• We were often told to be quiet when we were young.
• We're bitter from all those bad meetings.
• We're developing our own bad habits (e.g. interruptions, finishing others' sentences, rolling eyes, etc.).
• We don't trust ourselves to avoid saying the wrong thing

What do we substitute for conversation?

• meetings
• facilitators
• chat rooms
• e-mail
• passivity

But change comes from conversation. We're tired of the way things are. We find others who feel the same way. We talk. And we dream. Of course, "we hesitate to pray, knowing that it will change us." Maybe all conversation is like that, not just conversation with higher powers. We know (for instance) that if we pray, we might need to forgive others, or do something equally distasteful :-). Maybe we're worried that in talking about change with other people, we'll find out that we have to change first -- in order for any other change to have meaning.

Staged Conversation

You can actually stage a conversation, if you intend to use a small group to bring about a change or come up with an idea. You'll have to recognize that this is different from what we actually DO. You may even need to establish ground rules:

• good manners (e.g. no interruptions)
• mutual respect and recognition of equality
• no rehearsing our own ideas, or planning ahead our next comment, or anything else that prevents us from listening
• maintain curiosity (e.g. allow thoughts to develop)
• live with nonlinearity and friction and differences
• accept what's there, knowing we can't change what we don't accept

If you have to go to all this trouble, it's probably appropriate for you to focus on a topic and have a goal. :-)

Listening

There are several techniques for keeping yourself in the conversation, or more importantly, for letting the speaker know you're following along. Such techniques are commonly found in language and TESOL classes, where listening is a critical skill.

• Short responses: I see. Oh? Of course. Yes. Really? Mmmm. (Similar expressions can be found in nearly any language on the planet. Consider French "d'accord" and Russian "tak kak.")

• Questions based on auxiliaries:

  A: The meeting started late!
  B: It did?
  

  A: I didn't take notes.
  B: Didn't you?
  

  Do you? (You do?) Don't you? (You don't?)
  Were you? (You were?) Weren't you? (You weren't?)
  Have you? (You have?) Can you? (You can?)
  

• Repeating key words/phrases:

  A: I'm going to Cleveland next week.
  B: Cleveland?
  

  A: The meeting lasted for two hours.
  B: Two hours?
  

• Follow-up questions:
  • What happened?
  • How was it?
  • What did you do then?

• Don't block traffic.
• Don't block light.
• Don't move people far apart when they might want to talk.
• Mark out a designated conversation area, and make it the warmest apparent part of the room. If you have a fireplace, that works well, but who's got that in an office?
• Move the big stuff (e.g. piano, conference table) away from the conversation area.
• Set aside a quiet place for reading.

Furniture notwithstanding, the best way to reap the benefits of conversation is to try at least not to limit it. Offices need a certain amount of quiet for work to get done; but work itself is to some extent noisy. And conversation is often part of work, as well as part of learning. So we have to watch out for

• excessive noise restrictions
• limits to participation in local mailing lists, message boards, and newsgroups

Large conversations between multiple Internet participants can be classified in several ways:

• social networks, based on who's talking to whom
• semantic networks, based on what terms are discussed
• threads, based on chronological order and subject

TCNJ's SOCS is an example of an attempt to stage large Internet-based conversations among classmates, and then sort the conversations by threads (far and away the most common means, as Usenet is structured that way) and author (for the benefit of faculty only).

Questions to Think About

• Have computers stifled conversation? Or changed it?
• Have computers changed our note-taking habits?
• Are we more likely to LEARN from conversation or lecture?
• I read recently that the potential benefits of a network grow exponentially with the number of interconnected nodes. (Though this is a telecommunications principle, I suppose you could make the case that it applies to other types of networking, but I bet your mileage varies.)

  Anyway, if you have two nodes, you have one connection. If you have three nodes, you have three connections. If you have N nodes, you have something that looks like this:

  C = sum (as i goes from 1 to N-1) of i

  (ASCII isn't very good at this sort of thing, is it?) So a fully-connected network, as N gets large, has a number of connections C that seems to approach N^2/2.

  But I'm not really a telecommunications type. Is my estimate OK here? And more importantly, what would limit a social network from growing exponentially in a similar way?

References

Wheatley, M. J. "Some friends and I started talking..." Utne Reader, 07/08.2002.
Sandra, J. N. and J. Spayde. Salons: the Joy of Conversation. New Society Publishers, 2001. ISBN 0-865-71444-4
Sack, W. Conversation Map, version 0.01.
Encouraging Conversation.