent study, "Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War", showing a positive correlation between watching Fox News and misunderstanding basic details about the war in Iraq, perhaps the risks are just as great -- maybe greater.

More to the point, though, conversation is what makes us us. It is at the same time the source of information about acting in the world and action in the world. Conversation is where we draw the raw material of our selves and is the field in which we shape ourselves from that raw material. This fear of conversation, of "what they might say", seems to me a rejection of our humanity itself -- but that's what scares me. Because as far-fetched as it may sound, it seems to me that their is a faction in modern society that would like us a little less human, a little less active, a little more like machines or robots. And, yes, a little less conversational.